New Delhi:
When three Indian seafarers were killed in attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this week, India’s response was swift but carefully calibrated: New Delhi summoned the top American diplomat not once, but twice in 48 hours.
It was a pointed signal, and India was the only country to do so through the duration of the crisis. That single act lay the essence of India’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi: principled, assertive, yet never fully in anyone’s corner.
The Middle East crisis was India’s most demanding diplomatic stress test in years. At stake were not just strategic partnerships but the livelihoods of nearly nine million Indian workers across the Gulf, billions in remittances, critical energy supply chains and India’s own carefully constructed identity as a global south leader that plays by its own rules.
The Ministry of External Affairs, throughout the weeks of military brinkmanship and missile exchanges, issued statements that were notable as much for what they didn’t say as for what they did. Every communique urged “restraint”, called for “protection of civilians”, and demanded “dialogue and diplomacy”. There was no strong condemnation of any single party.
Strategic Web India Spent A Decade Weaving
Consider the coordinates India had to simultaneously manage. In February, PM Modi visited Jerusalem and announced a Special Strategic Partnership with Israel, a landmark upgrade in ties that included a push to conclude a long-pending India-Israel Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and a deepening defence partnership. Yet within weeks, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in New Delhi for the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, where he and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar held substantive bilateral talks. Araghchi would later describe their exchanges as “frank and constructive”.
“India has always believed in dialogue,” Jaishankar has said on multiple occasions, and during the crisis he demonstrated exactly what that means: picking up the phone with counterparts across the region even as bombs fell. His visit to the UAE immediately after the ceasefire was telling: he was the first foreign minister of a major power to arrive in Abu Dhabi, signalling India’s intent to be a post-conflict stabiliser, not just a bystander. The UAE-India Defence Framework and energy agreements that followed were not accidental, they were the harvest of patient cultivation.
National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval’s quiet visit to Riyadh amid the crisis, meanwhile, kept the Saudi channel warm. PM Modi had spoken directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the hours immediately following the outbreak of full hostilities, an indication of the depth of the India-Israel relationship, while simultaneously maintaining communication with Gulf Arab leaders, whose concerns ran in the opposite direction.
The Economics Of Not Choosing
The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz sent shockwaves through global energy markets. For India, which sources a significant proportion of its crude oil through the critical marine chokepoint, the stakes were existential. It was here that India’s refusal to align with any camp paid concrete dividends: Washington, recognising India’s role as a stabilising force and a counterweight to Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean region, granted New Delhi a waiver to continue purchasing Russian oil, a concession that helped keep India’s energy bills manageable and prevented runaway inflation at home.
“India pursues a foreign policy that is in the best interests of the Indian people,” PM Modi has said repeatedly. The Hormuz crisis made that philosophy tangible and urgent.
The blockade has also delivered a lesson that New Delhi had been quietly noting since the India-Middle East-Europe Connectivity Corridor (IMEC) was announced on the sidelines of the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023: maritime choke points are vulnerabilities that India must systematically reduce. The crisis has given fresh urgency to the IMEC project, which would provide an alternative trade route linking India to Europe as invested significantly and for which the US has maintained a sanctions carve-out, and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) linking India to Russia and Central Asia
India needs Iran. India needs Israel. India needs the United States. And it has refused to let any one of them dictate the terms of how it relates to the others.
The Quad, I2U2, Art of Simultaneity
India’s Middle East balancing act does not exist in isolation; it sits inside a larger geometry of partnerships. The Quad binds India to the United States, Japan and Australia in an Indo-Pacific security framework. The I2U2, comprising India, Israel, the United States, and the UAE, is a newer grouping built around technology, infrastructure, and food security in Middle East. Both frameworks lean on the assumption that India is broadly aligned with the democratic, Western-led international order.
And yet India signed no joint condemnation of Iran. It called no party an aggressor. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited New Delhi for talks with both PM Modi and Jaishankar, the readout from the Indian side was characteristically measured: cooperation on counter-terrorism, trade and technology, with no public divergence on Middle East served up for foreign consumption.
India’s Middle East policy over the past decade has been, in the words of analysts who have watched it closely, a “paradigm shift”. Where once New Delhi defaulted to positions coloured by Cold War non-alignment or domestic political calculations, it now pursues transactional, interest-driven relationships simultaneously across the region’s fault lines.
Cost And Confidence Of Strategic Autonomy
Three Indian seafarers died in the attacks on commercial ships. India condemned those attacks unequivocally, and its summoning of the US diplomat twice in 48 hours was a rare public show of displeasure, a reminder that even close partners are held to account when Indian lives are at risk.
That combination, the assertiveness on Indian interests and the restraint on geopolitical alignment, is what strategic autonomy looks like in practice. It is not neutrality. It is the deliberate cultivation of influence through indispensability.
As the ceasefire holds and the post-crisis negotiations begin to take shape, India finds itself in a position that would have been unthinkable two decades ago: a trusted interlocutor for Washington, Jerusalem, Tehran, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi simultaneously. No other democracy can say the same.
The tightrope is difficult. But India has not fallen. And it is not done walking.
