India’s navy boasts aircraft carriers, submarines, warships and frontline vessels of steel as it spreads its maritime power worldwide.But none of its vessels is as unusual as its newest addition that sets sail on its maiden Indian Ocean crossing on Monday — a wooden stitched ship inspired by a fifth-century design, built not to dominate the seas but to remember how India once traversed them.Steered by giant oars rather than a rudder, with two fixed square sails to catch seasonal monsoon winds, it heads westward on its first voyage across the seas, a 1,400-kilometre (870-mile) voyage to Oman’s capital Muscat.Named Kaundinya, after a legendary Indian mariner, its 20-metre (65-foot) long hull is sewn together with coconut coir rope rather than nailed.”This voyage reconnects the past with the present,” Vice Admiral Krishna Swaminathan said, sending the ship off from Porbandar, in India’s western state of Gujarat, on an estimated two-week crossing.”We are not only retracing ancient pathways of trade, navigation, and cultural exchange, but also reaffirming India’s position as a natural maritime bridge across the Indian Ocean.”The journey evokes a time when Indian sailors were regular traders with the Roman Empire, the Middle East, Africa, and lands to the east — today’s Thailand, Indonesia, China and as far as Japan.”This voyage is not just symbolic,” Swaminathan said. “It is of deep strategic and cultural significance to our nation, as we aim to resurrect and revive ancient Indian maritime concepts and capabilities in all their forms.”- ‘A bridge’ -The ship’s 18-strong crew has already sailed north along India’s palm-fringed coast, from Karnataka to Gujarat.”Our peoples have long looked to the Indian Ocean not as a boundary, but as a bridge carrying commerce and ideas, culture and friendship, across its waters,” said Oman’s ambassador to India, Issa Saleh Alshibani.”The monsoon winds that once guided traditional ships between our ports also carried a shared understanding that prosperity grows when we remain connected, open and cooperative.”The journey is daunting. The ship’s builders have refused modern shortcuts, instead relying on traditional shipbuilding methods.”Life on board is basic — no cabins, just the deck,” said crew member Sanjeev Sanyal, the 55-year-old historian who conceived the project, who is also Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s economic adviser.”We sleep on hammocks hanging from the mast,” he told AFP before the voyage.Sanyal, an Oxford-educated scholar and former international banker, drew up the blueprints with traditional shipwrights, basing designs on descriptions from ancient texts, paintings and coins.”Vasco da Gama is 500 years back,” he said, referring to the Portuguese sailor who reached India in 1498. “This is 6,000-, 7,000-year-old history.”- ‘So much gold’ -India is part of the Quad security alliance with the United States, Australia and Japan, seen as a counterweight to Beijing’s presence in the Indian Ocean.For India, the voyage is also a soft-power showcase to challenge perceptions that it was China’s “Silk Road” caravans that dominated ancient East-West trade.That land trade, as described by 13th-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo, peaked centuries after India’s sea route.”India was running such large surpluses with the Romans that you have Pliny the Elder… complaining that they were losing so much gold to India,” Sanyal said.The ship’s only modern power source is a small battery for a radio transponder and navigation lights, because wooden vessels do not show up well on radar.”When you hit a big wave, you can see the hull cave in a little bit”, he said, explaining that the stitched design allowed it to flex.”But it is one thing to know this in theory,” he said. “It is quite another thing to build one of these and have skin in the game by sailing it oneself.”

Myanmar’s dominant pro-military party claimed an overwhelming victory in the first phase of the elections, a senior party official told AFP, after democracy watchdogs warned the junta-run poll would entrench military rule.The armed forces snatched power in a 2021 coup, but on Sunday opened voting in a phased month-long election they pledge will return power to the people.”We won 82 lower house seats in townships which have finished counting, out of the total of 102,” a senior member of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) told AFP.The figure implies that the party — which many analysts describe as a civilian proxy of the military — took more than 80 percent of the lower house seats that were put to the vote on Sunday.It won all eight townships in the capital Naypyidaw, the official added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose the results.At the last poll in 2020, the USDP was trounced by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), which was dissolved after the coup and did not appear on Sunday’s ballots.The Nobel laureate has been in detention since the putsch, which triggered a civil war.Campaigners, Western diplomats and the United Nations’ rights chief have condemned the vote — citing a stark crackdown on dissent and a candidate list stacked with military allies.”It makes sense that the USDP would dominate,” said Morgan Michaels, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank.”The election is not credible,” he told AFP. “They rig it ahead of time by banning different parties, making sure that certain people don’t turn up to vote, or they do turn up to vote under threat of coercion to vote a certain way.”Official results have yet to be posted by Myanmar’s Union Election Commission and two more phases are scheduled for January 11 and 25.”My view on the election is clear: I don’t trust it at all,” Yangon resident Min Khant said Monday.”We have been living under a dictatorship,” said the 28-year-old. “Even if they do hold elections, I don’t think anything good will come of them because they always lie.”After voting on Sunday, military chief Min Aung Hlaing — who has ruled by diktat for the past five years — said the armed forces could be trusted to hand back power to a civilian-led government.”We guarantee it to be a free and fair election,” he told reporters in Naypyidaw. “It’s organised by the military, we can’t let our name be tarnished.”The coup triggered a civil war as pro-democracy activists formed guerrilla units, fighting alongside ethnic minority armies which have long resisted central rule.Sunday’s election was scheduled to take place in 102 of the country’s 330 townships — the most of the three phases of voting.But amid the war, the military has acknowledged that elections cannot happen in almost one in five lower house constituencies.