India-Iran Relations and the Crises in Iraq and Yemen

India’s relationship with Iran is the one West Asian relationship that geography insists on and politics keeps interrupting. Iran is the land bridge to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan, and it was once among India’s largest suppliers of crude. It is also the state whose confrontation with the United States has repeatedly forced India to choose. The war that began in February 2026 and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz turned that long-running dilemma into an emergency.

What this account covers, and what it hands elsewhere

Four separate treatments of West Asia divide the region between them, and the divisions matter because the same events look different depending on which interest is in view.

• This account owns the India-Iran bilateral in full — Chabahar, the International North-South Transport Corridor, energy, sanctions, the convergence on Afghanistan and the domestic Shia dimension — together with Iraq, Yemen and the Houthis, and the maritime security of the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.
• It owns the narrative of the 2026 Iran war and the closure of the strait. Other treatments take only the consequence that bites their own subject.
• India’s relationship with Israel and its Palestine policy are treated separately.
  • Israel’s role in the 2026 war appears here as a fact of the war; India’s Israel policy and its votes at the United Nations do not.
• The Gulf monarchies as bilateral relationships are treated separately. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain are not the subject here.
• Energy appears here in its disruptive form — sanctions, chokepoints, price shocks, rerouting and rationing.
  • The structural energy relationship with the Gulf, with its long-term contracts, storage and investment, is treated separately.
• Chabahar and the INSTC appear here as the India-Iran project and as a sanctions problem.
  • Their separate life as the answer to India’s Central Asia access problem is treated with Central Asia.
• Afghanistan is treated separately as a crisis position. What belongs here is only the India-Iran convergence on it.
• The India-United States relationship is treated in its own right. Washington enters here only as a constraint on India’s Iran policy, which is exactly how Indian policymakers experience it.

Why Iran matters to India, and why civilisational depth explains so little

India and Iran are the two surviving centres of an old and continuous cultural world. Persian was the language of administration in India for six centuries, survives in Indian legal and revenue vocabulary, and shaped Urdu. India has one of the world’s largest Shia populations. None of this has been a reliable predictor of policy, and the gap between the cultural intimacy and the strategic record is the first thing an honest account has to explain.

• The hard interests are four, and none of them is cultural.
  • Geography and access. Iran is the only route by which Indian goods reach Afghanistan and Central Asia without crossing Pakistan, which has consistently refused transit. This is the single interest that cannot be substituted.
  • Energy. Iran holds the world’s second-largest proven gas reserves and among the largest oil reserves, sits close to Indian refineries, and historically offered credit terms, free shipping and insurance that no Gulf supplier matched.
  • Afghanistan. India and Iran have converged for three decades on opposing a Pakistan-aligned order in Kabul, and diverged only on tactics.
  • A hedge against encirclement. A functioning Iran relationship denies Pakistan an exclusive claim on India’s western land approaches and gives India a position in a region where China is advancing.
• What the cultural depth does not deliver is equally clear.
  • Iran’s claim to leadership of the Muslim world has repeatedly pushed it towards positions on Kashmir that India rejects, and towards statements on Indian Muslims that India treats as interference.
  • Iran has consistently declined to give Chabahar the anti-Pakistan strategic meaning Indian commentary attaches to it, and has publicly invited other participants, China included.
  • Shared civilisation has never generated shared threat perception. India’s principal adversaries are Pakistan and China; Iran’s are the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. There is almost no overlap.

The India-Iran relationship is deep in culture, thin in convergence, and hostage to a third party neither of them controls.

How the policy got its shape

The Cold War divergence, 1950 to 1979

• Diplomatic relations were established on 15 March 1950, and a treaty of friendship followed the same year, but the two states spent the next three decades on opposite sides of the central global division.
• Imperial Iran under the Shah was an American ally, a founding member of the Baghdad Pact and then of the Central Treaty Organisation, and a close military partner of Pakistan.
  • India was non-aligned, drew closer to the Soviet Union, and signed the friendship treaty with Moscow in 1971.
• The alignment had concrete costs. Iran supported Pakistan materially in 1965 and diplomatically in 1971, and Tehran regarded the emergence of Bangladesh as a precedent it did not welcome.
• India’s counterweight was Iraq. Baghdad was Baathist, Soviet-leaning, hostile to Tehran and useful to Delhi — the origin of a relationship built on oil and on the enemy of an enemy rather than on affinity.
• The 1973 oil shock changed the arithmetic without changing the politics. Iran became a major supplier and a source of credit, and India began the pattern that has held ever since: commerce running ahead of trust.

The revolution, the war, and a reset that did not take

• The 1979 revolution removed the American alignment and briefly created an opening.
  • Both states were now formally non-aligned, both were suspicious of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan, and Iran’s new leadership had no stake in CENTO.
• The opening closed almost immediately. Iran continued to support Pakistan on Kashmir, and India maintained close relations with Iraq through the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, which Tehran read as hostility.
• The 1980s were the low point — India buying Iraqi oil, hosting Iraqi trainees and staying conspicuously neutral in a war Iran regarded as existential.
• The convergence that eventually mattered was Afghanistan.
  • Through the 1990s India and Iran both backed the Northern Alliance against a Taliban regime that Pakistan sponsored and that Iran, as a Shia power, regarded as a sectarian threat.
  • This was the first genuine strategic overlap the two had ever had.

The high-water mark, 1993 to 2003

The decade after the Cold War produced the closest India-Iran relationship there has ever been, and it is worth setting out in detail because everything since has been measured against it.

• P. V. Narasimha Rao visited Tehran in September 1993, the first Indian prime ministerial visit in decades, and opened a period of active political cooperation.
• In 1994 Iran blocked a resolution on Kashmir at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
  • Pakistan, with support inside the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, was close to tabling a censure of India; Rao sent his External Affairs Minister to Tehran with a personal letter to President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Iran’s representative in Geneva argued that a dispute between two friends belonged in bilateral channels.
  • The OIC consensus broke and the resolution was never tabled.
  • Pakistan has not attempted a Kashmir resolution at a United Nations forum since.
• A defence cooperation agreement was signed in December 2002, providing for training, ship visits and access arrangements — an unusual document for two states with no shared adversary.
• The Tehran Declaration of April 2001, signed during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s visit, set out a vision of strategic partnership covering energy, connectivity and regional security.
• The New Delhi Declaration of January 2003 went further.
  • President Mohammad Khatami was chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade, and the declaration committed the two to a “strategic partnership”, to cooperation on Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to Indian participation in developing Iranian ports and transport links.
  • This is the document Chabahar descends from.

Phase	Years	What defined it
Cold War divergence	1950-1979	Iran in CENTO and aligned with the United States and Pakistan; India non-aligned and Soviet-leaning; India’s counterweight was Iraq
The failed reset	1979-1990	Revolutionary Iran no longer American, but India’s closeness to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and Iran’s Kashmir positions blocked convergence
Convergence on Afghanistan	1990-2000	Both back the Northern Alliance; the first genuine shared interest
The high-water mark	2001-2005	Tehran Declaration 2001, New Delhi Declaration 2003, Khatami as Republic Day chief guest, a defence agreement, oil at scale
The American constraint	2005-2015	IAEA votes, the civil nuclear deal with Washington, withdrawal from the pipeline, sanctions
The Chabahar decade	2016-2025	Connectivity replaces energy as the content of the relationship; the 2024 ten-year contract; sanctions exemption and its revocation
Crisis and improvisation	2026-	War, the closure of Hormuz, the waiver’s expiry, one Iranian cargo, and no settled policy

The votes Iran has not forgotten

Nothing in the bilateral record is cited by Iranian officials as often as India’s conduct at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005 and 2006. The votes are the clearest single illustration of the constraint the United States places on this relationship, and of what that constraint costs India in credibility.

• On 24 September 2005 India voted for a resolution of the IAEA Board of Governors finding that Iran’s nuclear activities raised questions within the competence of the Security Council — in effect, a finding of non-compliance.
  • China and Russia abstained; India did not.
• On 4 February 2006 India voted again, this time for the resolution that referred Iran’s file to the United Nations Security Council.
• The context was the civil nuclear agreement with Washington. The July 2005 joint statement that opened the way to the nuclear deal was moving through an American Congress in which support for Iran sanctions was a condition of goodwill, and the linkage was made explicit in Washington rather than inferred in Delhi.
• India’s stated reasoning was that it opposed further proliferation in its neighbourhood, that Iran should meet its safeguards obligations, and that the issue should be resolved within the Agency rather than at the Security Council.
  • The last of these sat awkwardly with a vote that sent the file to the Security Council.
• The Iranian reaction was immediate and lasting. Iran’s foreign ministry warned that economic relations with states that had voted against it would be reviewed, and the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, put the sense of betrayal in personal terms, saying that Iran had regarded India as a friend and had not expected it to vote as it did.
• The material consequences followed quickly.
  • A twenty-five-year liquefied natural gas contract for five million tonnes a year, agreed in 2005 with deliveries due from 2009, was abandoned amid Iranian price revision demands.
  • India’s participation in the Iran-Pakistan-India “peace” pipeline, for which it had signed a preliminary agreement in 1999, ended in 2009 on stated grounds of price and transit security — a decision Iran read alongside the nuclear deal.
• The deeper damage was to India’s reputation as an autonomous actor.
  • Iranian commentary since has repeatedly used a version of the line that New Delhi’s qibla — the direction it faces — is Washington.
  • Whether or not that is fair, it is the frame through which Iranian officials now read Indian assurances.

India’s two IAEA votes bought a nuclear agreement with Washington and cost it two decades of Iranian trust; both halves of that trade are still being paid.

Chabahar: the project that has had to carry the whole relationship

Chabahar is the only Indian project in Iran that survived twenty years of sanctions, and by the 2020s it had become the content of the relationship rather than one item within it. Its purpose is simple: Chabahar is Iran’s only deep-water port on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz, and from it road and rail run to Zahedan, to Zaranj on the Afghan border, and northwards towards Central Asia and Russia.

Origin and the trilateral framework

• India’s commitment dates to a memorandum of 2003, agreed in the atmosphere of the New Delhi Declaration; sanctions prevented anything being built for more than a decade.
• India’s first physical contribution was the Zaranj-Delaram highway, a 218-kilometre road inside Afghanistan built by the Border Roads Organisation and opened in 2009, which connects the Afghan ring road to the Iranian frontier and makes Chabahar useful.
  • Its construction cost lives, and it belongs to the Afghanistan account as much as to this one.
• The trilateral transit and transport agreement between India, Iran and Afghanistan was signed at Tehran on 23 May 2016 during the Prime Minister’s visit,
  • alongside a bilateral arrangement giving India the right to develop and operate two berths at the Shahid Beheshti terminal for ten years through India Ports Global Limited, a joint venture of the Jawaharlal Nehru and Kandla port authorities.
• The 2016 package was announced with headline numbers that were never fully realised — US$85 million for berth equipment, a US$150 million credit line, and much larger figures floated for the Chabahar-Zahedan railway and the free zone.
  • The gap between announcement and delivery is a recurring feature of this project and a fair criticism of it.

What the port has actually done

• India began operating the terminal in December 2018, the first time an Indian entity had run a port abroad.
• The first Indian wheat consignment to Afghanistan through Chabahar sailed on 29 October 2017, before operations were transferred, and the humanitarian route has been the port’s most convincing achievement.
• By the mid-2020s Chabahar had carried roughly 2.5 million tonnes of wheat and about 2,000 tonnes of pulses to Afghanistan, along with earthquake relief and medical supplies — small volumes commercially, but the only sustained Indian supply line to Afghanistan that does not depend on Pakistani permission.
• Throughput has never approached capacity. The terminal’s designed handling capacity is several million tonnes a year; utilisation in the early years ran in the low tens of percent, and the port’s commercial case has always rested on future rail links rather than present cargo.
• The Chabahar-Zahedan railway, the piece that would make the port a corridor rather than a berth, has repeatedly stalled.
  • Reports in 2020 that Iran had dropped India from the project were denied by both governments, but Indian participation never materialised in a form that moved earth.

The ten-year contract of May 2024

• On 13 May 2024 India Ports Global and the Port and Maritime Organisation of Iran signed a ten-year contract for the operation of the Shahid Beheshti terminal, the first long-term agreement replacing a decade of annually renewed arrangements.
• The financial structure was about US$120 million of equipment investment by India and a US$250 million credit line for connected infrastructure, offered in Indian rupees.
• The agreement was signed in the presence of the Indian shipping minister and was framed as a commitment that would outlast electoral and sanctions cycles. It did not.
• Within days the American State Department publicly warned of “potential risk of sanctions” for entities dealing with Iranian ports — a signal that the exemption India had enjoyed since 2018 was politically, not legally, secure.

The sanctions clock, September 2025 to April 2026

• The exemption granted in 2018 had been explicitly justified in Washington as support for Afghan reconstruction, and it survived the whole of the maximum-pressure period.
• On 16 September 2025 the exemption was revoked as part of a general withdrawal of Iran-related waivers.
• A conditional six-month waiver was granted to allow wind-down, and it expired on 26 April 2026 without renewal.
• Indian-appointed officials of the operating entity resigned shortly before the deadline and the company’s public presence was withdrawn — the administrative form that a strategic retreat takes.
• By April 2026 India was reported to be exploring a temporary transfer of its stake in the free-zone entity to Iranian partners, pending any future sanctions relief.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs described itself as discussing the matter actively with both Tehran and Washington and denied that India was exiting.
• India nonetheless paid its promised US$120 million equipment commitment in February 2026, which is the strongest available evidence that Delhi intends to return rather than to abandon the asset.

The budget line that disappeared

• The Union Budget presented on 1 February 2026 carried no allocation for Chabahar, for the first time in nearly a decade.
  • The previous years’ line had been modest — of the order of ₹100 crore — but its presence was the annual signal that the project was live.
• Its removal is the single most legible statement of Indian policy on Chabahar, and it was made in an accounting document rather than a diplomatic one.
  • That is characteristic: India has withdrawn from Chabahar without announcing a withdrawal.

“Chabahar has really become a losing bet over the last few years. In that sense, it’s really a damaged asset.”

— Michael Kugelman

The North-South corridor and two wars

The International North-South Transport Corridor is the other half of the Iranian connectivity bet, and it has been damaged by an entirely different conflict.

• The corridor is a 7,200-kilometre multimodal route — ship, rail and road — agreed by India, Iran and Russia in 2000 and since expanded to a membership of thirteen states including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Belarus and Oman.
• The route runs from Indian west-coast ports to Bandar Abbas or Chabahar, north through Iran, and then by two branches — west through Azerbaijan and east through Central Asia — to Astrakhan and Moscow, with onward links to northern Europe.
• Its claimed advantage over the Suez route is roughly 30-40% less distance and up to half the transit time, with substantial savings per container.
  • Those figures come from route studies rather than sustained commercial operation and should be treated as design claims.
• The missing physical link is the Rasht-Astara railway in northern Iran, a short segment whose absence forces transhipment by road.
  • Russia and Iran signed a construction agreement in 2023 and have repeatedly re-announced timelines since; it remains unbuilt.
• Two wars have degraded the corridor at once.
  • The war in Ukraine placed its northern terminus under comprehensive Western sanctions and made Russian banking and insurance hazardous for Indian shippers;
  • the 2026 Iran war placed its southern half in a combat zone.
  • A corridor is only as usable as its weakest jurisdiction, and the INSTC now has two.
• The strategic consequence is that India’s two overland alternatives have failed at once, for reasons that have nothing to do with either project’s engineering.

Energy: from a top-three supplier to zero, and back to a single cargo

Energy is the strand where the relationship’s decline is most exactly measurable, and where American policy has been most directly determinative. This account treats energy as disruption — sanctions, chokepoints and shocks — rather than as the structural buyer-seller relationship India runs with the Gulf.

The collapse of 2019

• Iran was for most of the 2010s among India’s three largest crude suppliers, and India was Iran’s largest buyer after China.
• In 2018-19 India imported about 23.5 million tonnes of Iranian crude, roughly a tenth of its petroleum imports by volume, making Iran its fourth-largest supplier in that year of falling purchases.
• What made Iranian crude attractive was not only price. Iran offered 60-day credit, free shipping and free insurance, terms no Gulf producer matched, and accepted payment partly in rupees through a designated bank — a mechanism that also financed Indian exports of rice, tea and pharmaceuticals.
• The United States withdrew from the nuclear agreement in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions.
  • India received a Significant Reduction Exception in November 2018, one of eight granted.
• The exceptions were not renewed and lapsed on 2 May 2019. Indian imports of Iranian crude went to zero and stayed there for almost seven years.
• India argued for a continued small volume — around 100,000 barrels a day paid for in rupees — and was refused.
  • The refusal is the cleanest available demonstration that India’s Iran policy is set within limits it does not draw.

Farzad-B: the field India discovered and lost

• ONGC Videsh led the consortium that signed an exploration agreement for the Farsi block in 2002 and discovered the Farzad-B gas field in 2008.
  • The Indian consortium was ONGC Videsh with 40%, Indian Oil with 40% and Oil India with 20%.
• The field holds about 21.7 trillion cubic feet of gas in place, of which roughly 60% is estimated recoverable — a discovery large enough to have changed India’s gas position had it been developed.
• Negotiations ran for more than a decade and never closed. Talks stalled on sanctions in the early 2010s, revived after the 2015 nuclear agreement towards an investment package of the order of US$5 billion, and broke down after the American withdrawal in May 2018.
• In January 2020 Iran announced it would develop the field itself, and in May 2021 signed a US$1.78 billion contract with Petropars, a domestic company.
• Both sides are at fault and the lesson runs both ways.
  • India was slow, sanctions-averse and unwilling to commit capital it might lose;
  • Iran shifted terms, disputed the commercial model and finally chose sovereignty over investment.
  • Farzad-B is the standing exhibit for the argument that this relationship under-delivers because both parties expect the other to absorb the risk.

One cargo, April 2026

• Indian Oil purchased a cargo of Iranian crude in early April 2026, the first since May 2019.
  • It was enabled by an American general licence issued during the war that waived restrictions on previously sanctioned Iranian oil already at sea.
• The buyer declined to disclose volume, price or payment mechanism; some reporting indicated settlement outside the dollar.
  • Treat the payment details as unconfirmed.
• The purchase is best read not as a policy reversal but as crisis procurement under a temporary American permission — which is to say, as further evidence of the constraint rather than of its relaxation.

Trade beyond oil, and how small it now is

• Total India-Iran merchandise trade was about US$1.68 billion in FY2024-25 — Indian exports of about US$1.24 billion and imports of about US$440 million.
  • The comparable figure for FY2019-20 was US$4.77 billion, and in the years when oil flowed the total ran well above US$13 billion.
• India runs a large surplus in what remains. Exports are basmati rice, tea, sugar, fresh fruit, pulses, meat and pharmaceuticals; imports are methanol, bitumen, liquefied propane, dried fruit and nuts.
• Iran has historically been the largest single market for Indian basmati.
  • That trade is hostage to payments: Indian exporters have repeatedly carried unpaid receivables, and shipments have been stranded at ports during each escalation.
• On 13 January 2026 the United States imposed a 25% secondary tariff on the major trading partners of Iran, naming China, Turkey, India, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Armenia.
  • Basmati shipments to Iran fell close to a standstill within days.
  • India was at the time already exposed to separate American tariff action.

The obstacles: what actually limits this relationship

The honest answer to the question of what constrains India-Iran relations is that there are seven distinct constraints, only two of which India could remove by its own decision.

Constraint	What it does	Can India change it?
American sanctions and banking channels	Ends oil purchases, blocks payments, deters investment, kills insurance	No — it is set in Washington
Iran’s own reliability	Shifting terms on Farzad-B and the railway; over-promising; slow decisions	Partly, through better-structured contracts
The China-Iran twenty-five-year agreement	Gives Iran an alternative partner with a Security Council veto and no sanctions inhibition	No
Pakistan	Iran’s Muslim-world positioning, the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, Pakistan’s 2026 mediating role	Marginally
Terrorism and the Sistan-Baluchestan border	Attacks by Jaish al-Adl, Iran-Pakistan strikes, insecurity around Chabahar	No
India’s Israel and Gulf relationships	Every Indian step towards Israel is read in Tehran as a step away	Yes, but at a price
Iranian comment on Indian Muslims	Converts a foreign policy question into a domestic one	No

The American constraint, which is the whole of the problem

• Sanctions do not merely block oil. They make banking channels unusable, so even permitted trade struggles to be paid for; they deter shipping and insurance; and they place any Indian company with American exposure at risk for dealing with Iran at all.
• The exposure is asymmetric.
  • India’s services economy is oriented to the West, its largest single trading relationship is with the United States, and its technology, defence and capital relationships all pass through jurisdictions Washington influences.
  • The Iran relationship is worth less to India than the American one, and both sides know it.
• This is why Indian policy on Iran has taken the form of preserving optionality rather than building assets — keeping Chabahar alive at minimum cost, keeping political contact warm, and waiting for a change in Washington that has not come.

Iran’s reliability, and the China alternative

• Iran signed a twenty-five-year comprehensive strategic partnership with China in March 2021, providing for Chinese investment across energy, infrastructure and transport in return for long-term discounted crude.
• Its implementation has been far less than its announcement.
  • Chinese investment has not arrived at the scale reported, and the substantial reality is the crude trade: China buys the large majority of Iran’s exported oil, much of it through intermediaries.
• For India, the significance is positional rather than commercial.
  • China is a permanent member of the Security Council, is not deterred by secondary sanctions, and has parallel investments in Gwadar, 140 kilometres from Chabahar.
  • Iranian officials weigh Indian caution against Chinese willingness, and India loses that comparison.
• Iran has also declined to give Chabahar the meaning India wants, describing it as open to all partners including China and refusing to frame it against Gwadar.

Pakistan, and a pipeline that runs the other way

• Iran’s ambition to lead the Islamic world requires it not to alienate Pakistan, which is why Iranian statements on Kashmir have generally leaned Pakistan’s way even at moments of Indian goodwill.
• The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline is the physical form of that tie.
  • Conceived in the 1990s as the Iran-Pakistan-India project, it lost India in 2009 and became bilateral.
  • Iran completed roughly 900 kilometres on its own territory; Pakistan has built almost none of its 780-kilometre section, deterred by American sanctions, and faces Iranian claims for penalties.
  • Islamabad approved a short 80-kilometre segment from the border towards Gwadar in 2024 as a token of intent.
• The pipeline is a standing reminder that Iran will build energy infrastructure to Pakistan and that only sanctions have prevented it.
• The relationship is not warm.
  • On 16 January 2024 Iran struck alleged Jaish al-Adl positions inside Pakistan’s Balochistan; Pakistan struck Baloch separatist targets inside Iran two days later.
  • India’s public reaction was notable: the Ministry of External Affairs said it understood actions taken in self-defence against terrorism — a formulation aimed at Pakistan rather than at Iran.
• Jaish al-Adl and other Sunni Baloch militant groups operate in Sistan-Baluchestan, the province Chabahar sits in, and have attacked Iranian security forces there repeatedly, including a large assault in 2024.
  • The security of India’s only foreign port operation depends on an insurgency India cannot influence.

Israel, the Gulf, and the domestic dimension

• India’s deepening relationship with Israel is read in Tehran as alignment, and the perception hardened when the Prime Minister’s visit to Israel in late February 2026 was followed within days by the American and Israeli air campaign against Iran.
  • India’s Israel policy is treated separately; what belongs here is only that it constrains what Tehran believes about Indian intentions.
• India’s relationships with the Gulf monarchies, and Saudi Arabia in particular, impose a symmetrical caution in the other direction, though the Saudi-Iran detente brokered in Beijing in March 2023 has made this constraint milder than it was.
• The Shia dimension inside India is real and mostly quiet. India’s Shia population is among the largest anywhere; large numbers of Indian pilgrims travel to Iranian and Iraqi shrine cities each year; and Iranian religious authority carries weight with a section of Indian Shia opinion.
• It becomes a foreign policy problem when Iranian leaders comment on Indian domestic matters.
  • Khamenei criticised the Indian government over the Delhi violence of February 2020, and on 16 September 2024 listed India alongside Gaza and Myanmar as a place where Muslims suffered. India’s response was unusually blunt.

“We strongly deplore the comments made regarding minorities in India by the Supreme Leader of Iran. These are misinformed and unacceptable. Countries commenting on minorities are advised to look at their own record before making any observations about others.”

— Ministry of External Affairs

The convergence that survives: Afghanistan

• India and Iran have wanted the same outcome in Afghanistan for thirty years — a government not controlled by Pakistan, and no sanctuary for Sunni jihadist groups that threaten both.
• Their tactics have differed sharply. India opposed reconciliation with the Taliban long after Iran had begun talking to them, and supported the international military presence that Iran opposed.
• Since 2021 both have converged again on engagement without recognition, and both run their Afghan policy partly through the same physical channel:
  • Indian wheat has reached Afghanistan through Chabahar with Iranian cooperation, and Iranian and Indian officials consult in regional formats on Afghan questions.
• The loss of the Chabahar exemption damages an Afghanistan policy as well as an Iran policy — which is why the two subjects cannot be entirely separated even though they are treated apart.

Iraq: the most transactional relationship India has

India’s relationship with Iraq is worth stating plainly: it is almost purely transactional, built on crude oil and on the safety of Indian workers, with very little political content in either direction. That is not a criticism. It is an accurate description of a relationship that has survived three wars, a decade of sanctions, an occupation and a jihadist insurgency without either side ever expecting much of the other beyond delivery.

• Crude is over 95% of the trade.
  • Iraq was India’s largest crude supplier from 2017 to 2022 and has since alternated with Russia at the top of the table.
  • India is the second-largest buyer of Iraqi oil after China.
• Bilateral trade was about US$33.36 billion in FY2024-25 and fell to about US$27.51 billion in FY2025-26, a decline of roughly 18% attributed to the regional conflict.
  • Indian exports are about US$3 billion — cereals, pharmaceuticals, iron and steel, machinery, tea and sugar.
• Iraq is India’s seventh-largest trading partner, and the imbalance is close to ten to one.
• About 25,000 Indians live in Iraq, in Baghdad, Basra and the Kurdistan region, and roughly 100,000 Indian pilgrims visited the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in 2025.
  • India has a consulate in Erbil, opened in 2016, and has announced one for Najaf.
• The working machinery is a Joint Commission at ministerial level, whose eighteenth session met in June 2023, plus foreign office consultations and a small technical assistance programme.

1990-91: the largest civilian airlift ever conducted

• Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 stranded more than 170,000 Indians, the largest concentration of Indian nationals ever caught in a war zone.
• India moved them overland from Kuwait through Basra and Baghdad to Amman, having negotiated Iraqi permission, and then flew them home.
  • Air India and Indian Airlines operated 488 flights between 18 August and 20 October 1990.
• The operation entered the Guinness World Records as the largest civilian evacuation by air, a record that stood for three decades.
  • It cost India dearly in other ways: the crisis contributed directly to the collapse of remittances and the foreign exchange crisis of 1991.
• India’s diplomatic position was uncomfortable.
  • Delhi’s long friendship with Baghdad made unequivocal condemnation politically awkward, and the Foreign Minister’s visit to Baghdad and meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1990 was widely criticised.
  • The episode is the origin of the modern Indian doctrine that the protection of citizens outranks political alignment.

2003: the resolution that refused a war

• The American-led invasion of March 2003 put India under sustained pressure to contribute troops to the occupation, and the request was serious: a division-sized deployment in the north was discussed in detail.
• On 8 April 2003 both Houses of Parliament adopted a unanimous resolution on Iraq.
  • It held the military action to be unacceptable, noted that it lacked the specific sanction of the United Nations Security Council, expressed anguish at civilian suffering, and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the early withdrawal of coalition forces.
  • It also recorded India’s humanitarian commitment of ₹100 crore and 50,000 tonnes of wheat through the United Nations.
• The resolution was drafted to bridge a domestic split — the government preferred “deplore” and the opposition “condemn”, and the text was settled in Hindi to leave the strength of the word open.
  • The compromise on wording did not weaken the effect.
  • An American diplomat reportedly observed that it was harder than the official position of any Arab state.
• India did not send troops. The decision was taken in July 2003 on the stated ground that only an explicit United Nations mandate could justify a deployment.
• This is a genuine set-piece of Indian foreign policy independence, and it is worth noting what made it possible: a parliamentary vehicle, a domestic consensus across parties, and an American request that carried no immediate penalty for refusal.
  • Where those three conditions are absent — as they were over the IAEA votes — India has behaved differently.

ISIS: the nurses, the workers and the four-year silence

• The fall of Mosul in June 2014 caught Indian nationals inside the Islamic State’s advance.
• Forty-six Indian nurses were trapped in a hospital in Tikrit and brought out on 4 July 2014, in an operation combining negotiation through intermediaries with a chartered flight from Erbil.
  • It was presented, fairly, as a diplomatic success.
• Thirty-nine Indian construction workers, most from Punjab and Bihar, were abducted in Mosul in June 2014.
  • One survivor escaped and reported from the outset that the rest had been executed.
  • The government maintained for nearly four years that they might be alive.
• On 20 March 2018 the External Affairs Minister told Parliament that all thirty-nine were dead, their remains recovered from a mass grave at Badush and identified by DNA.
  • This is the counter-case to the evacuation record, and any honest account of India’s protective diplomacy has to carry it: the capability is real, the candour was not.
• India’s wider position on the Islamic State was non-participation in the military coalition combined with counter-terrorism cooperation, intelligence sharing and support for Iraqi sovereignty.

Recovery, Kurdistan, and 2026

• Oil volumes recovered strongly after 2014 as Iraqi production rose, and Iraq became the anchor of India’s crude supply for the second half of the decade.
• India has handled the Kurdistan region carefully — a consulate in Erbil, commercial engagement and Indian-built power projects, without ever endorsing Kurdish political claims.
  • India did not support the 2017 independence referendum, consistent with its general aversion to secession.
• The 2026 crisis removed Iraq as a supplier almost entirely.
  • Iraqi production fell about 70% within ten days of the outbreak of war, and Iraqi supply to India fell by roughly 84%, reaching zero in March and April 2026 before recovering to around 41,000 barrels a day by May, against 200,000-300,000 barrels a day before the war.
• The collapse of the transactional relationship was total and instantaneous, which is the point: a relationship built only on delivery has nothing left when delivery stops.

Yemen, the Houthis and the Red Sea

Yemen matters to India in three separate ways: as the site of its most admired evacuation, as the source of the movement that closed the Red Sea to Indian trade, and as the case that shows most clearly how India uses naval power without joining alliances.

The war from 2015 and India’s refusal to take a side

• The Houthi movement took Sanaa in September 2014 and a Saudi-led coalition began air operations in March 2015, opening a war that has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies.
• India did not join the coalition and was not asked to in any serious way. It maintained relations with the internationally recognised government, kept quiet about the Houthis, and framed its own involvement as humanitarian.
• India’s embassy has operated from Djibouti since 2015. Indian doctors and nurses were among the very few foreign professionals who remained in Yemen through the war.
• The Indian position drew on the same instinct it applies across the region: do not choose between Riyadh and Tehran in a proxy war, protect nationals, and stay out of the politics.
  • Its cost is that India has no standing with either Yemeni party and no role in any settlement.

Operation Raahat, 2015

• Between 1 and 11 April 2015 India evacuated more than 4,640 of its own citizens and 960 nationals of 41 other countries from Yemen.
• Roughly 2,900 were flown out of Sanaa on eighteen flights and about 1,670 came out by sea from Aden and other ports,
  • carried by INS Sumitra, INS Mumbai and INS Tarkash with two chartered passenger vessels, staging through Djibouti and Muscat, with Air India and Indian Air Force C-17 aircraft completing the journey.
• The evacuation of nationals of forty-one other countries is what distinguishes this operation.
  • Among those India brought out were Americans, Britons, French, Pakistanis, Nepalis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis and citizens of several African and Arab states, in most cases at the request of their governments.
• It was conducted with the acquiescence of both belligerents — the coalition opened humanitarian windows in the air campaign and the Houthis permitted movement to the ports.
  • That access was a dividend of not having taken a side, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence for the value of India’s regional posture.

The Houthi campaign against shipping from November 2023

• The Houthis began attacking merchant shipping in the southern Red Sea and Bab-el-Mandeb in November 2023, declaring the campaign to be in support of Gaza, and rapidly extended it into the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
• Traffic through the Suez Canal fell by about half in the first months of 2024.
  • Vessels rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly 4,000 nautical miles and ten to fourteen days to the Asia-Europe voyage.
• The costs were immediate: container freight rates roughly tripled on affected routes at the peak, war-risk insurance premiums rose from about 0.3% to around 1% of hull value, and each rerouted Asia-Europe round trip consumed on the order of US$1 million in additional fuel.
• India was among the worst-affected large economies.
  • The Red Sea carries a very large share of India’s trade with Europe, North Africa and the eastern coast of the Americas.
  • Agricultural, marine and engineering exports — low-margin, time-sensitive and heavily containerised — took the sharpest damage, and the disruption complicated the case for the India-Middle East-Europe corridor at the moment it was being launched.
• Two incidents brought the campaign to Indian waters.
  • The MV Chem Pluto, a Liberian-flagged, Japanese-owned tanker with twenty Indian crew, was struck by a drone about 220 nautical miles off Porbandar on 23 December 2023 — the first attack in India’s own maritime approaches.
  • The MV Lila Norfolk was boarded by armed men in the Arabian Sea on 4 January 2024; INS Chennai intercepted it and marine commandos cleared the vessel and secured all 21 crew, 15 of them Indian.

The Indian answer: escort under a national flag

• India’s response was the largest peacetime deployment in the Indian Navy’s history.
  • At its height, around ten to twelve frontline warships — destroyers, frigates and offshore patrol vessels — operated across the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea approaches and the Arabian Sea,
  • supported by long-range maritime patrol aircraft, remotely piloted aircraft and, in January 2024, one of the largest Arabian Sea exercises the Navy had conducted, involving twin carriers.
• The Navy responded to a long series of distress calls involving hijacking, drone and missile strikes and piracy, and recaptured the hijacked MV Ruen in March 2024 in an operation more than 2,600 kilometres from the Indian coast.
• India declined to join Operation Prosperity Guardian, the American-led coalition announced in December 2023, and later stayed out of the European Union’s Operation Aspides.
  • It escorted under its own national flag, coordinating information but not command.
• The reasoning was threefold: joining an American-led coalition would have implicated India in the Israel-Hamas conflict it was trying to stay clear of; it would have damaged the Iran relationship at a moment when Chabahar still had a future; and India’s own naval capability made independent action possible.
• India made the same choice again in 2026, which is the strongest evidence that this is a doctrine and not an improvisation.

India has learned to supply the public good of maritime security without joining the coalition that supplies it — and the Red Sea is where that doctrine was written.

The two chokepoints are not the same problem

	Bab-el-Mandeb and the Red Sea, 2023-25	The Strait of Hormuz, 2026
What passes	Manufactured trade with Europe, Africa and the Americas	Crude, LNG and LPG — the fuel itself
Is there a detour?	Yes — the Cape, at a cost in time and freight	No. Nothing India buys in the Gulf can leave any other way
Who closed it	A non-state actor with limited reach	A state, using mines, missiles and navigation jamming
India’s instrument	Independent naval escort under its own flag	The same, plus rerouting, rationing and diplomacy
What it cost India	Freight, insurance and export margins	Fuel supply, prices, industrial output and political capital

The 2026 war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz

This is the defining event of India’s West Asian environment and the largest single disruption of Indian energy supply since 1990. It is being reported through wire copy while it happens, some of it contested; what follows is confined to dated facts, and says where accounts differ.

The war in dates

• 28 February 2026: coordinated American and Israeli airstrikes on Iranian nuclear, military and leadership targets — the American operation named Epic Fury, the Israeli one Roaring Lion.
  • Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes.
• 3-8 March: the Assembly of Experts meets; Mojtaba Khamenei is announced as Supreme Leader on 9 March 2026.
• 28 February – 2 March: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issues radio warnings against transit of the strait within hours of the first strikes.
  • Traffic falls about 70% immediately, and by midnight on 2 March no vessels were broadcasting position data and the strait was effectively closed.
  • The instruments were naval mines, drone and missile attacks on merchant shipping, satellite navigation jamming and spoofing, and transit fees.
• 8 April: a two-week ceasefire begins, mediated by Pakistan — the Chief of Defence Forces Asim Munir working with the American Vice-President JD Vance and the envoy Steve Witkoff.
• 7-11 June: the ceasefire collapses.
  • Iran fires ballistic missiles at Israel on 7 June, Israel strikes back on 8 June,
  • and on 10-11 June the IRGC attacks American bases across the Gulf — Al Udeid in Qatar, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, Al Dhafra in the UAE and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain — declaring the strait fully closed again.
• 14 and 17 June: the Islamabad Memorandum, a fourteen-point framework, is digitally signed on the 14th and formally signed on the 17th by President Trump remotely and President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran.
  • Pakistan led the mediation, with Qatar and Oman as co-mediators and Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt facilitating.
  • Its terms included an end to operations on all fronts including Lebanon, removal of the American naval blockade within thirty days, toll-free passage through Hormuz for sixty days, a US$300 billion reconstruction fund, phased sanctions relief,
  • an Iranian reaffirmation that it does not seek nuclear weapons, release of frozen assets, and endorsement of a final deal by a Security Council resolution.
• The Memorandum expired on 17 August 2026 with no final agreement.
  • It failed over three ambiguities: Article 5, where Trump said passage would be permanently toll-free and Iran insisted it would charge service fees on a route of its own choosing;
  • Article 1, whose text never named Israel, which continued striking Lebanon and denied being bound; and Article 6, whose reconstruction fund had no funding mechanism.
  • American strikes resumed in late June, Iran struck bases in Kuwait and Bahrain on 28 June, and on 12 July struck targets in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Omani logistics at Duqm.
• As of early September 2026 there is no settlement.
  • Iran refuses direct talks with Washington and is discussing management of the strait through Oman.
  • Hormuz traffic in August fell to single figures on some days, against roughly a hundred vessels a day before the war, and a backlog of several hundred stranded ships remains.
  • Estimates of Iranian casualties, of the state of the nuclear programme and of responsibility for particular attacks on shipping are all contested, and none is settled here.

India’s exposure, and why it was worse than the headline numbers

• Before the crisis, roughly 45% of India’s crude, about 50% of its LNG and about 90% of its LPG imports passed through the Strait of Hormuz.
  • The crude share was manageable. The LPG share was not, and it is the reason a distant war became a kitchen-table event.
• India imports around 85-88% of the crude it consumes, and the Gulf supplies the majority of it.
  • Rerouting is possible for crude because sellers exist elsewhere; it is far harder for LPG, where Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia dominate the trade and the alternative source, the United States, is a two-week voyage away.
• India’s strategic petroleum reserve covers only about nine to ten days of imports — some assessments put it as low as seven — against the International Energy Agency’s 90-day benchmark.
  • Including refinery and company stocks, total national cover is roughly 74 days; the dedicated strategic buffer that a government can actually release is a fraction of that.
  • This is the single most damaging fact about Indian energy security.
• Japan and South Korea hold over two hundred days of cover. India’s storage gap is a policy choice, deferred for a decade on the argument that oil was cheap and disruptions were short.

What India did

• Crude was rerouted at speed.
  • The share of Indian crude imports arriving from outside the Strait of Hormuz rose from about 55% to roughly 70% within weeks, with the number of source countries expanded from twenty-seven to over forty.
  • Russian barrels did most of the work under temporary American waivers: Russia’s share of Indian crude imports had fallen below 20% by January 2026 from a peak near a third, and climbed back to nearly 38% by value in April 2026.
• The Navy escorted rather than joined.
  • Operation Sankalp — the standing Gulf maritime security deployment, originally raised in 2019 — was activated to bring out stranded shipping, and evacuated five LPG carriers between 14 and 24 March 2026.
  • Operation Urja Suraksha followed from 25 March, with five or more frontline warships escorting Indian-flagged vessels west of Hormuz.
  • India again declined to join a Western escort coalition, including a Franco-British initiative proposed in April.
• India was placed on Iran’s permitted list. Selective passage began on 5 March, and on 26 March the Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi named the states whose vessels could transit.

“For some countries we consider friends, we have allowed passage through the Strait of Hormuz; we permitted China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan to pass. There is no reason to allow our enemy to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.”

— Abbas Araghchi

• Indian shipping was still hit.
  • Iran fired on two Indian vessels on 19 April and later described the shooting as unintentional after the Indian government summoned its envoy; a Liberian-flagged, India-bound ship was seized on 22 April;
  • and three Indian seafarers were killed in June 2026 when tankers were struck near the strait, over which the Ministry of External Affairs summoned the American chargé d’affaires.
  • Accounts differ on which vessels were hit and by whom, and the details should be treated as unsettled.
• Diplomatically India said very little.
  • It called for a ceasefire on the first day, spoke to Gulf leaders and to the Israeli prime minister, sent two consignments of medical aid to Iran, and condemned attacks on sovereignty without naming Iran.
  • The Foreign Secretary signed a book of condolence after Khamenei’s death without referring to the circumstances.

The shock at home

Effect	What happened
Crude price	Brent rose from about US$80 to US$120 between 2 and 9 March, passed US$100 on 8 March for the first time in four years and peaked near US$126; Dubai crude hit a record US$166 on 19 March
Cooking gas	Cylinder prices rose about ₹60 for the 14.2 kg domestic cylinder and ₹144 for the 19 kg commercial cylinder, with black-market prices reported far higher; queues formed at distributors
Rationing	Commercial LPG allocation cut to 70% of normal; additional kerosene released; hotels and restaurants permitted biomass fuel for a month; sales of induction stoves rose sharply
Industry	Gujarat’s tile and ceramic cluster suspended production for three weeks; fertiliser feedstock supply was disrupted, carrying the shock into agriculture
Macroeconomy	The rupee fell to record lows past 94 to the dollar; the current account deficit widened; the government absorbed part of the price rise through excise cuts at very large fiscal cost
Regional supply	India kept supplying its neighbours throughout — roughly 210,000 tonnes a month of fuel to Nepal, 24,000 tonnes to Bhutan, 45,000 tonnes of petroleum products to Sri Lanka and 38,000 tonnes of diesel to Bangladesh
Diaspora	About 1.1 million Indians returned from the Gulf between 28 February and the end of April 2026, with remittance income of the order of US$50 billion placed at risk

• The supply to the neighbourhood is the most creditable single fact in India’s crisis record.
  • India rationed its own consumers while continuing to fuel four neighbouring states, three of them entirely dependent on Indian refineries.
  • That is what a first responder looks like when it is under strain itself.
• A February 2026 framework with the United States included a one-year arrangement for 2.2 million tonnes of American LPG, roughly a tenth of Indian demand, which arrived as the shortage peaked.
  • American exports of LPG to India reached a record 471,000 tonnes in April 2026.

Evacuation and humanitarian diplomacy as a distinct capability

India has evacuated its citizens from war zones more often, and at greater scale, than any other developing country. It has become a recognisable instrument of policy with a name, a template and a public constituency, and it deserves to be assessed as a capability rather than celebrated as a series of gestures.

Operation	Year	Where from	Scale
Kuwait airlift	1990	Kuwait and Iraq	About 170,000 on 488 flights over nine weeks; a world record for civilian air evacuation
Operation Sukoon	2006	Lebanon	Over 2,000 by sea, including Sri Lankan and Nepali nationals
Operation Safe Homecoming	2011	Libya	About 15,400 by air and sea
Rescue from Tikrit	2014	Iraq	46 nurses, by negotiation and charter
Operation Raahat	2015	Yemen	4,640 Indians and 960 nationals of 41 countries
Operation Devi Shakti	2021	Afghanistan	Several hundred Indians and Afghan minority nationals
Operation Ganga	2022	Ukraine	About 20,000 through five European neighbours
Operation Kaveri	2023	Sudan	About 3,800 via Port Sudan and Jeddah
Operation Ajay	2023	Israel	About 1,346 on six flights, 13-22 October, including Nepali citizens
Operation Sindhu	2025	Iran and Israel	4,429 in total, of whom about 3,400 from Iran, via Armenia, Turkmenistan, Jordan and Egypt
Sankalp / Urja Suraksha	2026	The Strait of Hormuz	Vessel escort rather than passenger evacuation; over a thousand Indian seafarers repatriated

• What this record is actually evidence of: an expeditionary logistics capacity built on a state-owned airline, a blue-water navy with sustained out-of-area reach, an extensive consular network, and — decisively — political relations good enough to obtain access, with all parties.
  • Raahat required the acquiescence of both a Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis; Ganga required six European borders; Sindhu required Iranian and Israeli airspace within days of each other.
• It is also evidence of a domestic political return.
  • Evacuations are named, branded and publicised, and they convert foreign policy into visible service.
  • That is not a criticism of the operations, but it explains their prominence relative to slower instruments.
• Where the capability stops is equally clear.
  • It is reactive. It moves people out of a crisis; it does not prevent or shape the crisis, and India has had no role in ending any of the wars it has evacuated from.
  • It works for those who can be reached. The thirty-nine workers in Mosul could not be, and India’s account of them was not candid for four years.
  • It has no equivalent on the economic side. India can bring home a million workers from the Gulf but cannot replace their income, and the 2026 returns produced no comparable programme.
  • It does not substitute for influence. Evacuating nationals of forty-one countries earns goodwill; it does not earn a seat at a negotiation, as Pakistan’s mediating role in 2026 demonstrated.

Debates, critiques and assessment

Did India’s refusal to align buy it anything?

The 2026 crisis produced the sharpest available test of India’s regional posture, and it is genuinely contested.

• The case that it did.
  • India was named on Iran’s permitted list while the strait was closed to almost everyone else; Indian-flagged and India-bound cargo moved when American and Israeli-linked shipping could not;
  • Indian Oil was able to buy Iranian crude within weeks; and Indian evacuation and escort operations proceeded with the tolerance of both sides.
  • No aligned state received comparable treatment.
  • On this reading, twenty years of refusing to break with Tehran produced exactly the insurance it was meant to.
• The case that it did not.
  • India was on that list alongside Pakistan, which suggests the criterion was Iranian convenience rather than Indian goodwill.
  • India’s crude supply from Iraq still collapsed to zero, its LPG market still broke, and its citizens were still fired on.
  • Most tellingly, Pakistan — not India — mediated the ceasefire and hosted the memorandum, which is a direct statement about which South Asian state the parties to the war considered useful.
• The intermediate reading is the strongest.
  • India’s posture bought it access and supply — real goods, unevenly delivered — and did not buy it standing.
  • Access is what a state gets for being harmless; standing is what it gets for being able to change an outcome, and India was not in a position to change this one.
• The domestic political argument was fought on the same ground.
  • The opposition attacked the government for condemning attacks on American bases without naming Iran, for the timing of the Prime Minister’s visit to Israel days before the campaign began, and for silence over the deaths of Indian sailors, and read Pakistan’s mediation as a failure of Indian diplomacy.
  • This is contested political argument and is reported here as such, not as settled fact.

Non-alignment bought India cargo and not a chair; whether that is enough is the argument the 2026 crisis has left behind.

What the crisis proved about diversification

• Diversification of suppliers worked and was not sufficient.
  • India moved from twenty-seven source countries to over forty within weeks and shifted fifteen percentage points of its crude away from Hormuz.
  • That is a genuine achievement of a decade of policy.
• It did not work for the products that mattered most.
  • Crude can be bought anywhere; LPG cannot, because the trade is concentrated, the shipping is specialised and the alternative supplier is a fortnight away.
  • Diversifying the barrel while leaving the cylinder concentrated was the specific failure.
• Chokepoint concentration is a different problem from supplier concentration, and Indian policy had solved only the second.
  • A wide spread of suppliers whose cargoes all pass through one strait is not diversification.
• The reserve is the real vulnerability.
  • A buffer of nine or ten days converts any disruption longer than a fortnight into a rationing problem, which is a political problem.
  • The reserve exists to buy time for exactly the diplomacy India was trying to conduct, and it did not buy enough.
  • Expanding it, filling it and giving it a release doctrine is the one lesson of 2026 that is entirely within India’s control.
• Price shielding is not a substitute for supply security. The government absorbed a large share of the increase through duty cuts, which protected consumers, cost the exchequer heavily and postponed rather than answered the question.

The scholarly argument about Iran

• Meena Singh Roy, the standard Indian authority on Iran and Central Asia, has argued consistently that India under-invests in the Iran relationship relative to its stake in it, and that connectivity through Iran is the only credible answer to India’s exclusion from continental Eurasia.
• Kabir Taneja frames Chabahar as indispensable precisely because Central Asia is otherwise inaccessible to India — which makes its loss a strategic and not merely a commercial setback.
• Michael Kugelman takes the opposite view, that Chabahar has become a damaged asset and a losing bet, and that Indian persistence has been driven by sunk cost and symbolism.
• Talmiz Ahmad, among the most experienced Indian practitioners in the region, has argued for a more autonomous Indian posture in West Asia and against the reflex of reading the region through Washington.
• C. Raja Mohan has described India as an emerging swing state in West Asia with the capacity to shape outcomes; the 2026 record is a hard test of that claim and does not obviously support it.
• Praveen Donthi has argued that India has entered more turbulent waters after a long period in which a favourable international environment made balancing cheap.
  • That is the most useful single frame for the whole episode: India’s West Asia policy was not built for a region at war with itself, and 2026 is the first time it has had to be.
• The Iranian critique deserves to be stated in its own terms.
  • Iranian analysts hold that India cooperates with Iran mainly to balance China and Pakistan rather than for its own sake, that Chabahar is over-hyped in Indian commentary relative to what India has actually built, and that India participated in the American pressure campaign.
  • These are not unreasonable readings of the record.

Four unresolved weaknesses

• India has no instrument for a war it is not in.
  • It could evacuate, escort and buy; it could not deter, mediate or shape.
  • The gap between India’s economic weight in the region and its diplomatic weight was never wider than in 2026.
• The Iran relationship has no floor. It has been degraded twice by decisions taken elsewhere — in 2019 by the lapse of a waiver and in 2025-26 by the revocation of an exemption — and India has no mechanism that survives either.
• Iraq showed the fragility of purely transactional relationships. A supply relationship with no political content produced no political protection when supply failed.
• The maritime doctrine is sound but unaccompanied. India escorts alone and well; it has no framework agreement with regional states on maritime security, no role in any Gulf security architecture, and no voice in how the strait is eventually reopened.

Conclusion

The three crises in this account are one crisis seen from three angles. Iran is the relationship India cannot consummate because a third power forbids it; Iraq is the relationship India never invested in because oil arrived without politics; Yemen and the Red Sea are where India learned that it could act alone at sea and that acting alone at sea is not the same as counting.

• The 2026 war exposed all three at once — the Chabahar exemption gone, the Iraqi barrel gone, the strait closed, the cylinder empty, and Pakistan in the mediator’s chair.
• What India retains is real: the ability to keep its ships moving, its people safe and its neighbours fuelled while its own consumers queued.
• What it lacks is equally clear, and is not a matter of intent but of instruments — a strategic reserve worth the name, a payments channel that sanctions cannot sever, and a seat where the region’s security is decided.