NEW DELHI – A distress call sent to a small office in Mumbai late last week opened the kind of diplomatic file India had not had to open against Washington in a generation. “We have a fire on board,” the crew of the merchant ship Marivex told the Forward Seafarers’ Union, in an audio recording first played to Manoj Yadav, the union’s general secretary. We have a fire on board. And the ship is sinking. By the time the recording reached him, three Indian sailors had died. The fire on board the plane was caused by a precision munition fired from a United States military aircraft.
The strikes, reported over three days in the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman, were carried out by US Central Command against commercial tankers that it said violated the US blockade of Iranian oil. The ships were not warships. The crews were not armed. The United States military, Mr. Yadav said, did not fire a warning shot; He was launching a bloody missile that would inevitably destroy ships and kill sailors. The American chain of command, in this account, had been treating civilian ship crews as combatants for the duration of the war that the United States was now ending.
India’s response has been measured, formal and unambiguously disturbing. External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar registered a direct protest with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. State Department spokesman Randhir Jaiswal told a news conference in New Delhi that the attacks must stop and end, and called for dialogue and diplomacy in the language the State Department uses as it prepares for a longer engagement. A senior American diplomat was summoned to South Block. The Indian protest is written.
The response from Washington did not make things easier. The State Department issued a statement effectively refuting India’s claim that the use of force against commercial shipping was unjustified, reiterating the position that the blockade was an act of war that flag-of-convenience operators carrying Iranian crude were aware of. The reading did not mention the dead sailors by name. In the Indian reading, their deaths were not treated as a question that Washington was prepared to answer.
The incident is now being placed within the larger problem of Indian sailors in the war. Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Indians serve in the world’s merchant fleet, a larger number than most navies, and the Hormuz crossing sees about a fifth of seaborne oil pass under their watch each month. More than five hundred Indian sailors have been stranded in the strait for 107 days, according to seafarers’ unions, which say Indian-crewed ships have been attacked during the conflict. The United Nations confirmed that fourteen sailors were killed and forty-six attacks on international shipping occurred during the war. Three of those killed in the recent strikes were from India.
The Indian position is clear and frank, and by the standards of independent foreign policy, unusually direct. Merchant ships are not warships. Their crews are not enemy combatants. India does not recognize a US blockade of a third country as legal authority to fire on the crews of ships flying the flags of other countries, owned elsewhere, and largely staffed by Indian nationals under contracts to deliver oil to ports in the Indian buying world. The legal reading is consistent with the position India has taken since the beginning of the war, which is that the conflict was a matter for the United States and Iran to resolve, rather than an issue upon which Indian shipping should be recruited to either side.
The Iranian response was louder and clearer. Esmail Baghaei, spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, condemned the brutal attacks launched by the United States on commercial ships as clear evidence of the continuing US policy of armed robbery and state piracy. The language was intended for the local Iranian audience and the foreign Asian audience simultaneously. It also recorded, in plain English, the regional reading of what strikes were: the imposition of a unilateral blockade by killing civilians from a third country.
What makes the timing acute is what the United States chose to announce in the same week. The US government and Iran have finalized an interim memorandum on the war. The agreement, according to the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, includes an explicit commitment to end the naval blockade and lift oil and petrochemical sanctions upon signing. The text circulating in Iranian state media on Monday treats the blockade as something the United States must now dismantle, an admission, in its simplest reading, that the strikes that killed the Indian sailors were imposing an authority negotiated by the same government that issued them.
The diplomatic problem this creates for Washington is more lasting than the war it ends. The United States cannot retrospectively explain, under any legal structure that India recognizes, why the lives of three Indian sailors were an acceptable cost of enforcing the blockade that the United States itself has now agreed to lift. The strikes were carried out under the authority of war. The war is closed. The dead are not like that.
The Indian government has not made the families of those killed the focus of its public response, and has been disciplined about not allowing this issue to be subsumed into broader bilateral relations. The protest from Jaishankar to Rubio is being directed through the appropriate channels of a friendly country, which is the official description of the United States in the Indian diplomatic record. Choosing a channel is a message in itself. Friendly countries are expected to respond to protests of this seriousness in writing, in detail, and in the public record. The State Department’s readings that have been Washington’s response so far do not meet this standard.
There is a long-standing pattern visible in the story of the sailors. Over the four months of the war, the Indian merchant marine bore the costs of a conflict in which India was not a party, while the political infrastructure designed to protect its citizens at sea moved slowly enough that union officials did some public outreach on its behalf. The Advanced Seamen’s Guild and its counterparts were a source of operational details that made it possible to trace the casualty record. The international system that is supposed to insulate civilian shipping from blockades has generated very little of it.
For Indian sailors, the practical question now is whether the end of the war will translate into the end of targeting. Union officials interviewed in Mumbai and Cochin on Monday were cautious in approaching this question, offering the same answer in different forms: The war is ending on paper, but the rules of engagement that led to the strikes do not necessarily fall with it. The US memorandum with Iran lifts the official authority under which the strikes were announced. It does not change the operational logic of the US Navy’s position, which has been treating Hormuz as a war zone for four months. Merchant officers serving on deck of ships passing through the strait carefully read the absence of an express stop order.
There is one fact that India will not insist on in public, but which is highlighted on every page of the protest. The three sailors who died were on a ship transporting oil, which, in market terms, would have been bought by an Indian refinery had it not been transporting Iranian crude. The legal infrastructure the United States created to punish Iranian oil during the war was seeping directly into the wallets and livelihoods of the country to which those killed belonged. India does not need to say that out loud. Style is the point.
The next step is Washington’s step. Mr. Rubio has a written protest from the Indian foreign minister on his desk and a reading from the State Department that India took as a dismissal. Bilateral meetings on the G7 are still ongoing. The dead are buried. The Indian Foreign Ministry has not yet said what its position will be when the official apology does not arrive, and this is the question to which the next stage of this story will move.
