By Hassan Elbiali
The Silence in New Delhi
On 25 February 2026 — three days before the first U.S.-Israeli strikes hit Iranian nuclear facilities — Narendra Modi stood in the Knesset and delivered the first-ever address by an Indian prime minister to Israel’s parliament.
His words were unambiguous: “India stands with Israel, firmly, with full conviction, in this moment and beyond.” He received a standing ovation. He flew home. Operation Epic Fury launched on 28 February. What happened next: nothing.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs issued its customary call for ‘dialogue and diplomacy.’ Modi went quiet. And while the Strait of Hormuz began shutting down around the world’s single most important oil chokepoint, India’s response to the crisis it had arguably helped legitimise was: silence.
That silence is not neutral. It never was. And its consequences — for India’s energy security, its foreign policy credibility, and its claim to be a genuine great power — are now visible in ways that polite diplomatic language cannot obscure.
Silence is not strategic ambiguity. It is strategic dependence with better PR.
India imports close to 88 per cent of its crude oil requirements. Nearly two-thirds of those imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. When Operation Epic Fury triggered Iran’s closure of that waterway — effectively choking off roughly 20 per cent of global seaborne petroleum — India was not a distant observer. It was a direct casualty.
And yet New Delhi’s architects of foreign policy seem to have concluded that the correct response to watching your own energy lifeline be weaponised by your security partners was to say nothing loud enough for everyone to hear.
The Numbers India Cannot Ignore
Let us be concrete. India’s crude import requirement runs at approximately 5.5 million barrels per day. Roughly 2 million of those barrels transit Hormuz daily. Pre-conflict, around 3,000 vessels used the strait each month. By late April 2026, that figure had collapsed to approximately five per cent of normal levels. The International Energy Agency described the situation as one of the most serious potential disruptions to the global energy market in recent history.
This is not an abstraction. India’s finance ministry has issued explicit warnings that its growth forecast of 7 to 7.4 per cent for the financial year ending March 2027 faces considerable downside risk due to rising energy costs. Insurance premiums on Gulf shipping have spiked. Tanker availability has tightened. And India’s options for rapid substitution are — to put it charitably — constrained.
KEY DATA: India imports over 85% of its crude oil requirements. Nearly two-thirds transit the Strait of Hormuz. At the conflict’s peak, vessel traffic through the strait fell to approximately 5% of pre-conflict levels. India’s finance ministry projected ‘considerable downside’ risk to its 7–7.4% growth forecast for FY2027. Source: CNBC, April 2026; ORF, March 2026.
Here is where it gets worse. India’s ability to pivot away from Gulf crude depended heavily on two lifelines: Iranian discounted oil and Russian crude. Operation Epic Fury put pressure on both simultaneously. Washington’s new Hormuz counter-blockade cut off India’s first Iranian oil shipment in seven years — secured only after painstaking back-channel diplomacy. And on 11 April 2026, the U.S. waiver allowing countries to purchase Russian crude expired, creating a brief but acute squeeze. The Trump administration eventually extended the waiver to 16 May after days of uncertainty — but the episode exposed exactly how much India’s energy security now depends on Washington’s discretionary goodwill.
As Mukesh Sahdev of XAnalysts told CNBC, India is facing a mounting supply squeeze from two directions at once. That is not bad luck. That is the structural consequence of a foreign policy that deferred to Washington’s preferences without extracting meaningful concessions in return.
Strategic Autonomy, or Strategic Dependence in a Better Suit?
India’s foreign policy establishment has long presented ‘strategic autonomy’ as its defining contribution to international relations theory. The concept is elegant: maintain relationships across rival blocs, avoid entanglement in others’ conflicts, and preserve the freedom to act in India’s interests regardless of external pressure. For decades, it delivered real dividends. India bought Russian arms while pursuing U.S. technology partnerships. It maintained Chabahar Port ties with Iran while deepening defence cooperation with Israel. It abstained on Russia at the UN Security Council in 2022 without paying a serious price.
Those days appear to be over. And the uncomfortable question is whether strategic autonomy was ever more than a fair-weather doctrine.
Strategic autonomy is not declared. It is exercised — or it is not.
What happened between 2022 and 2026 is instructive. The Trump administration imposed two tranches of 25 per cent tariffs on Indian exports in mid-2025, partly in response to New Delhi’s Russian crude purchases. By October 2025, Modi had reportedly assured Trump in a phone call that India would stop buying Russian oil.
India’s defence of its own energy interests — the very core of what strategic autonomy is supposed to protect — had been traded away under American tariff pressure. When Operation Epic Fury launched, India had already spent most of its diplomatic capital on accommodation.
The result: India did not condemn the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. It did not condemn the killing of Iran’s supreme leader. It co-sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 2817 condemning Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on Gulf infrastructure.
In effect, India sided with the attacking parties while refusing to say so publicly — which is the worst of both worlds. Iran knows. The Gulf knows. The Global South knows. And New Delhi’s carefully constructed reputation for principled non-alignment now sits somewhere between embarrassing and irrelevant.
The Quad Problem Washington Created
Here is the analysis that most current commentary misses entirely. India’s silence on Operation Epic Fury does not just damage its relationship with Iran. It fractures the Quad from within — and it is Washington that created this problem by designing a security architecture that systematically treats India as a junior partner rather than a strategic equal.
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the I2U2 grouping of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor: every U.S.-led framework in which India has chosen to embed itself places New Delhi in a supporting role. India brings demographics, market size, and geographic positioning. The United States brings the decision-making authority and, apparently, the prerogative to launch major military operations in India’s most energy-sensitive region without meaningful consultation.
ORIGINAL ANALYSIS: The Quad’s stability implicitly assumes that U.S. military action in the Indo-Pacific theatre would be calibrated in consultation with partners. Operation Epic Fury demonstrates that Washington is willing to take actions with catastrophic consequences for Indian energy security without any such consultation. If this logic extends eastward — say, a military confrontation over Taiwan — New Delhi has now seen how its Quad membership would function in practice: as a liability absorber, not a decision-maker.
India’s strategic planners should sit with that for a moment. The United States launched the most consequential military operation in the Middle East since 2003, closed the world’s most important oil chokepoint, and India’s response was to issue statements asking all sides to pursue dialogue. If you cannot assert your interests when your energy security is directly under threat, the idea that you will assert them in a future Taiwan contingency borders on fantasy.
BRICS, the Global South, and the Chair That Said Nothing
There is a specific irony here that deserves attention. India currently holds the chair of BRICS. The bloc’s founding logic — representing the interests of the global majority against a Western-dominated order — demanded, at minimum, a clear statement on the sovereignty violation inherent in the U.S.-Israeli decapitation strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi spent weeks building a diplomatic response alongside Pakistan, attempting to assemble the kind of collective voice that BRICS was built to amplify.
The chair of BRICS said nothing. India is hosting Araghchi on 14 May 2026 — but only because it is chairing a BRICS foreign ministers meeting and could hardly disinvite him. One observer put it succinctly: perhaps we should now speak of the BRI(ran)CS.
This matters beyond symbolism. The Global South’s agricultural economies — Brazil, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, much of sub-Saharan Africa — are directly exposed to fertiliser and food price shocks driven by the Gulf energy disruption. India had humanitarian leverage here. It had moral standing. It had the platform of the BRICS chair to shape a multilateral response to an energy crisis affecting billions of people. It chose not to use it.
India had the platform. It had the standing. It chose the seat at the back of the room.
What Most Analysis Gets Wrong: The Chabahar Paradox
There is a detail that exposes the full incoherence of India’s current position. Iran exempted India from its Strait of Hormuz blockade. New Delhi’s investment in the Chabahar Port — Iran’s gateway to Central Asia and a decade-long Indian strategic project — apparently earned it a partial pass.
Think about what that means. India received preferential treatment from the country whose sovereignty violation it declined to condemn, whose leader was killed in strikes it refused to criticise, and whose UN condemnation resolution it co-sponsored.
Tehran’s decision to exempt India from the blockade was not generosity — it was a calculated signal that the relationship can still be preserved if India eventually decides to show up. The question is whether Modi’s government understands the opportunity it is being offered, or whether it will spend that goodwill without ever cashing the cheque.
The Chabahar paradox cuts deeper than a single exemption. India’s connectivity ambitions in Central Asia — reducing dependence on Pakistani land routes, establishing trade links through Afghanistan, accessing Eurasian markets — run entirely through Iran.
Operation Epic Fury has not ended that geography. The port is still there. The strategic rationale is still there. But India’s diplomatic standing to leverage it has been substantially depleted.
The Prognosis: Three Scenarios India Has Not Prepared For
I am genuinely uncertain how this ends. That is not false modesty — the confluence of factors here is genuinely unprecedented: a closed chokepoint, simultaneous Russian supply disruption, a weakened diplomatic hand, and a U.S. administration that has shown it will impose costs on New Delhi for energy decisions that contradict Washington’s preferences. Let me offer three scenarios that India’s planners should be modelling but, based on public statements, appear not to be.
First: the Hormuz stalemate extends beyond six months. This is not implausible given the conditional ceasefire’s fragility. Indian refinery margins collapse, the rupee comes under pressure from a widening current account deficit, and the Modi government faces domestic political costs from fuel price rises just as state election cycles intensify. At this point, the cost of having deferred to Washington rather than securing independent energy insurance becomes politically visible.
Second: Iran decides that India’s BRICS chair silence was a strategic betrayal rather than temporary accommodation, and permanently recalibrates the Chabahar relationship. China — which has been consolidating its position with Tehran throughout this crisis — is the obvious beneficiary. India’s Central Asian connectivity ambitions effectively die. The logic of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor becomes harder for New Delhi’s planners to counter.
Third: the conflict escalates into a broader Gulf-wide confrontation involving Saudi Arabian or UAE infrastructure. India’s energy exposure, already at the extreme end of vulnerability, becomes an active emergency. And New Delhi, having spent its diplomatic capital on silence, has no credible backchannel to any of the relevant parties.
SCENARIO ASSESSMENT: None of these outcomes are inevitable. But all three are plausible — and India’s current diplomatic posture makes each of them more likely, not less. Strategic autonomy is not a doctrine that functions only in peacetime.
The Structural Problem No Statement Will Fix
There is a more uncomfortable truth underneath all of this, which almost no Indian commentary is willing to state plainly: the problem is not just Modi’s silence. The problem is that India’s dependence on Hormuz-transiting Gulf crude is so structurally embedded that no single government could have solved it quickly.
India has been importing over 85 per cent of its crude requirements for decades. The political economy of energy subsidy and domestic refinery infrastructure has consistently produced short-term dependence rather than long-term resilience.
Strategic autonomy requires structural investment, not just rhetorical confidence. India has not built the strategic petroleum reserves, the renewable energy transition speed, or the supply chain diversification that would give its foreign policy real backbone in a crisis like this. The doctrine has been maintained as an aspiration without being built as a capability.
This is the lesson that Operation Epic Fury has delivered to New Delhi, at significant cost. The Strait of Hormuz is not just a shipping lane. It is the physical expression of India’s foreign policy dependency. Until that dependency is reduced — through accelerated renewable deployment, serious strategic reserves expansion, and a genuine rather than performative diversification of crude suppliers — Indian foreign policy will continue to speak loudly and carry a very small stick.
Conclusion: The Test of a Great Power
Great powers shape events. They do not merely react to them. By that standard, India’s performance during the Operation Epic Fury crisis has been, to put it gently, underwhelming. The silence at the Knesset, the silence at the UN, the silence in the BRICS chair, the silence while two simultaneous supply disruptions squeezed the Indian economy: this is not strategic autonomy. It is strategic dependence in a better suit.
India still has options. The Chabahar exemption is a signal worth reading. BRICS remains a platform worth using. The Quad’s architecture is not destiny. But exercising those options requires a willingness to say unpopular things, absorb short-term diplomatic friction, and invest in the structural energy security that makes independent foreign policy credible rather than aspirational.
The smoke is rising over Tehran. The tankers are rerouting around the world. And New Delhi has a choice: be a spectator in its own neighbourhood, or start acting like the great power it insists it is becoming.
Hassan El Biali is a political analyst and writer specialising in U.S. foreign policy, international security, and Middle East geopolitics. He has published in Independent Australia and Counterfire, and writes on Substack and Medium.