Our sailors, our silence: India’s troubling double standard at sea

Somewhere in a small flat in coastal Andhra town, a woman wakes up every morning and looks at the framed photograph of her husband above the kitchen shelf. He was a merchant sailor. He worked on a tanker. He was in the Hormuz Strait when the violence found him. He never came home.

She does not understand foreign policy. She does not speak the language of diplomatic communiqués, strategic partnerships, or bilateral trade frameworks. She understands only that her husband is gone, that the sea took him not through a storm or an accident, but through deliberate violence. And she understands, because people told her, that her government had very little to say about it.

This article is written with her in mind. And with the families of every Indian sailor whose death or injury was quietly absorbed into the arithmetic of geopolitical convenience.

The Gulf that reveals everything

The Persian Gulf and the waters around the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman have, over the past several years, become among the most dangerous bodies of water on earth. Tankers have been attacked, seized, fired upon, and sunk. Iranian vessels, American warships, Houthi drones, and private tankers have all featured in a slow, grinding maritime conflict that rarely makes front-page news in India but kills real people — many of them Indian.

India is one of the largest suppliers of seafarers to the global merchant navy. Estimates suggest that around two lakh Indians sail on merchant vessels at any given time, many of them in the Gulf region. They are invisible when alive, processing the world’s oil trade with quiet competence. They become briefly visible when they die — and then invisible again, once the news cycle moves on.

What has India’s foreign policy said, consistently, on their behalf? The answer, uncomfortably, is: it depends on who is doing the killing.

The unequal weight of Indian lives

When Iranian naval and Revolutionary Guard forces have targeted or seized tankers in the Gulf of Oman and the Hormuz Strait — vessels that have had Indian crew members aboard, some of them killed or seriously wounded — India’s response has been reasonably swift. There have been official statements. Condemnations, or near-condemnations. Diplomatic communications. The Indian government expressed its outrage, called for the protection of its citizens, and made its displeasure known.

The principle, when Iran was the actor, appeared clear: Indian lives matter, regardless of where they are lost. But when the violence came from the other direction — when American naval operations in the same waters resulted in the deaths of sailors on Iranian-flagged or Iranian-connected vessels, some of whom had sailed from Indian ports, when Indian crew members aboard tankers were caught in the crossfire of American strikes in the Hormuz region — the silence from New Delhi was, and remains, remarkable.

No statements. No diplomatic protests. No calls for accountability. The same Indian government that spoke firmly about protecting its citizens when Tehran was responsible appeared to lose its voice entirely when Washington entered the picture.

And this is not merely an abstract observation about diplomatic language. These were real human beings — some of them Indian, some of them foreign nationals who had spent time in Indian ports, whose ships had Indian cargo, whose families lived in Indian cities. Their deaths were treated as collateral damage, not just by the United States, but by India.

The geopolitics behind the silence

Nobody is naive about why this happens. India and the United States are strategic partners. The two nations share military agreements, intelligence cooperation, major defence contracts, and an increasingly important alignment on questions of regional security, technology, and trade. The United States is India’s largest trading partner. America’s goodwill is something that New Delhi cultivates carefully and spends political capital to maintain.

Iran, on the other hand, is under American sanctions. India’s trade with Iran, once significant — particularly in oil — has been sharply curtailed under American pressure. India’s room to manoeuvre on Iran is narrower than it once was.

And so, when America acts in the Gulf in ways that harm Iranian interests — even when Indian lives are tangled in the consequences — India says nothing. The calculation is coldly rational: the cost of irritating Washington outweighs the cost of abandoning some sailors. This may be realpolitik. But it is not a principled foreign policy. And it is certainly not the foreign policy India projects to the world.

The vision and the reality

India presents itself to the world as the voice of the Global South — the large, principled power that speaks for nations that cannot protect themselves, that refuses to be bullied by either bloc in a polarising world, that stands for sovereign equality and the rule of international law. Prime Minister Modi has, on multiple occasions, described India as Vishwabandhu — a friend to the world.

It is a compelling vision. It commands real respect internationally. India’s balancing act between Washington and Moscow during the Ukraine war, for example, was diplomatic tightrope-walking of genuine skill.

But a foreign policy cannot be simultaneously principled and selective. It cannot claim to stand for international law while going mute when its most powerful ally violates it. It cannot claim to speak for the voiceless while choosing silence when the voices being silenced belong to its own sailors.

If an Iranian attack that kills two Indian crew members warrants an official condemnation, then an American strike that kills an Indian in the same waters should warrant at least a question. Not a war of words, not the abandonment of the strategic partnership, but a question. A note. A quiet representation through diplomatic channels. Something that says: Indian lives have a consistent value, regardless of who ends them. Right now, that consistency does not exist.

Not anti-American, but pro-Indian

It must be said clearly: this argument is not an anti-American one. America is an important partner. The India-US relationship has delivered real benefits — in defence, in technology, in trade, in diplomatic weight. That relationship is worth protecting.

But protecting a relationship does not mean surrendering one’s independent judgment. The best partnerships — between nations as between individuals — are those built on honest disagreement alongside genuine cooperation. America respects nations that push back occasionally far more than it respects those who nod along unconditionally.

India’s silence on American actions in the Gulf does not make America like India more. It makes India look weak. It portrays India as a nation whose values can be traded for convenience and whose principles come with a negotiable price tag.

The sailors deserve better

There is a particular cruelty in dying invisibly — in giving your life to a conflict you didn’t start, in a sea far from home, for a cargo that will fuel someone else’s economy, and having your government treat your death as a diplomatic inconvenience. The woman in coastal Andhra whose husband never came home deserves an answer. Not a complex one, not a treatise on balance-of-power theory. Just an answer to a simple question: Was my husband’s life worth less because of who killed him?

India’s foreign policy, as it currently operates, answers that question in the affirmative. And that is the most damning indictment of all. A country that aspires to global leadership must begin with the most basic principle of all: that its citizens’ lives carry equal weight, regardless of the nationality of those who ended them. Until India can say that honestly — not in speeches, but in its actual conduct — its claim to principled foreign policy will remain exactly what its inconsistency reveals it to be. A noble aspiration, but still far from reality.

(The author is with the Cholleti BlackRobe Chambers, Hyderabad, and writes on economy, politics and law.)