Did India Offer Anything to Tehran in Exchange for Free Passage of Its Ships? India’s GDP Has Been Overstated by 22% Say Economists; How Iran is Fighting This War in a Different Way
Sonam Wangchuk Released From NSA Detention After Six Months; US Religious Freedom Body Urges Sanctions on RAW, RSS; Haryana Govt's 'Magnanimity' in Dropping Case Against Mahmudabad
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March 16, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
Does India have anything to do with US President Donald Trump’s demand of seven undisclosed countries that they provide military support in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open? Asked this question on Monday, the external affairs ministry said that New Delhi has “not yet discussed it in [a] bilateral setting”. Trump did not reveal which countries these were but said that an open Hormuz is “something that we don’t need and these countries do need”. The chokepoint is key to India’s energy imports and security and while Raisina Hill has got Iran to allow two Indian-flagged gas tankers to traverse the strait, there is no “blanket arrangement” for Indian vessels and “every ship movement is an individual happening”, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar told the Financial Times in an interview published Sunday.
Tehran is aware of the price that New Delhi is paying for its energy security. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi took to X on Saturday to note that Washington “spent months … bullying India into ending oil imports from Russia” but is now “begging the world – including India – to buy Russian crude” in a “pathetic” move. His remarks did not target India but they will rankle here anyway because, as this analysis notes, he
“wrote it as the foreign [minister] of a country with whom India had halted oil trade when the US reimposed sanctions in 2019. Now, with tensions in the Gulf threatening energy flows, New Delhi finds itself needing Tehran’s cooperation to steady its supplies.”
One of the two Indian-flagged gas tankers that New Delhi has acknowledged were allowed to pass through the Strait of Hormuz – i.e. the Shivalik – was escorted by the Indian Navy on Saturday as it passed through the Gulf of Oman to the east of the bottleneck, the open source intelligence account Damien Symon wrote on X, adding that the other vessel, the Nanda Devi, also appeared likely to receive an escort. Early on Monday an Indian-flagged oil tanker named the Laadki too was escorted through the gulf by the Navy, he said.
Meanwhile Iran arranged for a chartered aircraft to carry home the non-essential personnel – comprising most of those – aboard the IRINS Lavan naval vessel that New Delhi had allowed to dock in Kochi a day after the US-Israeli strikes began. Rezaul Laskar reports citing sources that the aircraft also picked up from Colombo the bodies of a number of Iranian sailors who were killed in the US attack on the IRIS Dena off Sri Lanka and thereafter flew to Armenia, from where its occupants would be moved to Iran by road.
The Indian rupee stabilized near 92.42 per dollar on Monday, hovering just above its record low, notes Reuters.
Prices for Russia’s Urals crude delivered to India’s west coast rose to
