India is facing an LPG shortage. Fuel prices are climbing. The rupee is under pressure. Roughly ten million Indian workers in the Gulf are navigating a region where missiles are flying, and airspace has been disrupted. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant portion of the world's oil and gas supplies pass, is closed to the U.S. and its allies.

And the question being asked in diplomatic and strategic circles is a pointed one: did India's own political choices contribute to the bind it now finds itself in?

The crisis began when the U.S. and Israel struck targets across Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several senior Iranian leaders. Iran retaliated with missile and drone strikes across Israel and Gulf nations hosting U.S. military bases. The Strait of Hormuz was shut. The global economy took an immediate hit. India, heavily dependent on Gulf energy imports and deeply invested in the region through its diaspora, felt the impact faster than most.

What followed from New Delhi was a diplomatic response that raised more questions than it answered.

In the earliest days of the conflict, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the leaders of every Gulf state, Jordan, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The readouts of his calls with Gulf leadership explicitly condemned the violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of those states. Three days before the war broke out, Modi had visited Israel, received a medal at the Knesset, and delivered a speech in which he said India stands with Israel "at this moment and beyond."

Thirteen or fourteen days into the war, after the gas crisis had already hit India, Modi called the Iranian leadership.

The sequencing matters enormously. Foreign policy operates on signals, and the signal India sent in those first two weeks was unambiguous: it condemned territorial violations when the victims were Gulf states, stayed silent when the victim was Iran, and reached out to Tehran only after the economic consequences of that silence had become impossible to ignore.

The central question almost asks itself: if India had reached out to Tehran in the earliest days of the war, could it have secured quicker access to the Strait of Hormuz? Would the LPG crisis have been avoided, or at least mitigated? The answer is unknowable, but the question itself is damning enough.

When Khamenei was killed, New Delhi said nothing. Compare that with May 2024, when Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash, and India declared a day of national mourning. The contrast was stark enough to register in Tehran and Gulf capitals, with watchers carefully watching to see where India's loyalties lay.

India's foreign policy establishment has long prided itself on strategic autonomy: the ability to take independent positions rather than aligning reflexively with any bloc or power. It was this principle that allowed India to navigate the Russia-Ukraine conflict with a degree of credibility, maintaining lines of communication with Moscow while managing its relationship with the West.

What happened in the West Asia crisis was not strategic autonomy. It was something closer to its opposite.

Strategic autonomy has always meant the freedom to take independent positions, including positions that differ from those of major partners. What India demonstrated instead was a selective application of its stated principles: condemning violations of sovereignty when one side commits them and staying silent when the other side does the same.

India has a consistent voting record at the UN on Israeli violations of international law and Palestinian rights, even after 2023. That institutional memory, built carefully over decades by the Ministry of External Affairs, was visually contradicted the moment Modi landed in Tel Aviv. The political framing of the visit overrode the institutional nuance that India's diplomacy had carefully maintained.

The result is a credibility problem with Tehran that will take sustained effort to repair.

There is a secondary consequence to the conflict that carries long-term implications for India's strategic positioning in the region.

Gulf states have historically hosted U.S. military bases partly as a deterrent against Iranian aggression. Iran's response to this conflict has systematically dismantled that logic. By targeting Gulf states that host U.S. bases, Iran has sent a clear message: American military presence makes you a target, not a shield. Oman's foreign minister has already signalled publicly that Gulf states need to rethink their security arrangements.

This creates a genuinely complex situation for India. Gulf states are privately lobbying Washington for de-escalation even as they maintain public postures condemning Iran. Their priority is economic diversification, which requires regional stability and investor confidence. Missiles flying over Dubai and hitting targets in the region are catastrophic for that project.

India's decision to align its public signalling with the Gulf states' formal positions, rather than its actual private priorities, means it missed an opportunity to position itself as a credible voice for de-escalation. A country that could have leveraged its relationships on both sides to play an honest broker role instead spent the first two weeks of the crisis showing clear alignment with one party to the conflict.

One incident in particular crystallised the gap between India's stated foreign policy values and its actual responses.

The U.S. attacked the Iranian frigate IRIS-Dana in waters close to India, as the vessel was returning from a fleet review that India itself had hosted. India later offered safe harbor, which was the right call. But when External Affairs Minister Jaishankar was asked about the attack at the Raisina Dialogue, he framed it as a non-serious question.

An attack on a vessel returning from an Indian-hosted naval event in India's own neighborhood was dismissed as a non-serious question. The signal that it sends, both to Tehran and to anyone watching India's claim to strategic autonomy, is difficult to walk back.

India's relationship with the U.S. over the past year has involved Washington making economic decisions that affect India without consultation, and most recently, the sinking of the IRIS-Dana. If strategic partnership means anything, it requires partners to show respect for each other's equities. India has not pushed back on any of these incidents with any meaningful force.

The recent course correction, with multiple calls between Jaishankar and the Iranian foreign minister and a late-evening call between Modi and the Iranian president, is the right move. The question is whether it's sustained and whether it's matched with a clearer public position on the conflict's origins.

India holds the BRICS chair this year. The UAE and Iran are both new entrants to the grouping, and both are central players in this conflict. India has both the platform and the responsibility to use that position to push for de-escalation.

Every BRICS member state, with the exception of India, has issued statements recognizing that this war was initiated by the U.S. and Israel. China released successive statements condemning the aggression and the assassination of Khamenei. Russia was categorical. South Africa, Brazil, and even ASEAN's collective statement explicitly named who started the conflict. India's statement stood out in its absence of that recognition.

The economic argument for de-escalation is one that should resonate even with a mercurial U.S. administration: prolonged conflict in the Gulf raises fuel costs for American consumers and creates political liabilities domestically. India, as BRICS chair, is positioned to make that argument with genuine weight if it chooses to.

The India-West Asia crisis is a textbook illustration of how political decisions in the early days of a conflict translate into concrete policy consequences weeks later.

The decision to call Netanyahu before Khamenei's death, to condemn one side's violations while staying silent on the other's, and to accept the optics of a high-profile Israel visit days before a foreseeable escalation: these were political choices made at the highest level. The LPG crisis, the pressure on the rupee, the strained relationship with Tehran, and the weakened position at the BRICS table are their downstream consequences.

India has the relationships, the platform, and the strategic logic to play a genuinely constructive role in this crisis. The past two weeks have demonstrated that political framing can override all of that very quickly. The next few weeks will show whether the course correction is real or whether it's just another tactical adjustment that stops short of the independent position India's foreign policy has always claimed to represent.

Strategic autonomy means something, or it means nothing. Right now, India is being asked to decide which one it is.