Islamabad, Pakistan — More than 16 months after India and Pakistan fought a four-day air war, firing missiles and drones at each other, the South Asian neighbours came the closest since then to a military face-off — this time in the Arabian Sea.
Indian and Pakistani naval vessels collided on Tuesday, setting off tit-for-tat accusations. Pakistan’s government summoned India’s top diplomat in Islamabad on Wednesday, mirroring action New Delhi had taken hours earlier when it summoned Pakistan’s charge d’affaires and lodged a protest of its own over the incident.
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The collision is the first direct military encounter between the nuclear-armed neighbours since their four-day conflict in May 2025, when Indian air strikes and Pakistani retaliation brought both countries closer to full-scale war than at any point in decades.
So far, details of what happened remain disputed. Neither government has released video, track data or an independent account – and each statement places the blame on the other’s vessel.
But analysts say it underscored the risks of unintended incidents in the seas that could potentially escalate into broader crises, when India and Pakistan have few military and diplomatic mechanisms left in place to defuse tensions.
Two accounts
According to Pakistan’s Foreign Office statement issued on Wednesday evening, the navy has been conducting its biennial SEASPARK-26 exercise inside its exclusive economic zone since September 1 .
A country’s EEZ extends 200 nautical miles (370km) from its coast. Its territorial waters are only 12 nautical miles (22km) from the coast, with the rest of the EEZ in international waters. While vessels from other countries can pass through a nation’s EEZ in international waters unencumbered, they cannot exploit the waters economically: that right belongs only to the country whose EEZ it is.
Pakistan said that an Indian vessel, identified as the guided-missile destroyer INS Kolkata, had “repeatedly” tried to enter the exercise area since September 7 .
On September 15 , it said, Kolkata made a “dangerous” change of course that brought it into contact with a Pakistani vessel identified in local media as PNS Hunain, an offshore patrol vessel.
“Pakistan strongly rejects this belligerent Indian action,” the Pakistani Foreign Office said, calling it a violation of a 1991 bilateral agreement requiring warships to stay at least three nautical miles (5.5km, 3.4 miles) apart in international waters.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs said the warship was on “routine surveillance” in international waters when a Pakistani vessel approached at high speed and manoeuvred unsafely.
Neither government has named the vessels in its own on-record statement, and India has not confirmed or denied the Kolkata identification.
The two navies last collided in June 2011, when Pakistani frigate PNS Babur brushed against Indian frigate INS Godavari in the Gulf of Aden, while escorting a merchant vessel freed from Somali pirates.
Each side blamed the other then too. That row faded within weeks.
The risks
Retired Vice Admiral Ahmad Saeed of the Pakistan Navy said the pattern — two ships pressing close without a clear intent to collide — was familiar from Cold War-era “bumping” incidents between Soviet and US ships in the Black Sea.
But he argued that India and Pakistan are worse placed to manage similar encounters.
“There’s no bilateral Incidents at Sea agreement, the kind the US and USSR signed in 1972, and no navy-to-navy hotline,” Saeed told Al Jazeera. “Article 10 sets a distance, but it gives no manoeuvring rules and no procedure for investigating an incident afterwards. That gap is exactly why each side can just accuse the other.”
Article 10 of the 1991 confidence-building agreement between the two nations requires warships to stay at least three nautical miles (5.6km, 3.5 miles) apart in international waters.
Saeed said the greater risk was what might follow the collision: sharper tactics such as fire-control radar lock-ons or helicopter overflights and eventually “a contact with actual casualties.”
Muhammad Shareh Qazi, a Lahore-based security and maritime analyst, however, pointed to the same 1991 agreement, which he said requires 30 days’ written notice before a military exercise, as well as international collision regulations that apply to both countries as signatories to the UN maritime convention.
“If this collision really had the potential to escalate militarily, you’d have noticed by now,” Qazi said. “There’s a tool for that, called chaff, fired just above the bow or stern purely to signal you could escalate if needed. Nothing like that happened here.”
Both navies also have their own internal accountability channels, he added, with a captain found to have acted without authorisation facing a court martial process separate from any diplomatic protest.
On fishermen routinely detained for straying across the Sir Creek boundary, which is not demarcated between India and Pakistan further south, Qazi said the link to incidents further out at sea was indirect but real.
“Clear demarcation could help close those ambiguities over time, by reducing the ambiguity around where and how these interactions are expected to occur,” he added.
Saeed was more cautious about how contained an incident like this would remain.
“This hasn’t stayed quiet. Both governments went public with protests within a day of each other,” he said, adding that what made the moment riskier than 2011 was that “both publics are primed after last year’s conflict, which was not the case in 2011.”
Similar close-quarters confrontations have become more frequent between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea.
In the most recent flare-up, on July 24 , Philippine officials said a Chinese vessel came within about seven metres (23 feet) of a Philippine fisheries boat near Scarborough Shoal, the Philippine-claimed reef that China has controlled since 2012, and that Chinese coast guard ships fired water cannon at Philippine vessels.
Whether this week’s collision follows that pattern or fades like the 2011 incident depends less on the ships than on what comes next diplomatically, Qazi said.
“If, in the next 24 to 48 hours, an official statement suggests there was a genuine cause to manufacture an incident for the purpose of escalation, then yes, there may be a real possibility of this happening again,” he added.
