Seven days before USS Charlotte fired its torpedoes, the crew of IRIS Dena were “atithi (guest)” in India, walking through the Taj Mahal, marching in a city parade in Visakhapatnam, standing at attention as India's president reviewed the fleet during Exercise MILAN 2026. On February 25, the exercise ended and the ship sailed home. Eight days later, at 05:08 on March 4, a distress signal went out from 19 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka. IRIS Dena sank in under three minutes. At least 87 sailors were recovered dead. 32 survived. An unknown number remain missing.
The incident has placed New Delhi in a position it did not seek and probably did not anticipate.
MILAN-2026 had 74 nations participating. The circumstances of the sinking — a vessel in non-combat configuration, returning home from an Indian-hosted exercise — have made it difficult for many of those nations to treat the event as a straightforward act of war.
The hardest question the sinking raises is one India itself has not publicly addressed. Under the military pacts COMCASA and LEMOA, India and the United States share sensitive maritime data. If a US attack submarine used shared data to locate and sink an Iranian frigate that had just departed an Indian port after a multilateral naval exercise, it would represent, in Chellaney's words, "a foundational breach of the defence partnership."
The alternative is no more comfortable. If India was not informed — if USS Charlotte operated in the Indian Ocean and sank a vessel departing an Indian exercise without any notification to New Delhi — that too is a message about how Washington calibrates its partnership with India. India faces a classic bind: it cannot condemn the US without damaging a partnership it has spent two decades building, but its silence carries costs with every navy that participated in MILAN and is now watching how the host country responds.
But the questions are hard and loud, and US President Donald Trump, who as lately as March 11 called India a “great friend”, must answer how this act reflects on the very ties between New Delhi and Washington.
Former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal reflected on the moral dimension carefully. "The Iranian ship will not be where it was if we had not invited it to take part in our MILAN exercise. We were the hosts. As per protocol, ships cannot carry any ammunition. It was defenceless. The US has ignored India's sensitivities," he wrote on X.
Sibal was also clear that India bore no legal responsibility — once IRIS Dena left Indian territorial waters, New Delhi had no jurisdiction over what happened to it.
Strategic affairs analyst Sushant Singh, according to National Herald, assessed that "in all likelihood, the Trump administration bypassed the Modi government entirely," launching a lethal submarine strike without prior notice.
Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi described IRIS Dena as "a guest of India's Navy carrying almost 130 sailors, struck in international waters without warning."
Source: India Latest News, Breaking News Today, Top News Headlines | Times Now
