Why India has friends everywhere, but leverage nowhere

By Mihir Sharma

For more than a decade now, India has sought to build its “strategic autonomy.” New Delhi has booked a place at every high table — the Quad with Washington, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with Beijing, BRICS with Moscow, and the I2U2 Group with Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. The national interest, we were told, required us to be close to everyone, but not too close to anyone. Officials cultivated the art of the rhetorical win, and crafted exquisite put-downs for neighbors and superpowers alike.

But what is the national interest that was being protected precisely? There are three priorities that New Delhi’s foreign policy is supposed to center. First, the safety of the vast Indian diaspora; second, that the neighborhood remain largely terror free; and third, securing oil and gas for an energy-poor but fast-growing nation. Each of these is threatened by the crisis in the Gulf — but particularly the third.

It’s now time, surely, to cash in that strategic-autonomy check. But the store of goodwill India built might prove to be inadequate.

Last week, New Delhi finally began to make a few calls. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to the Iranian president; the foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, phoned his counterpart in Tehran and announced it was “already yielding some results.” Two tankers carrying 93,000 tons of liquid petroleum gas were permitted through the contested Strait of Hormuz.

But 22 others, according to Reuters, still remain in the Gulf’s waters. Nor will anything be released on Modi’s word alone; New Delhi might have to prove it is willing to defy some US sanctions. One possible ask is that India return three Iranian ships it had seized; or provide medicines and medical equipment to Iran.

To earn trust with Tehran, it will have to burn some bridges with Washington. The Trump administration had announced that India will be permitted to buy some Russian oil to replace its lost supplies from the Middle East. Whether this indulgence will persist if New Delhi defies the sanctions regime is uncertain.

For Modi, the notion that Trump was allowing India to do anything was already politically poisonous. Now his government looks like it has to ask the Iranians for favors as well. Indians will want to know how their country appears to be negotiating from a position of weakness when all they have heard for years is stories of its strength.

New Delhi’s inability to shape the world to its needs is going to hurt. Nine million Indian citizens live and work in the Gulf; their remittances prop up foreign-exchange reserves and support welfare spending back home. Over 50,000 returned in the first week of March; but hundreds of thousands remain at risk.

Meanwhile, the security establishment has not welcomed the war’s stated aim: Regime change in Iran. From their point of view, a power vacuum west of the extremism-prone highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan would be far more dangerous than the Revolutionary Guard ever was. In addition, India’s Shiite minority has always been strongly supportive of the Indian establishment, and nobody wants that to change.

Yet nothing will ever worry India’s leaders more than energy shortages. In the past, high fuel costs have brought down governments, led to lengthy periods of unrest and authoritarianism, and — in 1991, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait — almost bankrupted the country.

Ninety percent of India’s supply of liquid petroleum gas, universally used for cooking, comes through the Strait of Hormuz. A shortage will be politically cataclysmic. Restaurants are already shutting their doors or truncating their menus; and households are being told that they will have to wait longer to replace natural-gas cylinders. The government is telling people not to panic. I’m not sure that’s working; when I tried to buy my mother in Kolkata an induction stove this week, the best-reviewed ones on Amazon had already sold out.

The longer this crisis lasts, the more dangerous it will be. Fertilizer is made using natural gas, and plants are already running at only 70% of their capacity. Less fertilizer means less food; that will drive up inflation already under pressure from fuel prices.

In other words, India needs the Strait open to its ships. But tankers will only be allowed to pass on a case-by-case basis, according to officials. That’s not special consideration: The Indonesians, Turks and Pakistanis have already achieved that much. India is not uniquely trusted by Tehran.

And why would it be? It has spent the past three years insisting it was Israel’s strategic partner — with tech transfers and military deals and, most recently, a Modi visit to Tel Aviv. From Tehran’s perspective, India is either a bad friend or a naïve one.

I’m not faulting New Delhi’s crisis management. Given the circumstances, it has done well to get some Indians out and some tankers through. Modi’s phone calls are still being picked up.

But competent management is not a foreign policy. The question that New Delhi should ask, once this crisis ends, is: What is the point of an elevated global profile if not to have an edge in moments like this? The danger is that it confused presence with influence; being at the table does not mean you shape what happens at it.

The real facts are this: India is too close to Israel for Iran to trust it enough; but not close enough to avoid the humiliation of being blindsided by a war starting hours after an official visit. The Gulf monarchies, home to millions of its citizens, cannot rely on our defense at their time of danger. The US doesn’t take India’s concerns into account before throwing its neighborhood into chaos. And it is losing crucial assets — from Chabahar port in Iran to markets for rice exports. India has friends everywhere, but leverage nowhere.

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