India's Chief of Naval Staff Admiral R Hari Kumar on Wednesday confirmed that it was "proactively deploying" its warships in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea regions amid heightened hijacking threats from pirates.
"Recently we have had only two incidents (attempts of pirates to hijack ships). Both were not Indian flagged vessels, but in the second case we had Indian crew so we had to respond. So we boarded and rescued the crew...So we are now very proactively deploying our units there to ensure that these pirates keep away," Kumar told reporters.
The comments of the world's largest democratic sovereign state's top naval officer came only days after the Indian Navy's special marine commandos rescued 21, including 15 Indian crew members, from a ship hijacked by pirates in the Arabian Sea last weekend.
This came after MV Lila Norfolk, a Liberian-flagged vessel, was attacked by pirates in the North Arabian Sea.
Tensions in sea waters escalated as the Houthis, who control vast swathes of Yemeni territory, began attacking Israel-bound/owned civilian ships in the Red Sea.
The Houthis underlined that they were doing it in retaliation to Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza strip that has left over 23,000 dead.
Taking advantage of this situation, sea pirates began targeting naval vessels in and around the Indian Ocean and Red Sea area, with the most prominent of those attacks coming last Friday.