As the US military engagement continued for the fourth month in the Asia-Middle East region, India gets directly caught in the cross-fire over and above the economic hardships that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz posed. The US has warned of serious consequences if India violated the US blockade and continued with the “illicit transportation of Iranian oil” – after three Indian marines were killed in a US missile attack on a vessel in the Oman-Gulf region that was suspected to be carrying oil shipments from Iran. Curiously, the standoff between the US and India comes close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s planned meeting with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G-7 summit in France. Trump, on the one hand keeps talking about a peace deal and on the other, continues targeting Iranian installations, while Iran is retaliating in measured tones. Trump’s latest hint was that a deal would be signed by Sunday, but Teheran’s silence dimmed such hopes.
The rude manner in which US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke to external affairs minister S Jaishankar shows the Americans are bent on tightening their grip on the troubled region and beyond. His diktat to India is that all commercial vehicles in and around the Strait should immediately comply with the US writ vis-a-vis passage and the ban on oil deal with Iran. The US that has already hiked tariffs on Indian exports as a counter to India’s oil deals with Iran and Russia by circumventing the US sanctions moves to the next level. While a framework for an interim trade deal between India and the US was proposed earlier this year, legal challenges followed there, delaying a final “concessional” agreement. The scenario gets further complicated by the aggressiveness of the US against India as is reflected in the missile attacks on as many as three tankers manned by Indian crew in recent days; and the death of the three sailors in the latest offensive. Significantly, one of these attacks took place some 420 nautical miles away from the Strait.
India, along with other nations across continents and including the US, is faced with a tough economic scenario due to the curbs on movement of crude from the Middle East and other shipments, raising prices and adding to the inflationary pressures. What was initially thought to be an abrupt aggressive offensive against Iran has been dragged by both sides to the fourth month. Iran, having anticipated an American offensive for long, insists that it will not buckle under pressure. Having prepared well for a long-drawn-out-war, the Iranians are taking their sweet time to respond to peace plans mediated by intermediaries like Pakistan and Oman. The Gulf region too keeps facing the hard impact from this war. Several tiny nations in the region, including the UAE, have been repeatedly hit as Iran keeps targeting the American military and other installations in the region. Like Russia’s war in Ukraine, how long would this scenario persist is anybody’s guess.
