When Admiral Krishna Swaminathan boards a plane to Canberra this week, it will appear on paper to be merely a naval housekeeping duty; something like a ceremonial handshake tour that chiefs of staff undertake every few years. It is not. The Chief of Naval Staff's Australia-New Zealand double-head, which started on September 9, at a time when India's maritime policies in the Indo Pacific are moving from cautionary hedging to a closer toe look, reveal the same.

The Australian leg follows on from July's third India-Australia Annual Summit, which resulted in the Australian Defence Ministers, Richard Marles and Rajnath Singh, signing an agreement to negotiate a formal defence articles and services supply pact, which is usually a precursor to serious business cooperation, rather than a port call or photo opportunity. Swaminathan will meet with the senior leadership of the Royal Australian Navy and the broader Australian defence sector to discuss progress on interoperability, information exchange and joint training, and visit operational and training bases, as well as speak to RAN personnel about new technology.

There's no improvisation in this. It follows a published calendar that already involves India participating in Exercise Kakadu and the 2027 edition of Talisman Sabre, an exercise in which Australians will take part in India's own exercise Milan, which a how-to reveal has also “evolved” to include skills for littoral warfare, more relevant to patrolling the waters of a contested archipelago than to open ocean.

The newer, and in some ways more interesting part of the trip is the other half of New Zealand. Swaminathan's visit comes just 23 days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made history as the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Wellington in four decades, where he took 18 separate outcomes, and established the relationship as “full Strategic Partnership”. This package contained three not very pretty but significant instruments: a Maritime Cooperation Arrangement, a Mutual Logistics Support Arrangement, which provided each navy with access to each other's ports for refuelling and replenishment, and a standing Maritime Security Dialogue. The admiral's visit to Wellington is the operationalisation of paper signed in July, and a sign that Indian naval planners are not leaving diplomatic talk to rot in a ministry's records.

Remove the boilerplate on "bilateral cooperation" and the result is a fairly straightforward strategy calculation. The Indo-Pacific accounts for over 60 percent of global maritime trade and China's navy the world's largest by number of vessels has been normalising its presence well outside the first island chain for a decade by engaging in research missions, coast guard operations, fishing patrols and expanding port and basing deals from Ream in Cambodia to Gwadar in Pakistan. Beijing's Longpo submarine base on Hainan Island has grown to become so much a part of the regional anxiety that India is trying to get its own project, the INS Varsha submarine base near Visakhapatnam, the final construction spurt before it can receive a dozen nuclear submarines. In that context, the navy chief is only scrupulously maneuvering through Canberra and Wellington without seeking headlines he is just sewing the legwork into the southern side of a network of surveillance and logistics that already includes the Quad's Indo-Pacific Maritime Surveillance Collaboration and the Information Fusion Centre in Gurugram, which brings together maritime traffic data in the wider region.

There is a business side to this one as well, and it's no side show. India-Australia two-way trade stood at around $24.1 billion last full financial year, with India's exports increasing eight per cent and the trade deficit reduced to approximately $6.5 billion, with the full implementation of the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement to remove tariffs, from January this year. Coincidence is the right word for the fact that talks for a more ambitious Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement are also underway alongside the defence-industrial discussions: Canberra is now referring to India as a "top-tier security partner" and that's a language that's all about the money, not the missiles.

The two-way trade target is more symbolic than monetary there's a difference between that and the $two billion a year target that has been wrapped up in the defence logistics pact and New Zealand has set a goal of roughly doubling trade to $seven billion by 2030 in the same roadmap that also contains the pact on defence logistics. The strategy of integrating trade and security in one, as opposed to two separate, policies has evolved into a signature of India's new Indo-Pacific engagement, and is a contrast to the more cautious, trade-first diplomacy of a decade ago.

None of these, however, ensure a smooth journey. Meanwhile, Australia's own strategic bandwidth is being used up by planning for submarines under the AUKUS deal, as well as its own China anxieties in the Pacific islands, while New Zealand's traditionally more passive defence approach will probably moderate how far it wants to be seen to be aligning with a more assertive Indian navy.

The trend is clear, though. Ten years ago, the arrival of an Indian navy chief in Australasia would have been a news story, a report, and then it would be gone. It is located in a part of the ocean that is still in dispute, the heartland of tariff schedules and, most importantly, submarine basing and for this reason, this specific journey warrants more attention than the routine, diplomatic language it's getting.