India’s West Asian policy — a masterclass or miscalculation?

New Delhi’s diplomatic footprint in West Asia is frequently heralded as a masterclass in modern statecraft, anchored primarily by deepening partnership of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This relationship is built on what can be termed ‘portfolio politics’ — a pragmatic strategy where states construct external partnerships sector-by-sector, rather than aligning with a single political bloc.

Attracted by Abu Dhabi’s mercantilist and futurist vision, animated by a fascination with technology, speed, and a rejection of inherited conventions, India has sought to anchor its regional ambitions in a seemingly dependable, high-tech ally. Yet, building a substantial portion of regional strategy around the UAE appears to overlook the profound structural fragility of a fracturing Gulf order.

As Abu Dhabi pursues its own interests outside traditional frameworks like OPEC, its bid for strategic autonomy has locked it into a rivalry with Saudi Arabia. By tying its ambitions tightly to a UAE that seeks a more autonomous regional role, India risks building its regional strategy on the shifting sands of a Gulf consensus. This approach appears to depend on the challenging premise that economic integration can remain insulated from the region’s broader security dynamics.

The growing strain on this premise is most visible in the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), long envisioned as the centrepiece of New Delhi’s connectivity ambitions. Designed to link India to European markets via the Arabian Peninsula, the corridor is already being warped by the internal frictions of its largest Arab partners.

Far from co-operating on a seamless trade route, Saudi Arabia is increasingly exploring a bypass strategy to escape structural dependency on the Israeli-Emirati axis. Riyadh’s discomfort appears to push it toward alternative routes, signalling a readiness to spend billions rebuilding war-torn Syria if it means avoiding any reliance on Israel for key transport and trade routes. While proponents argue that IMEC can achieve resilience through deliberate redundancy by incorporating entry points in Oman and Qatar, this wartime redesign exposes a fundamental vulnerability.

A transcontinental corridor cannot easily function when its primary transit states are engaged in a fierce zero-sum competition for regional primacy, risking the transformation of an economic highway into a fragmented patchwork of competing geopolitical lanes.

The limits of India's strategy become even more apparent when looking at the region’s hard-security architecture. New Delhi has sought to leverage the UAE's unprecedented alignment with Israel — a high-tech security constellation utilising advanced defensive systems — to quietly neutralise Pakistan’s historically entrenched military role in the Gulf. However, the assumption that tech-heavy bilateral ties can completely displace Pakistan’s deeply-rooted security footprint remains increasingly difficult to sustain.

Pakistan, meanwhile, has deepened its security relevance within Riyadh's orbit under a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement, which could call upon Pakistani forces for collective defence. Furthermore, Islamabad has skilfully demonstrated its enduring regional relevance; its military leadership seized opportunities to play a pivotal role in mediating between Iran and the United States, earning widespread international praise. Since Pakistan remains an indispensable security actor, tech-heavy portfolios with the UAE are unlikely to simply erase Islamabad's systemic utility to other actors in the region.

This intense regional polarisation increasingly reverberates downward, endangering India's most tangible domestic interest in West Asia: its diaspora and the remittances they generate. While New Delhi relies on functional diversification to compartmentalise its high-tech and defence ties away from its labour flows, the compounding crises of the region are testing the absolute limits of this separation.

The real value of remittances is facing renewed fiscal pressure — driven in part by rising energy prices linked to the Iran war, which severely impacts the basic cost of living. More dangerously, direct strikes on energy production and storage facilities have shown that the lifeblood of Gulf economies can be upended overnight. When regional conflict targets the infrastructure of commerce, India’s meticulously compartmentalised discrete functional channels could increasingly collapse into a singular crisis of economic and human vulnerability.

Ultimately, does a widening crisis of political legitimacy born from its growing alignment with Israel pose the most corrosive threat to India's long-term position? Within the bubble of the Emirati partnership, joining a security constellation is viewed as a pragmatic vehicle for modernisation and sovereign deterrence. But outside of Abu Dhabi, where dependence on Israeli infrastructure is increasingly viewed as a severe political and security liability that Gulf Arab states will not absorb, this alignment faces deep structural resistance.

By anchoring its grand connectivity plans so closely to Israel, India risks seeing its economic initiatives fundamentally compromised. A visible alignment threatens to recast IMEC as a hostile alignment against Iran, an outcome that could expose the corridor to sustained pressure or attacks from Iran and aligned non-State actors. By treating West Asia merely as a collection of transactional, sector-by-sector portfolios, India’s strategy suffers from a deep conceptual flaw. The structural contradiction of pursuing economic integration through a highly polarising security alignment exposes the long-term fragility of New Delhi's ambitions, threatening to isolate India from the broader regional geography it seeks to navigate.

Bahram Kalviri is a PhD Scholar, Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)