Is the Great Nicobar Island India’s Hormuz-like chokepoint against China?

Far away from the mainland, the Indian government is pumping billions of dollars into a controversial development project that could spell the end of Great Nicobar Island.

New Delhi, India — The southernmost point of India, the Great Nicobar Island, is closer to the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia than it is to the Indian mainland.

No Indian prime minister has visited the island, which is the size of Hong Kong, since Indira Gandhi in 1984. India does not even conduct a full census on the island, relying on estimates of its population; the latest guess is that fewer than 10,000 people live there.

Yet the island is now in the eye of a political storm over an $11bn project planned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to turn Great Nicobar into a major strategic and economic outpost in the Indian Ocean.

The Modi government has greenlit plans to build a transhipment port, a civilian-military airport, a power plant, tourism infrastructure and a township for 350,000 people on the island.

In its blueprint, the government highlighted the economics of maritime trade as the justification for the project.

But in the face of growing criticism from global environmental watchdogs and opposition leaders in New Delhi, the Indian government has shifted its narrative to position the plan as central to the country’s strategic goals in its neighbourhood.

And the United States-Iran struggle over the Strait of Hormuz has given that vision a boost, serving as a reminder of the importance of a perch that can serve military and economic aims over a strategic waterway — in this case, the Strait of Malacca, through which a third of global trade and seaborne oil flows.

“This island has a strategic value because it is sitting right at the mouth of Malacca [strait],” Shekhar Sinha, a former vice chief of the Indian Navy, told Al Jazeera. “And if it is [developed as] a commercial setup,” he added, no one would be able to object.

Stretching into the southeastern end of the Bay of Bengal, the Great Nicobar Island sits nearly 1,600km (994 miles) from mainland India, near the western approaches to the Strait of Malacca. It lies adjacent to East-West shipping lanes that carry trade and supplies between the Gulf, Europe and East Asia, including China, Japan and South Korea.

It is only 2.8km (1.7-mile) wide at its narrowest at the Phillip Channel near Singapore, yet it is the principal body of water connecting the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

And while the world’s trade depends on this strait, it is especially critical for China, which relies on the route for 8