00:00India has friends everywhere, but leverage nowhere.
00:03Just look at its relationships in the Middle East.
00:05New Delhi has spent years building ties with both Israel and Iran.
00:09But although Modi visited Tel Aviv just hours before the bombing started,
00:13India was either unable to stop it from happening or unaware that it was about to begin.
00:17So from Tehran's perspective, that makes India either a bad friend or a naive one.
00:22To be clear, this is not a failure of crisis management.
00:25But competent management is not a foreign policy.
00:28The question that New Delhi should ask itself once this crisis ends
00:31is what is the point of a bigger global profile if it doesn't give you an edge when it matters?
00:36For more than a decade, New Delhi has aimed for strategic autonomy,
00:40being close to everyone without being too close to anyone.
00:43But what is the national interest that is being protected by this strategy?
00:47India's foreign policy has three core jobs.
00:49To protect its giant diaspora, to keep its neighbourhood terror-free,
00:54and to ensure that its growing economy has the oil and gas that it needs.
00:59Right now, all three are being threatened by the crisis in the Persian Gulf,
01:03but particularly the third.
01:04This should be the moment, right, to cash in that strategic autonomy check.
01:08Instead, however, India is discovering that all that goodwill it built up is inadequate.
01:13After calls between Modi and the Iranian president,
01:16a couple of Indian tankers have made it through the Strait of Hormuz.
01:19But 22 others are still waiting, according to Reuters.
01:23And other countries' tankers have gone through too.
01:25Any more progress will come at a price.
01:27And the stakes for India are high.
01:29Millions of Indian citizens live and work in the Gulf,
01:32and hundreds of thousands are still at risk.
01:34On top of that, 90% of India's supply of liquid petroleum gas,
01:38universally used for Indian cooking, comes through Hormuz.
01:41Restaurants are already shutting their doors,
01:43and households are being told that they're going to have to wait longer
01:46to replace their natural gas cylinders.
01:47Fertiliser output is falling as well,
01:50which means less food and higher inflation.
01:52Modi desperately needs the Strait of Hormuz to open,
01:56but India may have confused presence with influence.
02:00Being at the table doesn't necessarily mean you get to shape what happens at it.
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