India and West Asia: The Gulf, Look West and the Regional Tangle

No region touches more Indian lives more directly than West Asia. It fuels India’s cars, employs roughly one in every four Indians living abroad, sends home the single largest slice of the world’s largest remittance inflow, and hosts the sea lanes on which Indian trade depends. It is also the most quarrelsome neighbourhood on earth. India’s problem is not that it must pick a side; it is that its partners are on opposite sides of several different quarrels at once.

West Asia in India’s map of the world

India’s official vocabulary says West Asia, not the Middle East. The choice is not cosmetic. “Middle East” is an inherited European coordinate — middle of what, east of where — while West Asia places the region where Indian policy actually locates it: on the western edge of India’s own continent, an extension of the subcontinent’s neighbourhood rather than a distant theatre.

C. Raja Mohan’s familiar description of Indian foreign policy as a set of three concentric circles puts the region precisely.

• The first circle is the immediate neighbourhood of South Asia, where India seeks primacy.
• The second circle is the extended neighbourhood — Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean rim, Central Asia and West Asia — where India seeks influence and denies dominance to hostile powers.
• The third circle is the wider world, where India seeks recognition as a major power.
• West Asia sits squarely in the second circle, which explains both the intensity of India’s material stake and the caution of its political posture: near enough to matter, far enough to be somebody else’s security responsibility.

The region’s importance to India is not a modern discovery, and three observers frame it between them.

• Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval theorist whose writing shaped a century of maritime strategy, argued that whoever controlled the Indian Ocean would control Asia, and treated the Persian Gulf as the hinge between European sea power and the Indian empire.
  • British India was governed on exactly that assumption: the Gulf residencies were run from Bombay, not London, and the Trucial States’ external relations were an Indian responsibility until 1947.
• Hamid Ansari, a career diplomat in the Arab world before he became Vice-President, has argued that West Asia’s strategic importance lies in its geography and its resources, and that the same centrality is a curse — that a region every great power must care about is a region no great power will leave alone.
• The Indian corollary is often put bluntly: West Asia is not a petrol pump for India but a strategic space, and treating it as a fuel supplier alone has been the standing error of Indian policy.

A region India cannot do without, in which India has never been willing to take a side, is the definition of a policy problem rather than a partnership.

What this account covers, and what it hands elsewhere

• India’s relationship with Israel and India’s Palestine policy are treated separately, and nothing here narrates that conflict, India’s voting record at the United Nations, or the bilateral itself.
• The India-Iran bilateral is also treated separately. The Saudi-Iran rivalry appears here only as a structural feature of the region India must navigate, not as an account of Indian policy towards Tehran.
• Iraq, Yemen, the Houthis and the Red Sea belong with the treatment of Iran and the Gulf’s crises.
• Energy appears here in its structural form — dependence, suppliers, contracts, storage, investment.
  • Disruption — sanctions, chokepoints, price shocks and rerouting — belongs with the crisis material.
• The Gulf Cooperation Council’s own institutional history is not the subject. India’s relationship with the GCC is.
• The India-United States relationship is treated in its own right; the United States enters here only as a constraint and a competitor for the region’s attention.

Why the region matters: an argued hierarchy

The standard list — energy, diaspora, trade, security — is right but unordered, and the order is the argument. Ranked by what India would lose first and could replace least easily, people come before petroleum.

Interest	Scale	How replaceable	Why it ranks where it does
People and remittances	About 9-10 million Indians; roughly US$52 billion a year	Almost impossible to relocate at scale	Loss is immediate, household-level and politically explosive
Energy	Gulf supplies the majority of Indian crude and most LNG and LPG	Partly substitutable at a price	Loss is absorbable through price, reserves and rerouting
Trade and capital	US$178.56 billion with the GCC in FY2024-25	Slowly substitutable	Large, but diversified across partners
Diplomatic flank against Pakistan	Fifty-seven Islamic Cooperation members, six Gulf capitals	Not substitutable at all	A hostile Gulf would restore Pakistan’s lost leverage
Counter-terrorism and ideology	Funding networks, extradition, radicalisation	Requires the partner’s cooperation	Cannot be secured unilaterally
Sea lanes	Hormuz, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Arabian Sea	Only at heavy cost	Slow to bite, but bites everything at once

The human interest comes first

• Roughly nine to ten million Indian nationals live and work in the six Gulf monarchies, the largest concentration of Indians anywhere outside India, and the largest expatriate community of any nationality in the Gulf — ahead of Pakistan’s roughly 4.9 million.
• They are not a diaspora in the American or British sense.
  • They are overwhelmingly temporary contract workers on employer-tied visas, without a route to citizenship, and their presence is revocable by the host state at any time.
  • That is precisely what makes the interest fragile.
• The community carries India’s soft power more effectively than any state programme.
  • Indian food, film, music, cricket, yoga and the professional reputation of Indian doctors, engineers and teachers are the everyday content of India’s image in the Gulf, and they were built by migrants rather than by ministries.
• Remittances are the measurable return.
  • India received US$135-138 billion in FY2024-25, the largest inflow received by any country in the world, and the GCC accounted for about 38% of it — roughly US$52 billion.
  • The UAE alone supplies 19.2% and Saudi Arabia about 6.7%.
• The composition has shifted, and honesty requires saying so.
  • The Reserve Bank’s remittance survey shows that advanced economies — the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada and Australia — together now supply more than half of India’s remittances, with the United States alone at 27.7%, overtaking the Gulf as a bloc.
  • The Gulf share is falling in relative terms even as it grows in absolute terms, because the newer Indian migration is skilled and westward.
• The dependence is regionally concentrated within India. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar carry most of the exposure, which converts a foreign-policy interest into a state-level economic one and gives Gulf policy a domestic constituency no other Indian relationship has.
• Protection of that community is therefore a first-order diplomatic task, discharged through labour mobility agreements, the e-Migrate registration system, the Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana insurance scheme, Indian Community Welfare Funds attached to missions, and repeated consular interventions in individual cases.

Energy is structure, not commerce

• The Gulf supplies the majority of India’s crude oil and the overwhelming share of its gas.
  • Before the 2026 crisis, about 45% of India’s crude, 50% of its LNG and 90% of its LPG moved through the Strait of Hormuz.
• Qatar alone supplies over 48% of India’s LNG imports, and the renewed Petronet-QatarEnergy contract commits 7.5 million tonnes a year for twenty years from 2028 — a lock-in that outlasts several Indian electoral cycles.
• The relationship has moved beyond buying and selling. As Sanjay Bhattacharya has observed, the partnership has evolved from a straightforward hydrocarbon transaction between buyer and seller into participation in upstream and downstream projects, joint ventures in refineries, and the building of strategic petroleum reserves.
• The clearest recent evidence is storage.
  • In May 2026 the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Limited and ADNOC agreed to expand cooperation on strategic petroleum reserves and hydrocarbon storage including LNG and LPG, with the UAE storing crude in Indian caverns — an arrangement that makes a supplier a stakeholder in Indian energy security rather than merely a vendor.
• Kuwait has been invited into the same architecture, with participation in India’s strategic reserve programme discussed during the 2024 leaders’ meeting, and Saudi Arabia has agreed in principle to two refineries in India.
• The vulnerability behind the arrangement is severe. India’s strategic petroleum reserve cover is estimated at as little as about nine to ten days of import cover from the dedicated reserve, against a total national stockholding of roughly 74 days including refinery and company stocks and the International Energy Agency’s ninety-day benchmark — a gap no volume of long-term contracts closes.

Trade, capital and the direction of the imbalance

• India-GCC trade reached US$178.56 billion in FY2024-25 — Indian exports of US$56.87 billion against imports of US$121.68 billion, a deficit near US$64 billion, and 15.42% of India’s total global trade.
• The country breakdown for that year: the UAE at US$100.06 billion, Saudi Arabia at US$41.88 billion, Qatar at US$14.15 billion, Oman at US$10.61 billion, Kuwait at US$10.22 billion and Bahrain at US$1.64 billion.
• The old comparison that West Asia is India’s largest trading region needs care.
  • India-United States trade in goods and services is now of the order of US$210 billion and India-EU goods trade was €118.4 billion in 2025, so the honest claim is that the GCC is India’s largest single trading bloc by goods volume, not that it dwarfs every other partner.
• The deficit is structural, not a policy failure. It is hydrocarbons: bilateral deficits run at about US$26.76 billion with the UAE, US$18.36 billion with Saudi Arabia and US$10.78 billion with Qatar, and no realistic export push closes a gap made of crude and gas.
• Capital is the newer flow. Cumulative GCC investment in India crossed US$31 billion by September 2025, and Gulf sovereign wealth funds — the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Mubadala, the Public Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority — have become significant investors in Indian infrastructure, ports, renewables and digital assets.
• The logic is symmetrical.
  • The Gulf states are attempting to convert finite hydrocarbon rents into permanent income under Saudi Vision 2030, the UAE’s diversification into tourism, logistics and artificial intelligence, and Qatar’s events-and-services strategy; India offers the growth market and the labour they need, and needs the capital they hold.

Pakistan, the diplomatic flank and the ideological question

• For four decades the Gulf was Pakistan’s diplomatic redoubt — a source of concessional oil, deposits to the State Bank of Pakistan, remittance income, and reliable votes.
• That advantage has narrowed sharply but has not disappeared. Gulf capitals now routinely describe cross-border terrorism in terms India recognises, and after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019 Riyadh publicly expressed understanding of India’s approach and actions in Jammu and Kashmir following the National Security Adviser’s visit.
• The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation remains the exception.
  • India was invited to the OIC’s founding conference at Rabat in 1969 and then disinvited at Pakistan’s insistence; Sushma Swaraj’s appearance as guest of honour at the OIC foreign ministers’ meeting in Abu Dhabi in March 2019 was the first Indian participation in fifty years, and it was hosted by the UAE over Pakistani objection.
  • The organisation’s collective statements on Kashmir have nevertheless continued.
• The distinction that matters is between bilateral and collective behaviour: individual Gulf states have moved decisively towards India, while the multilateral Islamic bodies they belong to have not.
• The ideological interest is separate and older.
  • The export of Salafi and Wahhabi religious funding into South Asian seminaries and charities has been a standing Indian security concern, as has the presence in Gulf jurisdictions of fugitives wanted in India.
  • The UAE has deported more than a hundred wanted persons to India, and extradition and financial-intelligence cooperation is now a routine part of the relationship.

The maritime commons

• The Arabian Sea is the busiest stretch of India’s near seas, carrying the crude and gas that come out of the Gulf and a large share of the containerised trade that goes to Europe.
• India’s navy treats the region as an operational area, not a distant one, and has conducted bilateral exercises with Saudi Arabia (Al Mohed Al Hindi), Oman (Naseem Al Bahr), Qatar (Zair-Al-Bahr) and the UAE, alongside participation in the Bahrain-headquartered Combined Maritime Forces and repeated anti-piracy deployments.
• What India does not do is join the region’s coalitions of the willing. It declined to enter American-led escort arrangements in the Gulf in 2019 and again in 2026, preferring national operations under national command — a choice that preserves independence and forgoes influence in equal measure.

How the policy got its shape

India’s West Asia policy was not designed. It accumulated — out of a civilisational inheritance, a national movement’s improvisations, a Cold War alignment, an oil shock, a migration, and finally a deliberate decision after 2014 to stop treating the region as a moral question and start treating it as a market and a security space.

Before the state: commerce, pilgrimage and the Khilafat

• The Gulf littoral and western India formed a single trading world for millennia, moving pottery, gems, grain, timber, textiles, horses and pearls across the Arabian Sea on the monsoon.
  • Indian rupees circulated as legal tender in the Gulf sheikhdoms into the 1960s.
• The traffic was cultural as much as commercial: Arabic and Persian vocabulary in Indian languages, Indo-Islamic architecture, Sufi orders, systems of music and law.
  • Hyderabad, Malabar, Gujarat and Sindh were as much part of the Indian Ocean’s Arab world as of the subcontinent.
• The Khilafat movement of 1919-24 was the moment Indian nationalism first took a position on West Asian politics.
  • Indian Muslims mobilised against the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate, and Gandhi linked the campaign to the Non-Cooperation Movement in the belief that it would fuse Hindu and Muslim political energy.
• Its significance is not that it succeeded — Atatürk abolished the caliphate himself in 1924 and the movement collapsed — but that it established a habit:
  • Indian nationalist opinion treated West Asian causes as its own, and later Indian governments inherited a domestic audience for Arab positions.

Nehru’s Arab-first policy and its logic

• Independent India’s earliest foreign-policy decisions included West Asian ones. India voted against the United Nations partition plan for Palestine on 29 November 1947, having earlier proposed a federal alternative during the special committee’s work.
• India recognised Israel on 17 September 1950 and permitted a consulate in Bombay from 1953, but withheld diplomatic relations for four decades.
  • Nehru’s formula is remembered as recognition without relations, and the observation that he tried to look “more Arab than the Arabs” has stuck because the substance behind it was real.
• The standard explanation — domestic Muslim sentiment — is weaker than it looks.
  • Ishrat Aziz, who served across the Arab world, has argued that the calculation was secular and strategic: India judged that a state founded on religion would destabilise the region and produce security problems on India’s western flank, and that unlike the United States, India has no organised lobby directing its West Asia policy.
• The competing considerations were concrete: Pakistan’s claim to Muslim solidarity, which India could only contest by out-performing it in Arab capitals; oil, which India began importing in quantity from the 1950s; and non-alignment, of which Nasser’s Egypt was a founding pillar alongside India and Yugoslavia.
• West Asia was in fact the best proving ground non-alignment ever had. India maintained working relations with Iran under the Shah and after the revolution, with the Arab republics and the Gulf monarchies, and eventually with Israel — a spread no aligned state could have held.

The 1970s: two shocks and a migration

Change	What it did to India
1973-74 oil shock	Quadrupled the import bill, triggered a balance-of-payments crisis, and made the Gulf a macroeconomic fact rather than a diplomatic one
1979 second shock	Repeated the damage and coincided with the Iranian revolution and the Soviet entry into Afghanistan
Gulf construction boom	Opened mass labour migration from Kerala and the west coast, creating the diaspora and the remittance economy
Petrodollar recycling	Gave the Gulf monarchies capital surpluses they deployed politically — including in Pakistan
1969 Rabat and after	Locked India out of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at Pakistan’s insistence

• The migration is the most consequential of these and the least planned. Nobody in New Delhi designed it; it was a private response to a wage differential, and it produced India’s largest single overseas interest as a by-product.
• The period also fixed India’s habit of political silence.
  • With workers exposed, oil supplies exposed, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation hostile, the cost of taking a position in any Arab quarrel was high and the benefit invisible.
  • Passivity became doctrine because it was cheap.

The long passivity and its critics

• Through the 1980s and 1990s India’s West Asia policy amounted to buying oil, exporting labour, voting with the Arab consensus at the United Nations, and staying out of every regional dispute — including the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese civil war and the intra-Gulf quarrels.
• Ranjit Gupta has described the resulting posture as non-interventionist, non-judgemental, non-prescriptive and non-aligned — an accurate summary that is also, read a certain way, an indictment.
• The 1991 Gulf War exposed the costs. India evacuated more than 170,000 nationals from Kuwait and Iraq in what remains one of the largest civilian airlifts ever conducted, lost the remittance income at the precise moment of its balance-of-payments crisis, and discovered that it had no political standing with any of the belligerents.
• The 1990s reorientation was economic first.
  • Liberalisation, the establishment of full relations with Israel in 1992, and the Look East policy all preceded any comparable westward initiative — which is itself the point: the Gulf was where the money already was, and therefore attracted less strategic thought than the region where the money might one day be.

Look West, Link West, and what actually changed

• The Look West policy was announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on 27 July 2005.
  • Its premise was that the Gulf belonged inside India’s economic neighbourhood on the same footing as Southeast Asia.

“The Gulf region, like South-East and South Asia, is part of our natural economic hinterland.”

— Manmohan Singh

• What Look West delivered was real but narrow: the Delhi Declaration with Saudi Arabia in 2006 during King Abdullah’s visit, the Riyadh Declaration of 2010, a framework agreement with the GCC, and a steady expansion of energy and labour ties.
  • What it did not deliver was political engagement — no Indian Prime Minister of that decade travelled widely in the region, and India took no position on any regional dispute.
• Link West is the label attached to the change after 2014, and C. Raja Mohan’s framing of it is the standard one:
  • India would stop viewing West Asia through the prism of Pakistan and through the inhibitions of domestic politics, and start treating each state as a separate relationship with its own content.
• Jaishankar, then Foreign Secretary, put the sequencing plainly in 2016: while the Act East policy was being consolidated, it was time to think West — and he has argued that Indian policy towards the region had until then been driven by markets rather than by strategic calculation.

	Look West (2005-2014)	Link West / transactional Gulf policy (2014 onwards)
Framing	Gulf as economic hinterland	Gulf as strategic partner set
Political engagement	Minimal; almost no summit travel	Continuous leader-level travel to all six monarchies
Israel and the Arabs	Treated as a single balance to be managed	De-hyphenated and pursued in parallel
Pakistan	Gulf policy shaped defensively around it	Gulf relationships built on their own terms
Instruments	Framework agreements, energy MoUs	CEPAs, investment vehicles, defence exercises, minilaterals
Institutional output	India-GCC framework, bilateral commissions	Strategic Partnership Councils, I2U2, IMEC, GCC Joint Action Plan
Weakness	Passivity mistaken for prudence	Deal-making mistaken for strategy

• The substantive change was de-hyphenation.
  • India stopped treating its Arab, Israeli and Iranian relationships as a single balance in which a gain in one had to be paid for in another, and began running them as separate accounts.
  • The evidence is that the Abu Dhabi temple, the Israeli strategic partnership and the Chabahar contract all belong to the same decade.
• The second change was density.
  • Between 2014 and 2026 an Indian Prime Minister visited the UAE repeatedly, Saudi Arabia three times, and made the first prime ministerial visits to Kuwait in forty-three years, the first ever to Bahrain, and the first to Oman in decades; the Emir of Qatar, the Saudi Crown Prince and the UAE President all travelled to India.
• What did not change is more revealing. India still has no published West Asia strategy, no white paper, no declared regional doctrine — and no willingness to take a public position on any quarrel among its partners.

The six monarchies, one by one

The Gulf Cooperation Council is treated in Indian practice as six relationships, not one. They differ in size, in what they want from India, and in what they cost India politically.

	Trade FY2024-25	Indian community	What India wants	The standing irritant
UAE	US$100.06 bn	~3.5 million	Trade, capital, logistics, political cover	Re-export leakage; hedging with Pakistan
Saudi Arabia	US$41.88 bn	~2.5 million	Crude, investment, Haj, restraint on Pakistan	The Pakistan defence pact; religious funding
Qatar	US$14.15 bn	~800,000	LNG, investment, mediation access	Alignment with Turkey; Islamist networks
Oman	US$10.61 bn	~700,000	Duqm, naval access, an Iran channel	Small economy; limited weight
Kuwait	US$10.22 bn	~1 million	Crude, sovereign investment, labour	Slow institutional pace
Bahrain	US$1.64 bn	~332,000	Naval access, financial services	Sectarian fragility; small scale

The United Arab Emirates: the anchor relationship

• The UAE is India’s most complete relationship in the region and its third-largest trading partner overall, after the United States and China.
  • Bilateral trade reached US$100.06 billion in FY2024-25 and US$101.25 billion in FY2025-26, crossing the hundred-billion mark for a second consecutive year.
• The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement is the instrument.
  • Signed on 18 February 2022 and in force from 1 May 2022, it was negotiated in eighty-eight days and was India’s first major trade agreement in a decade.
  • Its original objective was US$100 billion in non-oil trade by 2030; the partners have since reset the target to US$200 billion in total trade by 2032.
• The results are measurable rather than transformative.
  • Non-oil trade is now close to two-thirds of the total, Indian non-oil exports rose sharply in the first years of the agreement, and the Virtual Trade Corridor on the MAITRI platform has begun linking customs and port authorities digitally.
  • Against that, the deficit has widened, and gold and re-export flows have raised persistent questions about how much of the gain is genuine value addition.
• The UAE hosts the largest single Indian community in the world outside India — over three million people, roughly about a third of the country’s population — spread far beyond construction into professional services, retail, logistics and finance.
• The BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi, inaugurated on 14 February 2024 on land granted by the Emirati leadership, is the most visible symbol of that community’s standing and of a deliberate Emirati policy of religious accommodation.
  • It is soft power flowing in both directions.
• Food security has been a distinct track since 2018, when the UAE announced an intention to build a US$7 billion food corridor in India, sourcing agricultural output from Indian farms into Emirati and regional markets — the model on which the later I2U2 food-park proposal was built.
• Investment has become the newer content.
  • Following the Prime Minister’s visit of 15 May 2026, Emirati entities including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Emirates NBD and International Holding Company committed about US$5 billion to Indian infrastructure and financial institutions,
  • alongside agreements on strategic petroleum reserves and LPG supply, defence-industrial cooperation, a Cochin Shipyard-Drydocks World ship-repair facility at Vadinar, and an eight-exaflop supercomputing cluster with the Emirati artificial-intelligence firm G42.
• The UAE is also India’s political instrument in the region: it hosted the 2019 OIC meeting at which India was guest of honour, has acted as a quiet channel between India and Pakistan, and anchors both I2U2 and the eastern end of IMEC.
• The irritants are real but manageable: the UAE maintains its own working relationship with Pakistan and with Turkey, and its status as India’s re-export hub for the Middle East and North Africa creates rules-of-origin problems that Indian industry has raised repeatedly.

Saudi Arabia: the largest partner and the hardest

• Saudi Arabia is India’s second-largest Gulf partner at US$41.88 billion and among the top suppliers of Indian crude — third by value in the first quarter of 2026 at about 16% of imports, behind Iraq and Russia.
• The institutional architecture is the Strategic Partnership Council, created during the Prime Minister’s visit to Riyadh in October 2019.
  • Its second meeting was held in Jeddah on 22 April 2025, co-chaired by the Prime Minister and Mohammed bin Salman, and it now runs four ministerial committees covering political and consular affairs; economy, energy, investment and technology; defence; and tourism and culture — the last two created at that meeting.
• The relationship’s lineage runs through two declarations: the Delhi Declaration of 2006, signed during King Abdullah’s visit, which opened the strategic partnership, and the Riyadh Declaration of 2010, which deepened it.
  • Both preceded the current density of engagement.
• The investment pledge is the most-quoted and least-delivered fact in the relationship.
  • Saudi Arabia has repeatedly restated an intention to invest US$100 billion in India across refining, petrochemicals, infrastructure, mining and technology, and the two sides agreed at Jeddah to work on two refineries in India.
  • What has actually landed is far smaller: cumulative investment from all six GCC states in India stood at just over US$31 billion by September 2025, and Saudi Arabia’s share of that is a fraction.
  • The pledge should be described as a pledge.
• Haj is a permanent item of business and one no other Indian relationship contains.
  • Saudi Arabia fixed India’s 2025 quota at 175,025 pilgrims, negotiated through an annual bilateral agreement, and the management of the pilgrimage is a recurring test of the relationship’s administrative quality.
• Defence cooperation is now substantive rather than symbolic — the bilateral naval exercise Al Mohed Al Hindi, army exercise Sada Tanseeq, staff talks, and Saudi interest in Indian defence manufacturing.
• Two problems are structural and neither is solved.
  • Religious funding. Saudi financing of Salafi and Wahhabi institutions across South Asia over four decades reshaped religious education in Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India, and the security consequences outlived the funding. Riyadh’s domestic religious retrenchment under Vision 2030 has changed the direction of travel without undoing the legacy.
  • Pakistan. The relationship is older and deeper than India’s: Pakistani military personnel have served in the Kingdom for decades, and Saudi financial support has repeatedly rescued Pakistan’s balance of payments.
• The Pakistan problem sharpened dramatically in 2025.
  • On 17 September 2025, days after Israeli strikes on Doha, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement at Riyadh providing that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both.”
  • The clause is the same one that anchors NATO’s Article 5, and it was signed by a partner India had courted for a decade.
• India’s formal response was measured to the point of understatement.

“The Government was aware that this development, which formalizes a long-standing arrangement between the two countries, had been under consideration. We will study the implications of this development for our national security as well as for regional and global stability.”

— Randhir Jaiswal

• The significance for India is not that Saudi troops would fight for Pakistan.
  • It is that a formal mutual-defence clause introduces ambiguity into any future Indian counter-terrorism operation against Pakistan, and that it was signed by a partner India had spent a decade cultivating, without India being able to prevent it.

India’s Gulf partnerships have grown deep enough to matter and never deep enough to constrain what those partners do about Pakistan.

Qatar: gas, mediation and a consular crisis

• Qatar is India’s indispensable gas supplier, providing more than 48% of Indian LNG imports, and the QatarEnergy-Petronet contract signed in 2024 commits 7.5 million tonnes a year for twenty years from 2028 on renegotiated terms.
• The Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani visited India on 17-18 February 2025, when the relationship was raised to a strategic partnership.
  • Bilateral trade of about US$14 billion is to be doubled to US$28 billion by 2030;
  • Qatar announced an intention to invest US$10 billion in India and the Qatar Investment Authority is opening an office;
  • a revised double-taxation treaty was signed and both sides agreed to explore a free trade agreement and a bilateral investment treaty.
• The consular episode is the most instructive thing in the relationship. Eight Indian former naval officers working for a Doha-based defence services firm were detained in August 2022 and sentenced to death in October 2023 on charges reported as espionage.
  • The sentences were commuted to prison terms on 28 December 2023 after sustained diplomatic engagement, including a meeting between the Prime Minister and the Emir on the margins of the Dubai climate conference.
  • All eight were released and seven returned to India on 12 February 2024, with the eighth following.
  • The case shows both the reach and the limits of Indian consular diplomacy: quiet, leader-level, entirely non-public, and successful — but only because the host state chose to be persuaded.
• Qatar’s regional alignment is a complication India lives with. Doha is close to Turkey, has hosted Islamist political leaderships, and mediates with actors India has no relationship with — which is precisely why the channel is valuable.

Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain

• Kuwait received the first Indian prime ministerial visit in forty-three years on 21-22 December 2024, when relations were elevated to a strategic partnership.
  • A defence cooperation memorandum was signed covering joint exercises, training, coastal defence and equipment development, alongside a cultural exchange programme and Kuwait’s accession to the International Solar Alliance.
  • Both sides agreed to move the energy relationship from a buyer-seller transaction to upstream and downstream partnership, including possible Kuwaiti participation in India’s strategic petroleum reserve.
• Kuwait holds a particular place in Indian memory as the site of the 1990-91 airlift, and hosts roughly a million Indians, the largest expatriate community in the country.
  • India took no position on the intra-Gulf quarrel that isolated Qatar between 2017 and 2021, which Kuwait mediated, and traded normally with every party throughout.
• Oman is India’s oldest strategic relationship in the Gulf and its most quietly useful.
  • It is the only Gulf state with which India has a formal defence framework of long standing, and Indian warships and aircraft have access to Duqm, on the Arabian Sea coast outside the Strait of Hormuz — a fact whose value was demonstrated in 2026.
• The India-Oman Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement was signed at Muscat on 18 December 2025 and entered into force on 1 June 2026.
  • Oman granted duty-free access on 98.08% of its tariff lines covering 99.38% of Indian export value; India reduced duties on about 77.79% of tariff lines covering 94.81% of import value.
  • Bilateral trade rose from US$10.61 billion in FY2024-25 to US$11.18 billion in FY2025-26.
• Oman’s other value is diplomatic. It maintains working relations with Iran, mediated the Islamabad process in 2026, and is the Gulf’s standing back channel — which makes it disproportionately useful to a country that refuses to take sides.
• Bahrain is the smallest relationship and the most naval.
  • Trade is only US$1.64 billion, but around 332,000 Indians live there, roughly a quarter of the population;
  • India participates in the Combined Maritime Forces headquartered in Manama alongside the American Fifth Fleet, and the fifth High Joint Commission met in New Delhi on 6 November 2025, agreeing to explore a comprehensive economic agreement and a double-taxation treaty and condemning the Pahalgam attack.

The regional tangle: why West Asia is not a single contest

The mistake most often made about West Asia is to look for the axis — Sunni against Shia, Arab against Persian, monarchy against republic, America’s friends against America’s enemies — and to sort every actor onto one side of it. No single axis survives contact with the region’s actual behaviour. The rivalries are real, but they cut across one another, and states that are adversaries in one quarrel are partners in the next.

The cross-cutting map

Fault line	Who is on which side	Where it breaks down
Saudi Arabia vs Iran	Riyadh and most of the GCC against Tehran	Qatar and Oman keep working relations with Iran; Beijing brokered a detente in 2023
Sunni vs Shia	Presented as the master cleavage	Sunni Turkey and Qatar back movements Sunni Saudi Arabia and the UAE suppress; Sunni Hamas was long funded from Shia Iran
Political Islam vs the monarchies	Turkey and Qatar against Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt	Cut clean through the GCC in the 2017-21 Qatar blockade
Normalisation with Israel	UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, Kazakhstan	Saudi Arabia has not normalised; Syria’s leadership says it will not
Alignment with the United States	All six monarchies host or depend on American forces	All six also deepened ties with China and refused to isolate Russia
Turkey and Pakistan	Ankara and Islamabad against Indian interests	Turkey is simultaneously a NATO member and a Saudi defence partner since 2026

• The practical consequence for India is that there is no side to join. Every available alignment would cost India a relationship it needs, and the states India is closest to — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Iran — are ranged against each other in different combinations depending on which quarrel is in play.
• This is what makes multi-alignment in West Asia different from multi-alignment elsewhere.
  • In the Indo-Pacific, India’s partners broadly share an adversary.
  • In West Asia, India’s partners are each other’s adversaries, and the balancing act is not between India and a great power but among India’s own friends.

India’s West Asia policy works not because India has chosen well, but because it has refused to choose at all — and the region has so far allowed it.

Saudi Arabia and Iran: structure, not bilateral

• The rivalry is the region’s organising conflict — a contest over regional primacy, over the legitimacy of clerical versus monarchical rule, and over the loyalties of Shia populations in Iraq, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
  • It has been fought through proxies rather than directly.
• The Beijing agreement of 10 March 2023 restored diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran after a seven-year rupture, with China as the visible broker.
  • It reopened embassies and lowered the temperature; it did not resolve the underlying competition, and its principal significance was the demonstration that Beijing could convene what Washington could not.
• The detente held through the 2026 war in a limited but consequential way: the Gulf monarchies declined to serve as launch platforms against Iran even while hosting the American bases Iran struck, which is the clearest evidence that Riyadh now treats accommodation with Tehran as insurance rather than betrayal.
• India’s own relationship with Iran — Chabahar, energy, sanctions, connectivity — is a separate subject and is treated as one.
  • What belongs here is only the fact that India must keep it alive without alarming Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and has so far succeeded because the Gulf states are themselves hedging.

The second pole: Turkey and Qatar

• Turkey and Qatar form the region’s alternative centre, built on support for political Islam, a shared discomfort with the Emirati-Saudi order, and Turkish military basing in Qatar.
• For India, Turkey is the single most hostile significant actor in the wider region.
  • Ankara has consistently raised Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly, cultivates Pakistan as its principal Islamic-world partner, and supplied the drones Pakistan used against India in May 2025.
• The Indian response has been economic and administrative rather than declaratory: security clearance for the Turkish ground-handling firm Celebi was revoked in May 2025, Indian universities suspended academic memoranda with Turkish institutions, and a broad consumer and travel boycott followed.
• The Turkey problem became a Gulf problem in 2026.
  • On 7 August 2026, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, extending the collective-defence language of the 2025 Saudi-Pakistan pact to a third party — with Riyadh insisting it was directed at no country and unconnected to nuclear ambitions, and Ankara describing it as collective deterrence.
• That single agreement contains the whole argument of the tangle: it binds a state India courts (Saudi Arabia) to a state India confronts (Pakistan) and a state India is estranged from (Turkey), and it was signed while India-Saudi trade stood near US$42 billion.
  • Economic depth did not buy strategic alignment.

The third pole: Israel and the normalisation order

• The Abraham Accords, signed on 15 September 2020 by the UAE and Bahrain and joined later that year by Sudan and Morocco, created a bloc of Arab states in open security and economic relations with Israel.
  • Kazakhstan joined in 2025, the first addition in five years and the first from Central Asia.
• The order the Accords implied has not been completed.
  • Saudi Arabia has not normalised, both Riyadh and Damascus are described as under discussion, and Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa has said publicly that Syria will not join.
  • Saudi normalisation should not be described as close.
• India was a quiet beneficiary rather than a participant. The Accords removed the requirement that India choose between Israel and the Arab states, and made possible groupings — I2U2 above all — that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.
• The Gaza war since October 2023 froze the process and strained the relationships the Accords had built.
  • India’s own position on Israel and Palestine is treated separately.

Yemen, Syria and Egypt

• Yemen is the rivalry’s most destructive proxy theatre, and the Houthi movement’s attacks on Red Sea shipping from November 2023 turned an internal war into a global trade problem.
  • The maritime and humanitarian consequences for India are treated with the Gulf’s crises, not here.
• Syria after Assad is a genuinely open question.
  • The government fell in December 2024 and Ahmed al-Sharaa heads the successor administration.
  • India’s engagement is thin and deliberately unhurried — a senior Ministry of External Affairs official visited Damascus in 2025, scholarships and cultural exchanges have been announced, and India has neither obstructed nor embraced the new order.
• The Indian logic in Syria is the same one applied to the Taliban: engage whoever holds power, protect concrete interests, avoid endorsement.
  • Reconstruction contracts, counter-terrorism cooperation and Syria’s vote in Islamic forums are the interests in view.
• Egypt is India’s oldest partner in the region and its most under-used.
  • The two were co-founders of non-alignment; President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was chief guest at India’s Republic Day in 2023, when relations were raised to a strategic partnership, and India has since run a first strategic dialogue with Cairo and expanded defence and wheat trade.
  • Egypt’s value is that it controls Suez and sits outside every Gulf quarrel.

India inside the new architecture: I2U2, IMEC and the GCC agreement

The decade after 2020 produced three attempts to give India an institutional place in West Asia rather than a set of bilateral files. All three are real; none is finished; and the gap between announcement and delivery is the honest subject.

I2U2 and the “West Asia Quad”

• I2U2 brings together India, Israel, the UAE and the United States.
  • It was formed at foreign-minister level in October 2021 and held its first leaders’ summit virtually on 14 July 2022.
  • The name is an initialism — two countries beginning with I, two with U — and the press label “West Asia Quad” was borrowed from the Indo-Pacific grouping.
• The borrowed name is misleading and the difference is the point.
  • The Indo-Pacific Quad is a security arrangement among four democracies facing a shared adversary.
  • I2U2 has no security mandate, no adversary named in its documents, and no secretariat.
  • It was conceived as an investment platform pairing Emirati capital, Israeli technology, American finance and Indian scale and markets.
• Its announced projects were two. A US$2 billion programme of integrated food parks across India, with Emirati investment and American and Israeli technology, and a 300 MW hybrid wind-and-solar project in Gujarat with a battery storage component, again with UAE investment.
• Delivery has been thin and the grouping has been largely dormant since the Gaza war.
  • No leaders’ summit has followed the 2022 meeting, the food-park programme has not produced operating capacity at anything like the announced scale, and the Israeli leg of the grouping became politically difficult for Arab participation after October 2023.
  • It should be described in the past tense of its achievements and the conditional tense of its prospects.
• What I2U2 nevertheless demonstrated is significant: that India could sit in a formal grouping with Israel and an Arab state simultaneously, which is the practical proof of de-hyphenation and the reason the format matters more than its output.

IMEC: the corridor that has not been built

• The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor was announced on the margins of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023.
  • The memorandum’s parties are India, the United States, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, France, Germany and Italy, with Israel and Jordan as transit territories.
• It has two segments.
  • The eastern corridor runs by sea from Indian west-coast ports to the Gulf;
  • the northern corridor runs by rail across the Arabian peninsula and the Levant to a Mediterranean port and thence to Europe.
  • Alongside the freight route the memorandum envisages an electricity interconnector, a hydrogen pipeline and a data cable.
• Its strategic purpose is plain: an alternative to the Suez route, a counter to the Belt and Road, and a physical stake for India in the Gulf’s post-oil economy.
• As of mid-2026 there are no firm funding commitments and no construction timelines. The obstacles are specific and costed.

Obstacle	The number
UAE-Saudi rail gap	269 km, costed near US$2 billion, uncommitted
Jordan cross-border link	US$2.09-2.5 billion; Jordan has signed nothing formal
Haifa port capacity	1.5 million TEU a year, about a tenth of Jebel Ali
GCC Railway	Pushed to 2030, interoperability unresolved
Political precondition	Saudi-Israeli normalisation, which has not happened

• Who is outside the corridor is itself an argument. Qatar, Oman, Turkey, Iraq and Iran are all excluded, which means the route is only as stable as the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli alignment it assumes, and it gives the excluded states no stake in its success.
• Two wars have gone through it. The Gaza conflict from October 2023 stalled the normalisation precondition and strained Israel’s relations with Jordan and the Gulf; the 2026 closure of the Strait of Hormuz undermined the premise that Gulf logistics are a safer bet than Suez.
• The honest verdict is that IMEC is a declaration of intent with a map attached.
  • India continues to affirm it at every summit; there is no project plan, no financing vehicle and no agreed timetable.
  • Its value so far has been diplomatic — it gave India a seat at the table where Eurasian connectivity is discussed — rather than logistical.

[Suggested image: the two IMEC corridors, with the uncommitted rail gaps marked]

The India-GCC free trade agreement

• India and the GCC have been trying to negotiate a trade agreement since 2004.
  • Two rounds were held in 2006 and 2008 and then lapsed for fifteen years, largely because the GCC suspended all external FTA negotiations while reviewing its own trade policy.
• The institutional relationship was rebuilt first.
  • A memorandum on a consultation mechanism was signed on 10 September 2022;
  • the first senior officials’ meeting was held in Riyadh in March 2023;
  • and the first India-GCC Joint Ministerial Meeting for Strategic Dialogue took place in Riyadh on 9 September 2024, adopting a Joint Action Plan for 2024-2028 covering health, trade, security, agriculture and food security, transport, energy and culture.
• The trade negotiation itself was relaunched in 2026.
  • Terms of Reference were signed in New Delhi on 5 February 2026 and a joint statement launching negotiations followed on 24 February 2026.
  • The first formal negotiating round, originally set for mid-2026, was pushed into the second half of the year because of the regional crisis.
• The sticking points are known and none is trivial.
  • The energy-driven imbalance, which no tariff schedule can correct and which makes reciprocal concessions hard to price.
  • Labour mobility — the interest India most wants covered, across six different visa and credentialing regimes.
  • Agriculture, petrochemicals and services, the same sensitivities that killed the 2006-08 rounds.
  • GCC internal coordination, since six states with different tariff structures must agree a position before negotiating with India.
  • Saudi Arabia’s original preference for concluding a bilateral investment treaty before the regional agreement, a linkage India succeeded in separating.
• India’s parallel bilateral track is the more productive one.
  • The UAE CEPA and the Oman CEPA are in force; a Qatar agreement is under discussion.
  • The bloc-level agreement matters mainly for the states with which India has no bilateral instrument, and for the political signal of treating the GCC as a single partner.

The Arab uprisings and whether they altered the power scenario

The wave that began with a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation in December 2010 was read at the time as a revolution in the Arab political order. Fifteen years on, the more accurate reading is that the uprisings destroyed several states without displacing the region’s centres of power. Regimes fell where the state was weak; where the state was rich, the state bought its way out.

What changed and what did not

Country	What happened	Where power sits now
Tunisia	Ben Ali fled January 2011; the only durable transition to elected government	Democratic gains substantially reversed since 2021
Egypt	Mubarak resigned February 2011; Morsi elected 2012 and removed by the army in July 2013	Military rule restored under Sisi, with Gulf financing
Libya	Gaddafi overthrown and killed in 2011 after NATO intervention	State collapse, rival governments, foreign proxies
Syria	Protests from March 2011 became a civil war	Assad survived thirteen years and fell only in December 2024, to armed opposition, not to the street
Yemen	Saleh stepped down in 2012 under a Gulf-brokered deal	Civil war and Houthi control of the north
Bahrain	Mass protests in February 2011	Suppressed with GCC Peninsula Shield forces; monarchy intact
Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Morocco	Limited or no unrest	All monarchies survived; several strengthened

• The single strongest generalisation is that no Arab monarchy fell. Every regime displaced was a republic with a military-security elite and without hydrocarbon rents sufficient to buy off dissent — which suggests the variable was fiscal capacity and dynastic legitimacy rather than popular demand.
• The Gulf response was counter-revolutionary and deliberate.
  • Saudi Arabia announced enormous domestic spending packages;
  • the GCC created a US$20 billion development fund for Bahrain and Oman;
  • Saudi troops entered Bahrain in March 2011; Jordan and Morocco were invited to join the GCC, an offer whose logic was monarchical solidarity rather than geography;
  • and after 2013 the Gulf states financed the restoration of military government in Egypt.
• The second-order effect was to split the Gulf itself.
  • Qatar and Turkey backed the Muslim Brotherhood-linked movements the uprisings brought forward; Saudi Arabia and the UAE regarded them as an existential threat.
  • That disagreement produced the 2017-21 blockade of Qatar and remains the region’s most durable intra-Sunni fracture.
• The third-order effect was the collapse of state authority in four countries, which created the space in which the Islamic State, the Houthis and a generation of militias grew — and which converted a political upheaval into a security problem for everyone who trades through the region.
• The verdict the question invites is therefore a qualified negative.
  • The uprisings radically altered the internal politics of a handful of republics and destroyed several of them as functioning states;
  • they did not alter the regional distribution of power, which remained with the Gulf monarchies and, in the wider balance, with Iran, Turkey and Israel.

What the uprisings meant for India

• The immediate cost was to Indians, not to Indian policy.
  • Operation Safe Homecoming, run between 26 February and 11 March 2011, evacuated more than 15,000 Indians from Libya using naval vessels including INS Mysore, INS Aditya and INS Jalashwa, Air India and Air Force aircraft, and chartered passenger ships, staging through Egypt, Tunisia and Malta.
• The Yemeni collapse produced the second contraction, and the 2015 evacuation from Yemen became India’s set-piece example of humanitarian rescue — an operation treated in detail alongside the Gulf’s crises.
• The energy effect was immediate. Libyan supply disappeared, Brent moved above US$100 and stayed there for three years, and the Indian import bill and current-account deficit widened at a difficult moment.
• India was on the Security Council when the intervention was authorised, and abstained.
  • Resolution 1973 of 17 March 2011, which authorised a no-fly zone and “all necessary measures” over Libya, passed with ten votes in favour and five abstentions including India, alongside Brazil, Germany, China and Russia.
  • India’s stated objection was to acting without adequate information and to the risk of regime change under a civilian-protection mandate — a position vindicated by events and rarely credited.
• The durable lesson India drew was procedural rather than moral: deal with whoever holds power.
  • India worked with the Egyptian military council, then with Morsi’s government, then with Sisi’s;
  • it kept its embassy in Damascus open throughout the Syrian war and engaged the successor government after Assad fell;
  • and it took no position on the legitimacy of any of them.
• That consistency is defensible and has a cost. It preserved every relationship and produced no influence over any outcome, and it left India with no constituency in any of the region’s societies beyond its own workers.

China as the competitive pressure

• China is now the Gulf’s largest economic partner and India’s principal competitor for its attention.
  • GCC imports from China have roughly tripled since 2008 while American exports to the region flattened after 2012, and China is the largest buyer of Saudi, Emirati and Iraqi crude.
• The competition is not symmetrical.
  • Chinese firms supplied close to 80% of GCC 5G base-station infrastructure between 2018 and 2023 and about 14% of GCC automobile imports by value in 2021-24, and Chinese construction and port investment across the region far exceeds India’s.
  • India cannot match that scale and should not try to.
• China’s political reach grew with the Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran restoration in March 2023, the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum summit of December 2022, and a long-running China-GCC free trade negotiation.
  • Beijing’s advantage is that it has no historical entanglements in the region and no alliance obligations to constrain it.
• China’s limitation is precisely the same thing. It has shown little appetite for the region’s security problems, maintains no permanent regional military presence beyond Djibouti, and provided no protection to Gulf states when they were struck in 2026.
• India’s competitive assets are different in kind: nine million residents, cultural familiarity, a democratic system Gulf publics do not fear, capability in pharmaceuticals, digital public infrastructure and skilled services, and a naval presence the Gulf states can accept because it threatens nobody.
  • The comparison India should draw is on trust and complementarity, not volume.

What the 2026 war did to India’s Gulf position

The war that began on 28 February 2026 is narrated with the crisis in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. What belongs here is only what it did to the Gulf monarchies, to India’s people in them, and to the assumptions Indian policy rested on.

• The Gulf states were struck on their own soil.
  • On 10-11 June 2026 Iranian forces attacked American bases across the peninsula — Al Udeid in Qatar, Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, Al Dhafra in the UAE and the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain — and a further round on 12 July 2026 hit targets in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and logistics facilities at Duqm in Oman.
• Gulf energy production stopped or was cut.
  • Qatar halted gas production on 2 March and declared force majeure on 4 March; Kuwait declared force majeure on 7 March;
  • Saudi Arabia cut output by a fifth on 13 March, from ten million to eight million barrels a day.
  • Regional output was down around ten million barrels a day by mid-March.
• The consequence for India’s diaspora was immediate and large.
  • About 1.1 million Indians — workers, travellers and residents — returned home between 28 February and the end of April 2026.
  • Construction projects were suspended, one Saudi contractor laid off some six hundred Indian workers, and roughly US$50 billion of annual remittance income was placed at risk.
  • The Ministry of External Affairs ran a control room and twenty-four-hour helplines and arranged commercial and non-scheduled return flights.
• The Gulf economies contracted sharply, with regional growth projected to fall to around 1.3% in 2026 from 4.4% in 2025 — which transmits into Indian employment, remittances and export demand with a lag.
• The most important political revelation was the Gulf’s own security dependence.
  • The monarchies host American forces and could not prevent being struck; they refused to be used as launch platforms;
  • and they responded by diversifying their security relationships rather than deepening the American one — the Mecca agreement of August 2026 being the clearest instance, alongside deeper European and British defence arrangements.
• For India the reading is uncomfortable.
  • The region on which nine million Indians depend has no security architecture that includes India, and the architecture now forming includes Pakistan and Turkey.
  • India’s largest human interest sits inside somebody else’s alliance system.

India has spent a decade building economic depth in the Gulf and has no seat at the table where the Gulf’s security is now being renegotiated.

Debates, critiques and scholarly assessment

• The oldest debate is between prudence and profile, and both sides are serious.
  • Girijesh Pant has argued that West Asia is not a place for the display of Indian power but a place for the augmentation of it — that India should extract capability from the region rather than expend it there.
  • Ranjit Gupta has held that policy should rest on a mature recognition of the limits of Indian capability, that passivity is appropriate in a volatile environment, and that where speech is silver, silence is golden.
  • Chinmaya Gharekhan has argued the contrary case: that India should abandon the passive approach and raise its diplomatic profile in a region where it has more at stake than most external powers.
  • Jaishankar has argued that India’s foreign policy must change with its changed status — that India should be a leading power rather than a balancing power, and that a “think West” must match an “act East”.
• C. Raja Mohan has argued that after many false starts India is emerging as a swing state in the region, with the capacity to shape outcomes on issues where no other actor is trusted by all sides — a claim that is a prediction rather than a description.
• Talmiz Ahmad, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Oman, has argued that the region is at war with itself along multiple simultaneous fault lines, and that external powers pursuing narrow transactional gains have consistently deepened those fault lines rather than stabilised them.
• Kabir Taneja has argued that India’s coordinating mechanisms with the region are effectively directionless and need revitalisation without delay if India is to shape the emerging multipolar arrangement rather than react to it — noting that the Gulf states hedge while remaining tied to American security guarantees, a constraint India does not face.
• Meena Singh Roy has argued that Indian policy has been strong on bilateral management and weak on regional strategy, and that India needs an integrated approach to a region it currently handles as a set of unconnected files.
• Nicolas Blarel’s framing of India’s policy as a recalibration rather than a reversal is the most useful description of what happened after 2014: the elements — culture, commerce, colonial inheritance, multiple simultaneous engagements — were all present before; what changed was their weighting and the removal of the Pakistan prism.

Four unresolved weaknesses

• India is a security consumer, not a security provider.
  • It buys its energy through a strait somebody else polices, its citizens are protected by host governments, and its naval presence is welcome precisely because it is too small to matter.
  • The Gulf’s talk of India as a net security provider outruns anything India has offered or been asked to do.
• There is no formal regional policy. India has no published West Asia doctrine, no regional strategy document, and no dedicated institutional structure comparable to its Indo-Pacific machinery — which means policy is made bilaterally, reactively and at leader level.
• Transactional diplomacy has a ceiling.
  • Trade near US$180 billion, four strategic partnerships and two trade agreements did not prevent a Saudi-Pakistan mutual-defence pact or a Saudi-Turkey-Pakistan agreement.
  • Economic interdependence buys access; it does not buy alignment.
• Domestic politics is now a variable in the relationship.
  • Gulf states monitor Indian communal politics closely; episodes of anti-Muslim rhetoric have drawn official protests from Gulf capitals and trade boycott campaigns, and the Indian community’s vulnerability in a region of employer-tied visas makes the cost real.
  • This is the one area where India’s internal conduct directly prices its external position.

Where the relationship can still be built

• Health and pharmaceuticals, where Indian generic manufacturing and Gulf health-system spending are naturally complementary and where the pandemic demonstrated the fit.
• Higher education in both directions — attracting Gulf students to Indian institutions, and the Indian campuses now operating in the region, including IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi and IIM Ahmedabad in Dubai.
• Defence manufacturing rather than defence purchase — co-production, maintenance and repair, and shipbuilding, of which the Cochin Shipyard-Drydocks World facility is the first real instance.
• Space, artificial intelligence, cyber security and data infrastructure, where the Saudi and Emirati space agencies, sovereign compute investments and Indian technical capacity intersect.
• Food security, the most obvious complementarity of all: the Gulf imports nearly all of its food and India is a surplus producer with an interest in stable, contracted demand.
• Labour mobility as a negotiated right rather than a tolerated flow — skills recognition, portable social security, grievance mechanisms and structured migration agreements, which is where the GCC trade negotiation could deliver most and is likeliest to deliver least.

Conclusion

India’s West Asia policy is best understood as an unusually successful piece of risk management that has not yet become a strategy. Every relationship is intact, the economics have deepened beyond recognition since 2014, and India has done what no other external power has managed — kept working ties with every side of every quarrel at once.

• But the region’s security is being rearranged without India in the room, its partners have just written each other’s adversaries into their defence commitments, and India’s nine million citizens there remain guests.
• The next stage of the policy will be judged not by how many partnerships India can hold simultaneously, but by whether it can convert them into influence when one of them turns against another.