Fine Print, Blunt Force: How One Naval Manoeuvre Can Tear Through a 35-Year-Old Bilateral Agreement

Diplomatic protests usually come dressed in vague language, all "deep concern" and "urge restraint". This week's was unusually specific. India's Ministry of External Affairs did not simply say Pakistan's naval conduct was rude. It said the conduct breached Article 10 of a named, dated bilateral agreement: the Agreement between India and Pakistan on Advance Notice on Military Exercises, Manoeuvres and Troop Movements, concluded in April 1991.

That agreement exists because two nuclear-armed neighbours, with a long history of military confrontation, decided that reducing the risk of miscalculation was worth putting some rules on paper. Its broader purpose is to prevent military activities from being misread and escalating into a crisis. And Article 10 gets unusually specific about naval forces: it says that naval ships and submarines belonging to the two countries are not to come within three nautical miles of each other while operating in international waters, "so as to avoid any accident."

Turns out you can violate paperwork at sea, and the Pakistan Navy appears to have found the fastest way to do it.

Article 10 specifically addresses the standard of separation expected of the two countries' naval vessels operating in international waters — essentially, a mutual promise not to play chicken. By invoking it directly rather than issuing generic diplomatic scolding, New Delhi has signalled that it isn't treating Tuesday's collision as an unlucky navigational error. It is treating it as a breach of a written obligation Pakistan signed up to more than three decades ago.

This matters because a breach of a bilateral agreement carries a different diplomatic weight from an ordinary accident. An accident invites an apology. A treaty violation invites a paper trail, and paper trails are what get cited the next time either side wants to make a case, whether in bilateral talks or in the next incident's press statement.

The 1991 agreement sits alongside a handful of other India-Pakistan confidence-building measures, most famously the Agreement on the Prohibition of Attacks against Nuclear Installations and Facilities, signed in December 1988 and brought into force in January 1991, and the 2005 Agreement on Pre-Notification of Flight Testing of Ballistic Missiles. Together they form a thin lattice of written restraint between two militaries that otherwise eye each other across the Line of Control and the Arabian Sea with permanent suspicion.

Every one of these agreements depends, in practice, on both sides actually observing the obligations they contain. The 1991 military-exercises agreement was explicitly framed around preventing a crisis arising from a misreading of the other side's intentions.

Pakistan has not publicly responded to the specific treaty allegation at the time of writing. Its silence leaves India's framing as the principal official version currently on record, an imbalance that will presumably persist until Islamabad decides paperwork deserves a reply.

There is also a practical angle worth noting. Citing a specific treaty article, rather than general maritime custom, gives India a cleaner diplomatic basis for raising the incident with Pakistan and placing the episode on the formal record. It converts an operational embarrassment into a documented allegation of a breach of an agreed bilateral obligation, with a citation attached — which is a considerably harder thing to shrug off later.

Treaties, in the end, are only as good as the willingness of both signatories to actually observe them. This week's collision suggests that willingness, on one side at least, currently extends about as far as the nearest safe following distance and not an inch further.