In early March, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean. The ship, a frigate called the IRIS Dena, had been docked at an Indian port just days earlier – an invited guest at India’s flagship multinational naval exercise. It had participated in a ceremonial parade attended by India’s president, Droupadi Murmu.
After the U.S. sank it on the way home, India’s sole public response focused on “humanitarian search-and-rescue.”
Days earlier, on Feb. 26, Modi had visited Israel, addressing the Knesset and embracing Prime Minister Netanyahu in a highly publicized state visit. Two days after that, U.S. and Israeli warplanes struck military installations in southeastern Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury – the ongoing bombing campaign.
Among the targets were facilities in the immediate vicinity of a port that India had spent a decade and $120 million building. The port was India’s only trade route to Central Asia which doesn’t pass through Pakistan. Under American sanctions pressure, India had already quietly surrendered it, zeroing out the budget and informing the U.S. Treasury it would “wind down all activities.”
Then the U.S. bombed the area anyway.
India condemned none of it – not the strikes on Iran, not the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, not even the bombing of facilities adjacent to its own investment. With no mention of the circumstances of Khamenei’s death, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri signed a condolence book.
Meanwhile, on April 26, the last U.S. sanctions waiver covering that port expires. India has made no move to renew its operations. A decade of strategic investment – obliterated without objection.
In the space of a week, the world’s largest democracy, a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, a nuclear power of 1.4 billion people, watched the United States sink its guest’s warship and bomb its own investment. Yet not a peep of protest.
From Non-Alignment to “Natural Ally”
India was not always so compliant. For decades after independence in 1947, its foreign policy was grounded in the principle of non-alignment. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, helped found the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 alongside Egypt’s Nasser and Yugoslavia’s Tito – explicitly as a rejection of the Cold War blocs and the imperial systems behind them.
“Non-alignment seems to me as the natural consequence of an independent nation functioning according to its own rights,” Nehru said in 1957. “Alignment means being regimented to do something you do not like and thereby giving up certain measures of independent judgement and thinking.”
For decades, India acted accordingly. It bought oil from whoever sold it, built relationships with whoever served its interests, and refused to subordinate its foreign policy to Washington or Moscow. As late as the 2000s, India was buying Iranian oil, developing an Iranian gas field, building a port in Iran, and maintaining deep defense ties with Russia – all while deepening its relationship with the United States.
India managed to do business with everyone.
That changed when Narendra Modi took power in 2014. At a summit with President Obama in Washington held within three months of assuming office, Modi called the U.S. a “natural ally,” language no prior Indian prime minister had used. In 2016, he became the first Indian leader since 1979 to skip the Non-Aligned Movement summit. By 2019, his foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, declared that “India has moved on from its non-aligned past.”
Modi’s domestic brand is built on Indian self-reliance – “Make in India,” the vision of a rising civilizational power. Yet his foreign policy record tells a story of increasingly choosing sycophantic submission to Washington. Under Modi, India stopped buying Iranian oil because Washington told it to, abandoned its own port because Washington pressured it to, reduced its Russian oil purchases under threat of 50 percent tariffs, lobbied Congress for four years for permission to operate a weapons system Washington opposed, and said nothing when the U.S. sank a warship that had been India’s guest days earlier.
“Modi has turned India’s foreign policy into a personal foreign policy,” India’s opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, told reporters.
Nehru stood up to both superpowers with a fraction of India’s current resources. Modi, presiding over the fifth-largest economy on earth, issues no statements.
The Systematic Surrender on Energy
On April 3, a U.S.-sanctioned tanker called the Ping Shun – carrying 600,000 barrels of Iranian crude loaded at Iran’s Kharg Island, headed for the Indian port of Vadinar – was diverted to China mid-voyage. It would have been India’s first Iranian oil import in seven years.
Iran was once one of India’s top three oil suppliers, accounting for more than 10 percent of the country’s crude imports, and Indian refineries were built specifically to process Iranian crude. Yet, in 2019, under sanctions pressure from the first Trump administration, India reduced its Iranian imports to zero.
India’s Ambassador to Washington, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, confirmed the decision publicly: India had ended all imports from Iran and stopped buying Venezuelan oil as well. The reason, Shringla told reporters, was that India “considered itself a partner of the United States.”
The shift, he acknowledged, “caused pain at home.”
Now the Iran war has thrown global energy markets into chaos. Nearly half of India’s crude imports transit the Strait of Hormuz – which Tehran effectively closed in early March – and millions of barrels are stuck near the chokepoint as oil prices spike. India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer, dependent on imports for nearly 90 percent of its crude, is dangerously exposed.
A decade ago, India had options. It bought from Iran, from Venezuela, from Russia, from the Gulf states. It had a port in Iran that connected it to Central Asian markets. It had a gas field under development on Iranian soil – discovered by India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in 2008, with vast natural gas reserves. It had a 7,200-kilometer trade corridor running through Iran and Russia, designed to bypass Western-controlled shipping lanes entirely.
Washington took all of it. Iranian oil – gone since 2019. Venezuelan oil – gone because India “considered itself a partner.” The gas field – killed by sanctions. The port – abandoned under pressure, then bombed. The trade corridor – stalled indefinitely by the Iran war.
Access to Russian oil is now under pressure as well. Imports fell 36 percent in five months after Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on Indian goods, including a 25 percent levy specifically punishing India for purchasing Russian crude.
Having already stopped buying Venezuelan oil at Washington’s request, India is now being told by Trump to resume. On his terms. “India is coming in, and they’re going to be buying Venezuelan oil as opposed to buying it from Iran,” he told reporters on Air Force One in February. “We’ve already made that deal.”
Meanwhile, in early March, the U.S. Treasury issued a 30-day waiver, granting India temporary permission to purchase Russian crude stranded at sea after Washington’s own sanctions made buyers unwilling to touch it.
India’s purchases of American oil, meanwhile, increased 31 percent over the previous year. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent “generously suggested” that India could temporarily be “allowed” to purchase Russian oil, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research noted; after that, India would have to buy American crude at higher prices. “The Modi government,” the institute observed, “appears blindly acquiescent to this economic extortion.”
Promises Unfulfilled
The energy squeeze is not an isolated case. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace acknowledged, “The full potential and promise of the 2005 nuclear agreement – and the larger U.S.-India partnership – has yet to be realized.”
Under that landmark agreement, India agreed to separate its civilian and military nuclear programs, place 14 of its 22 power reactors under permanent International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, and accept a moratorium on nuclear testing. In exchange, the U.S. committed to building reactors, supplying fuel, and supporting India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group – the international body governing nuclear trade.
Twenty years later, not a single American-designed reactor has been built in India. Westinghouse Electric (the company contracted to deliver six reactors) filed for bankruptcy in 2017, while General Electric refused the liability terms under Indian law.
Construction has not started.
Washington never fulfilled the deal’s energy and commercial promises. India surrendered nuclear testing sovereignty and opened its civilian facilities to international inspectors. After Washington placed India under safeguards, it delivered nothing commercial in return.
Defense proved no different.
When India needed advanced air defense and the U.S. offered no comparable system, it signed a $5.4 billion deal with Russia in 2018 for Moscow’s most advanced surface-to-air missile system, the S-400. Washington immediately threatened sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, the same law under which it sanctioned NATO ally Turkey for an identical purchase. For four years, India lobbied Congress for an exemption, until Indian-American Congressman Ro Khanna introduced a special legislative amendment arguing that sanctioning India would be “self-defeating” for U.S. interests.
The waiver finally passed in July 2022.
India received the weapons system it paid for. Yet the precedent was set: the United States reserves the right to approve or deny India’s defense purchases, even when Washington itself has no alternative to offer.
The Cost of Silence
The ledger is a list of Indian losses. Oil severed, port abandoned, reactors never delivered, weapons purchase nearly sanctioned, warship sunk, investment bombed.
It is also a list of American gains.
India stopped buying Iranian oil in 2019. For seven years, that helped drain Tehran’s revenue. When the U.S. and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury in February 2026, they struck a country already weakened in part by India’s cooperation with sanctions.
That cooperation did not prevent the war, but rather helped set the conditions for it.
India’s silence on the sinking of the IRIS Dena – in waters India considers its own strategic neighborhood – set a precedent; the U.S. Navy destroyed a warship in the Indian Ocean days after it had been a guest at an Indian port, and no government in the region objected.
The Caravan posed a counterfactual: “If the same ship were sailing out of a People’s Liberation Army Navy fleet review and hugging Chinese approaches, would the US have risked torpedoing it in similar fashion? The answer, self-evidently, is no, which only underlines how Washington reads India under Modi – not as a power whose red lines must be respected, but as a quiescent partner.”
India’s silence makes it complicit in Washington’s unchecked military operations in its own maritime neighborhood.
With Chabahar abandoned and the International North-South Transport Corridor stalled by the war, India has lost its only independent trade route to Central Asia and Afghanistan.
India’s acceptance of 50 percent tariffs – negotiated down only after increasing American oil purchases and reportedly committing to reducing Russian imports – demonstrated to every other country that economic coercion works. The world’s fifth-largest economy absorbed the punishment, complied with the demands, and asked for relief.
The next country Washington pressures will know that India capitulated.
Two Ports
India built a port in Iran – its gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, a decade of investment, a trade corridor outside Western control. India abandoned it under American pressure. Then the U.S. bombed the area around it.
India also operates a port in Israel (at Haifa, run by the Adani Group) that functions normally while Israeli warplanes fly sorties against the same country whose port India just abandoned.
Iran, a country with which India has maintained diplomatic and energy ties for over seven decades, is being bombed. Israel, whose relationship with India has deepened under Modi into what both governments describe as a strategic partnership, is doing the bombing.
India has made its choice.
Russia, China, and Brazil – India’s fellow founding BRICS members – have all condemned the strikes. India alone has not. Asia Times reported that Iran now views India as “aligned with its enemies,” and that the investments India made over decades in the relationship “hang by a thread.”
“India’s silence on Iran is not strategic autonomy,” claimed Newslaundry. “It looks more like strategic dependence.”
On April 26, the sanctions waiver on India’s Iran port expires. India has made no move to renew it. Meanwhile, the Ping Shun – carrying Iranian crude originally bound for the Indian coast – just changed course for China.
Pieter Friedrich is an investigative journalist covering ethnonationalism, transnational repression, and South Asian geopolitics. His work has appeared in The Caravan, Middle East Eye, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, and has been cited by Harper’s Magazine, the Washington Post, and The Intercept. More at pieterfriedrich.com.
