When Iran and the United States finally signed the “Islamabad Memorandum,” the name of the agreement itself told an uncomfortable story for India. Pakistan – a state with a weaker economy, difficult international reputation and a history of instability – had become the principal channel between Tehran and Washington. Pakistani officials transmitted proposals, hosted negotiations, maintained communication with Iran, coordinated with Gulf governments and cultivated access to the Trump administration. The ensuing agreement bore the country’s capital’s name.

New Delhi, meanwhile, watched from the margins.

The contrast between Islamabad and New Delhi exposes a deeper flaw in Indian foreign policy. India’s strategy of multi-alignment was designed to prevent dependence on any single power, allowing New Delhi to work simultaneously with competing states. Instead, in West Asia, it increasingly became selective alignment. Relations with Israel and US acquired political priority, while relations with Iran were reduced to cautious diplomacy, delayed infrastructure projects and abandoned economic mechanisms.

The Iran war revealed the price of this choice.

The cost of selective alignment

Academic debates on Indian foreign policy have long revolved around the transition from non-alignment to strategic autonomy and, more recently, multi-alignment. Ian Hall described multi-alignment as an effort to build multiple partnerships without entering binding alliances or surrendering independent decision-making. Its purpose was not neutrality, but to maximise India’s room for manoeuvre by ensuring that no single partnership excluded cooperation with another.

Other scholars have stressed continuity in India’s West Asia policy. Nicolas Blarel, for example, argued that Indian governments often compartmentalised regional relationships, developing ties with Israel, Iran and the Arab states separately rather than treating the region through a single ideological framework. Such compartmentalisation allowed India to work with adversarial states at the same time.

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Under Narendra Modi’s government, however, another element became prominent. Hall’s work on the reinvention of Indian foreign policy shows how Hindu nationalist ideas, status seeking and domestic political communication increasingly shaped New Delhi’s external relations. Foreign policy was no longer only an exercise in balancing material interests, but also a part of a civilisational narrative about a more assertive and ideologically self-confident India. Israel occupied a special place within this transformation.

The relationship was no longer managed quietly as a useful defence and intelligence partnership. It became highly public, personalised and politically symbolic. The ideological affinity between Hindutva and Israeli nationalism – their shared language of civilisational threat and terrorism – and the close relationship between Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu gave Israel a significance exceeding the material components of bilateral cooperation.

This alignment affected how New Delhi approached the war against Iran.

From restraint to silence

India did not become a formal participant in the American and Israeli campaign. However, its response was cautious and politically muted. Rather than clearly opposing the initiation of war, it issued familiar appeals for restraint, civilian protection and diplomacy. The limits of New Delhi’s response were visible not only in its language on the war, but also in its treatment of Iranian losses. After Iran’s Supreme Leader was killed, neither Prime Minister Modi nor the Indian government issued an immediate public condolence statement. Only after four days of silence did Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri visit the Iranian Embassy and sign the condolence book, an act that conveyed official sympathy without requiring India’s political leadership to speak publicly.

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The contrast was even more striking after a US submarine sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena near Sri Lanka. The vessel had been an invited guest at the Indian Navy’s MILAN 2026 exercise in Visakhapatnam and was returning home when it was torpedoed, killing more than 80 Iranian sailors. Yet, the Indian Navy waited more than a day before issuing a limited statement focused on the distress signal and rescue effort. A warship welcomed by India in the language of maritime friendship was destroyed shortly after leaving Indian waters, but New Delhi’s reaction remained constrained by its relationship with Washington. The episode exposed more than diplomatic caution, revealing the erosion of India’s ability to defend the political meaning of its own partnerships and its claim to act as a security provider in the Indian Ocean.

A country that claims the status of a leading power responded to a conflict affecting its immediate interests as though it were a distant observer. Pakistan, on the other hand, behaved differently.

How Pakistan did what India could not

Islamabad did not possess India’s economic capacity nor its international standing. Nevertheless, it preserved the political channels necessary to speak with Tehran, Washington, Beijing, Riyadh, Ankara and Doha. It used its relationships transactionally and accepted the risks of mediation. Pakistani leaders carried proposals between the belligerents, hosted difficult negotiations and proactively inserted themselves into the diplomatic process.

This was not the triumph of Pakistani idealism. It was the effective use of diplomatic position. Pakistan recognised that mediation could increase its strategic relevance, improve relations with Washington and strengthen its standing in the Islamic world. It converted access into influence. Conversely, India possessed this access, but failed to convert it.

Foundations that India abandoned

The reason cannot simply be attributed to diplomatic caution. New Delhi had already allowed its material relationship with Iran to deteriorate. Before 2019, Iran had been an important source of crude oil for India. A rupee-based payment mechanism allowed Indian refiners to pay for Iranian oil through accounts in India, while Iran used those funds to purchase Indian goods. The arrangement was not perfect, but it reduced dependence on the dollar system and protected a limited sphere of bilateral trade. When Washington ended sanctions exemptions in 2019, India stopped buying Iranian oil. Thus, the rupee mechanism lost its central purpose.

India often presents strategic autonomy as the right to pursue its own interests despite external pressure and demonstrated that autonomy in maintaining relations with Russia. In the Iranian case, however, it accommodated unilateral American sanctions even though the decision damaged its own energy options and reduced its economic influence in Tehran. This contradiction became evident during the war: India depended on the stability of Hormuz but had spent years weakening its relationship with the state capable of disrupting it.

Although Iran does not legally own the strait as it is governed under international maritime rules and is shared with Oman, it has the military and geographical capacity to obstruct passage, threaten shipping and impose severe costs on energy importers. India’s vulnerability was, therefore, not created during the war, merely exposed by it. 

Farzad B, Chabahar and the gap in implementation

The history of the Farzad B gas field demonstrates the same pattern. An Indian consortium discovered the field in 2008, but years of disagreements, sanctions, pricing disputes and political hesitation prevented its development by India. Iran eventually awarded the project to Petropars in 2021. The responsibility for the failure was shared. Iranian negotiating practices were often difficult and sanctions complicated financing and technology transfers. But, the outcome remained strategically damaging for India. Indian firms discovered a major Iranian gas field, yet failed to turn that discovery into a durable energy partnership.

Chabahar is an even clearer example of the gap between Indian strategic language and implementation. The port is frequently described as India’s gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, an answer to Pakistan’s denial of overland access and a potential link to the International North-South Transport Corridor. However, Chabahar cannot honestly be presented as an Indian success.

India and Iran first reached an understanding over the port in 2003 and progress remained slow for more than a decade. Modi announced major commitments during his 2016 visit to Iran, but the project advanced only partially. Equipment deliveries were delayed, financing remained uncertain and related transport projects failed to develop on schedule. Iran proceeded independently with the Chabahar-Zahedan railway after citing delays in Indian participation.

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The ten-year operating agreement signed in 2024 was important, but it came after two decades of hesitation. Even then, the project remained vulnerable to American sanctions. In the 2026 budget, India made no new allocation for Chabahar, the first such omission in almost a decade. As the American sanctions waiver expired, reports emerged that India was considering transferring operations temporarily to an Iranian entity.

This is an underdeveloped asset trapped between Indian hesitation and American pressure. Repeated delays have also produced a internal debate in Iran over whether Tehran should continue waiting for India or seek a larger Chinese role. An official decision to hand Chabahar to Beijing has not yet been taken and Iranian officials have continued to describe India as an important partner. Regardless, the possibility of Chinese participation has repeatedly surfaced in Iranian strategic discussions, particularly when Indian commitments have slowed.

For New Delhi, that possibility should be alarming. China already possesses a central position at Gwadar in Pakistan. If Beijing were eventually to acquire an important economic or logistical role in Chabahar, India would not just lose an investment; it would lose the strategic rationale that justified two decades of engagement with Iran. The deeper issue is not whether China will formally replace India tomorrow. It is that India’s delay gives Tehran the reasons to look elsewhere.

India’s glaring absence

The Islamabad Memorandum, therefore, represents more than a Pakistani diplomatic achievement, highlighting India’s absence. Pakistan became relevant because it remained useful to different sides at the same time. It did not require ideological affinity with either side to maintain sufficient trust, communicate and ensure political flexibility to serve as an intermediary.

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India’s multi-alignment was supposed to produce exactly this form of flexibility. Instead, ideological preference narrowed its diplomatic space. New Delhi grew publicly close to Israel, strategically closer to Washington and economically distant from Iran. When the war began, its formal relationships remained intact, but their political utility declined, emphasising the central distinction between having relations and possessing leverage.

India has embassies, strategic dialogues and ministerial contacts whereas leverage requires economic presence, political credibility and a willingness to act independently when major powers impose costs on Indian interests. By abandoning Iranian oil, allowing the rupee mechanism to collapse, losing Farzad B and delaying Chabahar, India progressively removed the material foundations of its relationship with Tehran.

What India must do next

The solution is not another rhetorical declaration of strategic autonomy. Nor is it a temporary return to Iran whenever Hormuz closes. India needs to restore an energy relationship with Tehran, reconstruct payment mechanisms resistant to unilateral sanctions, provide sustained financing for Chabahar and integrate the port into a genuine transport network rather than treating it as a symbolic counterweight to Gwadar. It must recognise that Iran is not simply an energy supplier or transit corridor, but a regional power whose decisions directly affect India’s economic security. Above all, New Delhi must separate national interest from ideological identification.

Foreign policy cannot be reduced to friendships between leaders or affinities between governing nationalisms. Israel’s political preferences cannot determine India’s relationship with Iran. American sanctions cannot automatically define the boundaries of Indian engagement. A country seeking to act as a leading power must be capable of maintaining difficult partnerships precisely when its preferred partners oppose them. The war offered India a painful comparison.

Islamabad balanced relationships it did not fully control and became the centre of diplomacy. Meanwhile, New Delhi celebrated multi-alignment and found itself without influence when the region’s most important conflict threatened its energy supplies and strategic projects. Pakistan named the agreement after its capital. India could only place its hopes in the reopening of Hormuz. This is precisely the cost of mistaking ideological proximity for geopolitical strategy.

Seyed Hossein Zarhani is a lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University.