When the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena slipped beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean on March 4, it took eighty-seven lives with it. Within hours, it also dragged an unwilling participant into the story — one whose involvement had, by any objective measure, already ended nine days earlier on a different coastline entirely.
India has spent the days since the sinking batting away a narrative it did not invite and does not accept.
IRIS Dena arrived in Visakhapatnam as one of dozens of international vessels participating in MILAN 2026, India’s biennial multilateral naval exercise. The sea phase ended February 24. The ship left the following day. It stopped at Hambantota in southern Sri Lanka. It then moved into international waters, where it remained for the better part of eight days. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. On March 4, a U.S. submarine fired on IRIS Dena approximately 40 nautical miles off Galle. The ship went down. Sri Lankan rescue teams recovered 32 survivors. The Indian Navy activated Search and Rescue assets upon learning of the attack. IRIS Dena had not requested them.
That, in its entirety, is India’s involvement.
The distress call came at 0508 hours local time and was received by MRCC Colombo, the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre with jurisdictional responsibility for those waters. Sri Lanka, not India, coordinated the response. This is not a bureaucratic footnote—it is the operational and legal reality of how maritime rescue works. Jurisdiction follows geography. IRIS Dena was nowhere near Indian waters when it was struck.
Yet the questions have kept coming. Indian defence officials and retired naval officers have since been consistent and pointed in that response: a port visit ends at the port. Hosting a foreign warship during a multilateral exercise does not extend responsibility for that vessel’s fate across international waters, through a third country’s harbour, and into the middle of an active military conflict.
The scale of U.S. naval action against Iran since the conflict began has not featured prominently in the same conversation. More than twenty Iranian vessels have reportedly been struck. Those incidents produced no comparable international reaction, no pointed diplomatic statements, no questions directed at host nations. IRIS Dena’s distinction, it appears, is its recent visit to Visakhapatnam — a stop that lasted days and ended before the war even started.
Indian officials have also raised the question of IRIS Dena’s movements in the period between leaving India and being attacked. Eight days in international waters, in a region that was about to become a theatre of active hostilities between Iran and the United States, is not a detail that has received adequate scrutiny. The United States, operating under the laws of naval warfare, would have regarded any Iranian warship as a legitimate military target irrespective of where it had docked the previous week.
History supports that position with little room for debate. Naval conflict has never confined itself to the territorial waters of combatant nations, and belligerent vessels have always been subject to engagement wherever they sail.
MILAN was a multilateral exercise. The conflict was bilateral. The waters were international. And India, by the time the first torpedo was fired, had been out of the picture for the better part of two weeks.