Mehbooba Mufti is making her packing, and it's not just about the PDP chief's politics, it's about the state of the world seven months into the Iran war. The invitation was extended to her via Mohsein Qummi, head of international relations in the supreme leader's office, who invited her to participate in the state funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as a "distinguished guest of India. Mufti has said it is an honour of a lifetime and she will be going to visit to pay her respects. That one sentence from a former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister is part of a much bigger and messier story that has touched upon a war, an assassination, a succession crisis, a fuel shock that changed household budgets from Los Angeles to Lahore and a funeral so huge that Iran is rumored to be considering it for cultural heritage status.

An invitation card is important because it is necessary to recall the last Saturday in February. That morning, Israel and the U.S. struck Iran's military and political leadership in a coordinated assault, dubbed Roaring Lion by Israel and Epic Fury by the Pentagon. Killed at his home was Khamenei himself, whose death was confirmed only after a day of conflicting reports in Tehran, as well as the Revolutionary Guard's supreme command and his daughter, son-in-law and daughter-in-law. Netanyahu portrayed the attack as the elimination of an “existential threat” and Washington as the defanging of “imminent danger” to Americans. It was an act of war, Tehran declared, and in the first few hours it fired missiles and drones not just at Israeli cities, but at American bases throughout Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, drawing a response from Gulf states from Saudi Arabia to Jordan, which scrambled their air defence systems to deal with a deluge that went far beyond the original theatre of war. Reaction was split more or less along familiar lines, with Vladimir Putin calling the killing a cynical murder, Beijing's foreign ministry condemning what it called a blatant assassination of a sovereign leader, and celebrations in some Iranian neighbourhoods, but state television announcing a forty-day mourning period.

The war was not going to be a short war. That leadership vacuum led to a competition within the clerical ranks, the Revolutionary Guard making strong arguments for continuity. The second hereditary-style transfer of power in the history of the Islamic Republic came within 10 days, when Khamenei's son, Mojtaba, was named as successor to his father, while critics deem it a violation of the Islamic Republic's own principles and those who back the move say it is a matter of stability in wartime. Mojtaba has been absent from public view since he was wounded in the attack that left his father dead, and his absence has led to months of speculation concerning his well-being and who is really in charge day to day of the country. An interim leadership council, comprised of a cleric from the Assembly of Experts, the current president and the head of the judiciary, was left to run the show in the early weeks, a fact that in itself makes one wonder just how ready the system was for Khamenei's sudden exit after being in the post for thirty-six years.

The funeral itself has been a saga itself. It was initially scheduled for early March, but was delayed several times, allegedly because of security concerns about the leaders meeting in one location during the war, and then because of the size of the anticipated crowds. The schedule has been changed at least three times so far, in the past four months, in Iran's Fars News Agency and other domestic outlets, ceremonies will start in Tehran around July 4-5, then in Qom, before moving to Iraq for the ceremonies through Najaf and Karbala, and finally burying the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad on July 9. Tehran's authorities are preparing for 15-20 million people in the capital and 35 million across the country a scale of mourning which dwarfs even that after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, five years ago. Foreign dignitaries will be received separately on July 3, and organisers have said that more than thirty countries have expressed interest in sending official representatives and religious leaders from more than ninety countries are expected to participate in some way or the other.

India's involvement in those ceremonies has been carefully planned and executed to a considerable degree. The official government delegation from New Delhi will be headed by Army veteran and Kashmir expert Lieutenant Gen Syed Ata Hasnain, Bihar Governor, as well as Minister of State for External Affairs Pabitra Margherita. The selection of these envoys a retired army general with a Kashmir background and a junior minister instead of the external affairs minister himself is an indication of how India is trying to maintain a civilisational relationship with Iran without taking sides in a dispute that also involves its key allies in Washington, Tel Aviv and the Gulf. Political parties have been invited separately and in this category, Mehbooba Mufti joins BJP national president Nitin Nabin, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress functionary Salman Khurshid and a few Shia members of parliament like Ruhullah Mehdi and Imran Masood. The PDP's long-term ties with the Shia community of Kashmir and Iran's cultural influence among the Muslim population of the region add weight to the visit, which is, however, presented by Mufti as a courtesy visit rather than as any sort of political statement.

But there is an economic dimension behind the funeral diplomacy that has transformed household budgets and government balance sheets on three continents, and that dimension which can't be divorced from the funeral of Khamenei can't be divorced from the war that caused it. Iranian mining activity, plus naval harassment, and a later American blockade of Iranian ports from mid-April through late May effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-fifth of the world's liquefied natural gas and one-quarter of its seaborne crude normally flow. Oil prices, which were around 64 dollars a barrel just before the war began, jumped above 120 dollars in early March and briefly reached the 200-dollar-a-barrel mark, prompting traders and even a former US Treasury secretary to warn of a real threat of $200-a barrel oil if the blockade continued. Dubai benchmark crude hit an all-time high of 166 dollars in March. Combined outages by Gulf Cooperation Council producers, who make up a significant portion of the world's spare production capacity, exceeded 10 million b/d at the height of the crisis, while Qatar's LNG exporter declared force majeure on its contracts. In response, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released four hundred million barrels of strategic reserves, for the first time in its history coordinating such a move, buying the market perhaps two to three million barrels a day of breathing room, analysts said, that would expire by mid-summer.

This had an immediate impact in India where less than half of its crude oil requirements are sourced from the Middle East. In late March, the government reduced the excise duty on petrol and diesel by 10 rupees a litre to cushion the impact on consumers, while imposing a higher export tax on refined diesel and aviation gas to ensure availability in the domestic market as Indian refiners started selling more of the products into the global market, where prices are lower, before the government took the decision. Sixty per cent of the LPG that India imports passes through the strait, and cooking gas was the first commodity to be visibly short, with queues developing outside LPG dealers within days of the closure of the strait. As the conflict spread, over 220,000 Indians, working in the Gulf and Iran, were repatriated, which was the reverse migration of a skilled workforce, unlike the labourers in the past Gulf crisis, who will bring capital and professional skills with them, as opposed to just remittance dependency, triggering a fourteen per cent surge in real estate demand already being tracked by economists in smaller Indian cities. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand and Vietnam, which are far more dependent on Gulf fuel and have not India's refining capacity, suffered even greater jolts, including a request by Pakistan to watch cricket matches from home to save electricity. The United States, on the contrary, has been one of the financial beneficiaries of the disruption: Crude and product exporters in this country have pulled in an estimated fifty billion dollars of extra revenue during the first few months of the war, while Russia, continuing to sell largely into Asian markets, has added upwards of fifteen billion dollars of its own.

The ceasefire remains fragile and an American-Iranian memorandum of understanding reached in early summer has eased some of the fighting, but traders remain wary that the lull will not last: Sporadic attacks near the strait, including one on a cargo vessel in June which briefly halted an international evacuation of stranded ships, keep traders nervous about how durable that calm really is. Islamabad, which also facilitated part of the recent understanding, expects a more comprehensive deal to be inked within days, Pakistan's prime minister has said, as negotiations are ongoing “on the sidelines” of this week's G7 summit.

It is in this context that a former Jammu & Kashmir chief minister's visit to Tehran on a flight is more than a courtesy call. Whether it's an Indian delegation, a Pakistani delegation or one from Moscow or Beijing, each delegation that walks into the Imam Khomeini Mosalla this week is making a statement about where it stands in the middle of a post-Khamenei order, where neither the health of its leader nor the direction of its government is known, nor is the economic and human toll of a war that resets energy markets for the rest of the world. The funeral will soon be over. It will not go away the questions it raises about Iran's leadership, the durability of the ceasefire, or the form of global energy security.