India Rebuts U.S. Navy Port Assertions
The denial follows remarks made earlier this week by former U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor to the One America News Network (OAN), in which he suggested Washington had been forced to rely on Indian port infrastructure after sustaining heavy damage to its own facilities.
"All of our bases have been destroyed," Macgregor said. "Our harbor installations are destroyed. We are actually having to fall back on India and Indian ports, which is less than ideal; that is what the navy says."
India's Foreign Ministry moved swiftly to counter the claim. "Claims being made on OAN, a US-based channel that Indian ports are being used by the US Navy are fake and false," the ministry's official fact-check handle posted on X Wednesday night. "We caution you against such baseless and fabricated comments."
The rebuke came just days before a U.S. submarine torpedoed and sank the Iranian warship IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Sri Lanka, killing 87 crew members. The vessel had been sailing home after taking part in the Indian Navy's International Fleet Review and the Milan-2026 multilateral maritime exercise in Visakhapatnam, India.
The incident has intensified scrutiny over a 2016 bilateral agreement — the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) — which permits reciprocal, case-by-case logistical support, including refueling and resupply, between Indian and American armed forces.
Geopolitical analyst Zorawar Daulet Singh flagged the agreement's potential implications in a post on X. "Iranian missiles have pushed the US navy close to Indian waters," he wrote. "This is precisely one of the scenarios for which the US signed the LEMOA (logistics agreement) with India. But the repercussions for India to be even an inadvertent war party in an aggressive and unprovoked intervention by the US would be dangerous."
Veteran journalist and author Praveen Swami also weighed in on the sinking, which occurred in waters widely regarded as India's strategic sphere of influence. "The decent thing – though not legally obligatory – would have been to notify India and Iran that the IRNS Dina could be targeted while sailing home from Visakhapatnam," he wrote on X. "Then, its captain may have chosen to shelter in a neutral port."
New Delhi has continued to urge a "cessation of hostilities" in the Middle East, even as the conflict edges ever closer to its own maritime borders.
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