India and Liberia Pair Crews and Flags Against Ship Attacks

India and Liberia launched a 25-country Group of Friends on seafarer safety at the United Nations on September 25, after an Indian sailor was killed on a foreign-flagged bulk carrier. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar co-chaired the first meeting with Liberia’s foreign minister, Sara Beysolow Nyanti, on the margins of the 81st UN General Assembly.

The chairs were not the usual naval powers. India sends a large share of the world’s crews. Liberia registers more ocean-going tonnage than any other flag. Jaishankar told the room that Indian sailors had already been killed or gone missing on ships that did not fly India’s flag, in the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Black Sea.

The Crew Country Sat Down With the Flag Country

Jaishankar put the split in one line. Seafarers often belong to a different nationality than the flag the commercial vessel flies, he said, which is why a single coastal state cannot close the file. India and Liberia had “joined hands to propose” the group, he added, as an inclusive platform for major ship-owning states, the biggest registries, and the countries that supply the most sailors.

These actions that disrupt maritime commerce and cost innocent lives are simply indefensible.

S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India, Group of Friends inaugural meeting, United Nations, New York

He listed the human residue that follows a missile or a boarding, prolonged confinement on board, delayed crew changes and repatriation, separation from families, and psychological distress, quite apart from the dead. The group’s working tag is GoFonS4. Members, he said, should make it inclusive, voluntary, and action-oriented, and should coordinate positions at the UN, the International Maritime Organization, and the International Labour Organization.

Glad to co-chair the inaugural meeting of Group of Friends on Safety & Security of Shipping & Seafarers, along with Liberia FM Sara Beysolow Nyanti #GoFonS4 #UNGA81

✅ Highlighted that commercial shipping and mariners have been subjected to repeated attacks in the Gulf, the Red… pic.twitter.com/9PuTWNorWR

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) September 25, 2026

Nyanti told the same meeting the idea had been bilateral only weeks earlier. She had been in New Delhi in August, held talks with Jaishankar, and reopened Liberia’s resident embassy there. “Just a few weeks ago, I was in New Delhi, and this was an idea, a bilateral idea between India and Liberia,” she said. “Today, we’re sitting here, over 20 countries have signed up.” Jaishankar’s own count for the first sitting was 25 countries.

Six Indian Seafarers Died on the Ships He Named

Jaishankar did not speak in generalities. He read four merchant-ship cases into the record, two of them from September, and he named the flags on the most recent pair. Antigua and Barbuda and Panama, not India, were on the sterns when an Indian sailor died and another went missing.

THE FOUR CASES ON THE RECORD

Those four examples add up to six Indian dead and one missing. Jaishankar said sailors of other nationalities had been hit this year as well. “Put simply, these attacks must stop,” he said at a joint briefing with Nyanti, adding that the violence had run across the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea, and that there could be no justification for it.

The classic piracy ledger does not hold this war-zone damage. The IMO’s 2025 circular on piracy and armed robbery logged 171 piracy and armed robbery incidents worldwide, up about 17 percent from 146 in 2024, with 122 of them in the Malacca and Singapore straits. That count, as Nyanti’s briefing noted in New York, does not capture attacks tied to armed conflict. The friends group is aimed at the second pile, merchant crews caught in other countries’ wars.

How Many Indian Seafarers Work on Foreign Hulls?

BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping, in the Seafarer Workforce Report 2026, put India as the second-largest seafarer supply in 2026, behind only the Philippines. The country’s share of that supply is 12.16%. In 2015 it was 5.2 percent and fifth in the world. In 2021 it was 6 percent and still fifth.

INDIA IN THE 2026 CREW COUNT

• Headcount: India supplies 311,936 STCW-certified seafarers, 140,718 officers and 171,218 ratings.
• Officer share: Those officers are 13.41 percent of the world officer pool of 1,048,980.
• Global balance: World supply is 2,565,580 against demand of 2,547,790, with a 39,100 shortfall in officers and a surplus of ratings.
• Concentration: The five largest supply countries hold 56.25 percent of the world seafarer workforce.

Ports, Shipping and Waterways Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, citing that report in a government release on July 28, said New Delhi is now chasing a Mission 20 percent seafarer target, one Indian in every five sailors worldwide. The same arithmetic that makes that goal look like industrial policy is what put Indian names on Jaishankar’s casualty list. When more than one in eight of the world’s sailors is Indian, a missile that finds a bulk carrier in the Gulf of Oman is, more often than the map suggests, finding a rating or an officer whose papers were issued in India.

Shipping companies, asked by BIMCO and ICS which nationalities they actually employ, still put Filipinos first. Indians sit in the top five, next to Ukrainians, Romanians, and Poles, which is another way of saying the people on the bridge and in the engine room are not the people whose flag is painted on the funnel.

Liberia’s Flag Covers 18 Percent of the World Fleet

Liberia’s value in that room is paper, inspections, and market share, not a navy. The Liberian Registry, run for the government by the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry, says it is the largest flag in the world, with more than 300 million gross tons and 18 percent of the world’s ocean-going fleet, citing Clarksons figures for September 2026. It also claims the largest container-ship fleet, at 23.96 percent of world boxships, and 25.94 percent of the world’s newbuilding fleet across tankers, bulkers, and boxships.

Open registries exist so an owner in Piraeus or Tokyo can put a hull under Monrovia’s law. Quality varies by ship, not by the word “Liberia” on the stern, and the registry has spent years staying on the Paris and Tokyo port-state White Lists to keep that business. When those hulls steam through Hormuz or the Red Sea, the crew on board is frequently Indian, Filipino, or Ukrainian. Flag state and labour state only meet if someone puts them at the same table.

Nyanti was frank about Liberia’s own interest. She said the government would work with its Maritime Authority and international partners to keep passage open while protecting the country’s economic interests and maritime revenue. A friends group that talks about seafarer welfare is also a friends group that talks about the conditions under which owners keep using the flag.

The Group Will Talk at IMO and ILO

UN “groups of friends” are not agencies. They have no fleet, no budget line for evacuation, and no power to order a navy to escort a tanker. They are clubs of member states that agree to raise an issue in the same direction in New York, London, and Geneva. Jaishankar said members would meet regularly and write modalities and terms of reference from the discussion. Nyanti set three priorities for that work.

NYANTI’S THREE PRIORITIES

• Vessel standards: Technical rules, compliance, and environmental stewardship on the ships themselves.
• Sea-lane security: Defence of commercial routes against piracy, armed attacks, regional instability, and asymmetric threats.
• The people on board: Protection of seafarers as the third, equal aim, not an afterthought to cargo.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The chairs: India and Liberia are co-chairs of the Group of Friends on Safety and Security of Shipping and Seafarers.
• The first room: 25 countries attended the inaugural meeting on September 25 in New York.
• The forums: The group intends to take the file to the UN, the IMO, and the ILO.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The rulebook: Terms of reference and a working method have not been published.
• The full list: A complete public membership roll was not issued with the launch.
• Any rescue tool: No joint response, escort, or evacuation mechanism was announced.

That last gap is the one that will matter the next time a projectile finds a bridge wing. Jaishankar said the international community cannot be a spectator or a victim of the violence. UNCTAD’s long-running finding that about 80 percent of goods trade by volume moves by sea is the reason foreign ministries bother to show up. Food, fuel, and fertilizer still travel in the same hulls as the ratings. A consultative club can put that sentence into an IMO plenary. It cannot, on the design shown on September 25, pull a wounded fitter off a burning tanker.

Modi Floated a Rescue Network at BRICS

The New York launch sits on a short stack of earlier Indian bids to make seafarer safety a diplomatic file rather than a coast-guard afterthought. Jaishankar walked the room through that stack himself.

THE DIPLOMATIC TRACK BEHIND THE GROUP

1. November 2025: India co-organises an Arria-formula meeting of the UN Security Council with Greece and the Philippines on maritime safety.
2. April 2026: India joins a high-level open debate on the same file.
3. August 2026: Nyanti visits New Delhi, holds talks with Jaishankar, and reopens Liberia’s embassy; the two sides float a joint group.
4. September 2026, BRICS: Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposes a Seafarers Emergency Support Network to link maritime authorities and embassies for distress alerts, medical help, family contact, and evacuation.
5. September 25, 2026: India and Liberia open the Group of Friends at UNGA, with 25 countries in the room and no operational network yet standing.

The BRICS network, on Jaishankar’s account, is the piece that would actually call an embassy when a crew is trapped. Distress alerts, medical assistance, communication with families, and support for evacuation are operational tasks. They need duty officers and ships, not a friends list. As of the New York meeting, that network was still a summit proposal. The Group of Friends was the vehicle on offer instead: a place for flag states, labour states, and owners to speak in the same direction while the terms of reference are written.

Indian seafarer unions treated the ministerial language as recognition that crews are civilians who keep trade moving, and as a demand that the attacks stop. Recognition is not a patrol. The objection that follows is blunt. Sailors keep dying in wars their passports did not start, and another UN grouping will not by itself stop the next strike on a foreign-flagged hull.

Nyanti said members would now work out how the group cooperates in practice and how it sits beside the IMO and the ILO. Until those terms exist, the pairing that made the room unusual is also the pairing that the next projectile will still find, an Indian officer or rating on a ship whose flag is Liberian, Panamanian, or Antigua and Barbuda, in water no friends group can clear.