Last week, the ongoing war in the Middle East escalated with the death of Hezbollah’s erstwhile leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in a bunker in Lebanon following an Israeli airstrike on September 27. Since then, Israeli planes and missiles have pounded Lebanon, decimating Hezbollah, in addition to causing civilian deaths. Subsequently, Iran, which is closely allied with Hezbollah, fired around 180 missiles at Israel on October 1.
India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has grown much closer to Israel, driven by strategic, economic, and ideological concerns. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) that could be interpreted as tacit support for Israel, Modi wrote on September 30 that he “spoke to [Israeli] Prime Minister [Netanyahu] about recent developments in West Asia. Terrorism has no place in our world. It is crucial to prevent regional escalation and ensure the safe release of all hostages.”
India has traditionally done a good job of cultivating good relations with sets of countries that are hostile to each other, such as the United States and Russia, and, in the Middle East, with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. As the minister of external affairs, Dr. S. Jaishankar, has said, India’s foreign policy is “multi-vector,” and characterized by dealing with countries that may be rivals with each other on a “non-exclusive” basis.
Yet, as India edges closer to Israel and the Gulf Arab states – such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the same level of engagement with Iran as before. Iran has not made things easier for itself. For example, on September 16, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wrote on X that “we cannot consider ourselves to be Muslims if we are oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring in #Myanmar, #Gaza, #India, or any other place.”
His statement earned a rare rebuke from India’s Ministry of External Affairs, which usually does not use such strong language with countries with whom India is ostensibly on good terms. The ministry described Khamenei’s comments as “misinformed and unacceptable,” and further noted that “countries commenting on minorities are advised to look at their own record before making any observations about others.”
The fact of the matter is that India and Iran’s interests and trajectories are diverging, and their worldviews are often in conflict with each other. For example, in regards to combating terrorism, India and Israel are much more aligned, whereas Iran’s behavior in sponsoring and funding militias and terrorist groups in the Middle East closely resembles that of India’s rival, Pakistan, which supports terrorist groups in South Asia.
India has also stepped into a role as a security provider in the Arabian Sea because it operates one of the few blue water navies in the world: a navy that can deploy ships across the open ocean and “support them at great distance from their bases.” No other country with a coast along the Indian Ocean has this ability, although Iran has a limited capacity to do so. As a result, India provides an invaluable service to many of the rich Arab Gulf states that are dependent on trade and the export of oil, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. These countries do not yet have the ability to provide for their own naval security, and have been traditionally dependent on the U.S. Navy. But since the United States cannot be everywhere all at once. India has become the “first responder in terms of security in the Indian Ocean.”
For example, India’s emphasis on a peaceful, secure Indian Ocean and rescue operations for ships targeted by the Houthi movement in Yemen favors Saudi, Israeli, and U.S. interests over Iranian ones, as the Houthi forces are allied with Iran. The Indian Navy is also one of the few forces that can keep Iran from becoming a mischief maker in the Arabian Sea, either through using proxies or by expanding its own navy. India could not have been happy with a tanker attack off of its coast last December, thought to have been struck by an Iranian drone.
On top of this, there is a natural geopolitical rivalry between India and Iran that has been obfuscated by the emergence of Pakistan between the two countries. However, for millennia, states based in present-day India and Iran have fought over much of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, in an attempt to project power into Central Asia and the Arabian Sea. The Persian Achaemenid Empire dominated the Indus Valley and Afghanistan, but its successor state, the Seleucid Empire, founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, ceded this territory to the Maurya Empire in 305 BCE. Many centuries later, in the 17th century CE, the Mughal and Persian Safavid empires fought for decades over Kandahar in Afghanistan. Today, both India and Iran seek to influence Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Indo-Iranian relations will also be impacted by the increasingly close relations between Iran and China and the poor relations between Iran and the United States. India’s relations with the U.S. are growing stronger, while its rivalry with China continues. India is involved in multiple trade corridor projects throughout the Middle East, including the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) linking India with Iran and Russia, and the much more important India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), seen by some analysts as a U.S.-backed alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
On top of this, India’s third, fourth, and seventh largest trade partners are all Arab states adjacent to the Persian Gulf: the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, respectively. India’s relations with the UAE and Saudi Arabia are especially beneficial because they provide India with energy security and investment. India’s defense industry has also developed strong ties to Israel; India is the largest buyer of Israeli weapons, which are vital to its national security.
Given the importance of trade between the Middle East and India, India has the good fortune of being a party to multiple trade corridors that pass through the region, including the aforementioned INSTC and IMEC. IMEC, which links Europe and India through Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, is more much lucrative and likely to succeed – notwithstanding the war in Gaza, as India and the UAE signed a pact in February to implement the corridor – because of India’s pre-existing strong ties with the countries involved in the corridor, something that would further tip the scales of India’s geopolitical heft in the region toward Israel and Saudi Arabia and away from Iran.
While India is still involved in constructing a port in Iran at Chabahar, envisioned to be the terminus of a land route to Central Asia and Afghanistan, the benefits and importance of this trade will likely be minimal, given the small markets of Central Asia and the sanctions regimes on Afghanistan and Iran. Meanwhile, IMEC is backed by the U.S. and European powers and will connect some of the world’s more important and dynamic emerging economies.
All these factors – trade, a common interest between India, Israel, and the Arab states in combating terrorism, increased people-to-people connections, and Iran’s disruptive behavior – are all factors in the coming drift between India and Iran.