INS Vikramaditya, India's flagship aircraft carrier, at sea.
WHAT HAPPENED
The sea increases the stress on India on a single front. It has come, all at once, and the fourth, the most politically significant, is American.
It originated in the Red Sea. In July 2025, two bulk carriers, MV Magic Seas and MV Eternity C, were attacked and sunk by the Houthis in the southern Red Sea, resulting in the deaths of four crew members, including some Indian private security guards. The Cordelia Moon is an attack by the Houthis which they claimed was “British”, but the ship was in fact part of an entity based in India at the time of the attack. Before starting to close down Hormuz, months ago, Indian sailors, Indian associated cargo, Indian-bound vessels were in the firing line.
Afterward, the Strait of Hormuz. In March 2026, vessel traffic dropped from an average of around 130 vessels per day throughout February 2026 to 6 per day, a decrease of 95% in vessel traffic in just one month. A member of an Indian crew was killed on March 12 when a tanker owned by the United States, Safesea Vishnu, was attacked off the coast of Basra. On April 19, Indian Navy vessels with Indian flags fired warning shots at two Indian-flagged ships trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz while the Indian MEA showed concern that attacks on Indian citizens proceeding with vessels bound for India is in the nature of escalating attacks, with “the intensity and lethality” of attacks increasing. In response, India launched Operation Urja Suraksha – a naval escort mission in the Arabian Sea and Strait of Hormuz to ensure security of ships with Indian flags and vessels heading for Indian ports.
Then came June. In four days, the US military targeted three ships with Indian merchant navy sailors in the Gulf of Oman. On Saturday, June 8, an F/A-18 Super Hornet from USS Abraham Lincoln fired a precision munition into an engine room of the Palau-flagged MT Marivex with 24 Indian crew onboard after it allegedly ignored the blockade instructions. All came out of the sea saved by help from the State of Oman. The next day, US forces attacked the MT Settebello, which was flying the Palau flag and had been off the coast of Oman. Three people were confirmed dead among the Indians. On the next day, two Hellfire missiles hit the Guinea-Bissau flagged MT Jalveer with 20 Indians aboard on the ship, no one injured.
A crew member on the Marivex gave a distress call: “US Navy attack the missile on the engine room, we have holes at the bottom, 24 crew, all crew Indian, please help quickly.”
India ordered the deputy chief of mission of the US Embassy in New Delhi to call its counterpart to New Delhi to provide an explanation. Jaishankar had filed a formal protest to Sec. of State Marco Rubio. The incident has ushered in a situation of what experts call ‘the worst moment in decades in India-US relations’.
India’s flagship partnership just killed three of its sailors, as its Prime Minister meets Trump at the G7. This is what maritime vulnerability looks like when it is not a strategic concept but a diplomatic crisis.
THE STRATEGIC CONTEXT
For most Indians the country’s primary security challenge is still the territorial (China at LAC, Pakistan at LoC). The frame is still applicable in an established situation of Indian Ocean trading through a period of US naval domination. It does not reflect the India that is operating today.
India has almost 95% share of trade in volume and about 70% share in value transacted through maritime trades. The Strait of Hormuz sees about 21 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products pass through each day, or nearly one of every 27 barrels of world seaborne supply. India has left itself highly vulnerable to any disruption in the sea lanes of the Persian Gulf as its dependency on crude oil imports for 85% of its need will invariably impact its economy in real time. India has just one week of LPG stocks and barely any supply of LNG reserves and is thus, one of the most vulnerable economies in the world in such a scenario of sustained closure of the Hormuz.
That was what Jaishankar was hinting at last May when the BRICS foreign ministers met in New Delhi, calling for “safe and unimpeded maritime flows through international waterways, including the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.” The words were purposeful. It did not mention Iran. It didn’t refer to the US. It dubbed the waterways after the former threat came from one direction only – now it comes from all recorded directions, including India’s strategic partner.
According to a recent IISS report, one of the new areas of contention in the Indian Ocean is the Hormuz straits, which is where China’s maritime vulnerability begins, instead of Malacca, arguably the Indian Ocean’s newest wild card, is India. Beijing, India, France and the United States are contesting the Indian Ocean, with India one of the new cards and the Indian Ocean’s vulnerability starting at Hormuz. The events of June are illustrative of the extent to which its ability to defend those interests on that front, which encompasses the lives of its citizens, is still a long way short of what it aspires.
The period of 20 years in front of us to achieve $30-35 trillion’s GDP goal for India demands about 10% annual growth. To achieve this growth, India’s maritime economy needs to be developed. That’s what is at war with itself and the seafaring context. Every week Hormuz continues to be interrupted, every time the Red Sea is rerouted through Cape of Good Hope, every Indian sailor shot by blockade fire is an extra reminder that India’s economic growth agenda is built on a sea base which it is yet to defend.
INDIA’S CALCULATION
Delhi is treading a tight rope between three contradictory imperatives at once, and it is all in the week leading up to Modi meeting Trump during the G7.
The first is a local one. The Forward Seamen’s Union of India, which argues that its 1.7 million members, the nation’s largest single operator in the world merchant navy, constitute the nation’s largest maritime-worker community, termed the Marivex attack a “matter of serious concern.” Three positive lives lost at sea isn’t just a number. It is a front page crisis that has families, unions and opposition ready, waiting and willing to weaponize the government’s response. There is no mutable key information available. The minimum is Jaishankar’s protest call to Rubio. The issue will be, does the Delhi frenzy just keep on going or are they going to take the costs gracefully?
The latter is a strategic move. The entire Indo-Pacific arrangement that includes the Quad, the transfer of defence technology, the sharing of intelligence and has been midway of a decade of India positioning itself against China depends on the partnership between India and the US. Delhi cannot afford to break that partnership over three sailors without undoing the strategic context of a ten-year spell. Meanwhile, a government that publicly accepts the slaughter of its own citizens by a friendly state without a penalty is unconditionally letting every ally and every opponent know that it has flexibility on the red lines (its own in this case).
The third is economic. Operation Urja Suraksha safeguards Indian flagged ships. It is not capable of safeguarding Indian nationals working in foreign-flagged ships, the domain of the majority of India’s 1.7 million merchant sailors. There is a tremendous gap in law, policy and practice between protection of Indian ship and protection of Indian seafarer. Three sailors are dead. But that is where Delhi doesn’t have anything that fills it at the moment.
While India is not open about it out loud, strategic autonomy which has worked for the country in its land engagements is structurally incomplete when it comes to the sea, in the absence of a deterrence posture against Pakistan or China. In order to achieve strategic autonomy, one needs to be able to act independently. In the Indian Ocean, the strength of the Indian navy has increased, but it still cannot use forces to defend the SLOCs the Indian economy relies on, its citizens on foreign ships and its partners from attacking Indian vessels. The blue-water expansion of the Navy, Operation Sankalp’s patrol architecture, and the Vikrant carrier battle group, these things are the right long-term investments. They can be no short-term solution in the event of an American missile hitting the engine room of an Indian sailor.
WHAT TO WATCH
The direction of the outcome of this moment will be taken by four signals.
1. The Modi-Trump bilateral at the G7. The attacks coincided with Modi’s talks with Trump on the fringes of G7 on the India-Pakistan issue. If Modi raises Settebello and Marivex and kicks them while they are down, names the incidents, asks assurances and gets a promise that Indian-crewed vessels will not be targeted under the blockade, it is India that draws the red line. In the event of a bilateral joint statement on trade and technology without any reference to the sailors, the cost will be a harsh one.
2. India filing a formal complaint at the IMO. The IMO’s call on the sanction of acts likely to endanger seafarers was clearly non-attributive and not directed at the United States. If India files a named complaint against the United States at the IMO, it goes beyond a bilateral protest and moves it to international legal proceedings. For the first time in treaty history, and as a testament to the fact that Delhi has determined that the price of silence is greater than that of confrontation.
3. The working guidelines of Operation Urja Suraksha. Expanding the escort mission to include Indian-crewed ships operating under all flags and not just Indian flag is a strategic maneuver. It would keep Indian navy forces in potential proximity with assets used to enforce the blockade of the United States. It’s a risk Delhi hasn’t taken in an open statement.
4. The Red Sea. The Houthis have announced they will resume attacks on Red Sea shipping. The recent quietism doesn’t mean it is a failure of capacity, as it was political timing. Escalation in the USA-Iran conflict is a direct Red Sea escalator. Currently, India has no military instrument in the Red Sea or a diplomatic forum that enables it to have a say on Houthi attacks resuming in the sea.
THE VERDICT
The biggest security worry for India in 2026 is not the LAC. It does not exist at the LoC. Three Indian sailors have met their demise at the hands of an American missile in a 33-kilometre-wide strait, a firing zone in the Red Sea, and at the engine-room of a Palau-flagged tanker. The land borders are under the control of military forces that have been years in the making to combat the threats they encounter. The maritime challenge for India is multi-front, with multiple threats including Houthis, Iran, the US blockade and massive exposure of Indian sailor in a war zone. India-USA relations are at a low ebb not seen in decades.
Strategic autonomy is no UN speech. It is what you do when you’re forced to leave your own dreams and priorities behind, when your own citizens are beginning to die. India has one note for protesting. It requires a seafaring doctrine.
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