At least three Indian sailors died when the missiles hit their ship in the Gulf of Oman. New Delhi, at the G7, was presented with a choice between outraging and arithmetic and opted for the trade deal.

Palau-flagged Settebello was hit in its engine room in the Gulf of Oman. In the same week, three Indian crewed members were killed and 2 other tankers with Indian sailors onboard were hit. Illustration.

The distress call was not one of Geopolitics. It was the sound of drowning men. “Fire on board, vessel is sinking” the call that came to an Indian seafarers' union this month after an American missile hit the engine room of the tanker Marivex in the Gulf of Oman. All twenty-four crew were rescued by the Omani navy. They were the fortunate ones.

Three Indians were dealt a raw deal three days later on board the Settebello, a tanker flying the flag of Palau. A young new deck cadet. An engine fitter. The one man on the ship who would have known exactly what guided munitions do to a ship's heart the chief engineer. The ship had violated an American blockade on Iranian oil and disregarded repeated warnings, said U.S. Central Command. Three Indians were killed, India said. The two statements were both accurate. Only one of them took a body count.

What has ensued is a tacit class in how a nation values its very own citizens against what it desperately desires. For now, India, it has determined, wants a trade deal.

Grief took first and it was unguarded. He was the father of a boy who died who asked that he just wanted to know what happened during the last moments of his life and that the remains be returned to him. Rarely in harmony, seafarers' unions in this case agreed on one point: a government has a debt to pay to seafarers when a foreign military slays Indian workers in international waters. The opposition took it a step further and characterized the killings as a litmus test on the personal warmth the prime minister has been promoting with the U.S. president for years. One opposition leader was even more forthright, suggesting he “show courage” to bring the nation's wrath to Washington's doorstep with neither one word of public grief from the top.

It is that silence that is worth clinging to it is in stark contrast to all that India proclaims about the men who sail the ships of the world.

By the numbers, A national export

It is not a minor and trivial clientele. India provides about one in every 10 seafarers of the world's 1.9 million, and between 250,000 and 300,000 seafarers are active in the country, which is nearly three times the number a decade ago. They are not welfare recipients. They are an export. They send home their remittances in hard currency and they man the foreign flagged fleets which carry the vast bulk of international commerce. This workforce is now included in New Delhi's big idea: India as a ship-building, seafaring power by mid-century. So it's bizarre that the state's excitement about these workers as a statistic is not necessarily matched by anger when three are killed.

The crew India sends to sea

India was the third largest supplier of sailors; and the cargo they died carrying was not India's cargo.

How many Indians work in the world's shipping industry?

~12%

The rest of the world (Philippines, China, Indonesia & others)

~88%

Globally approximately 1.9 million seafarers. India is third on the list behind the Philippines and China with 250,000-300,000 active sailors.

The reason for New Delhi's flinch.

There is nothing mysterious about the reason for the caution. This is recorded on the balance sheet, and the majority of it flows through the same watercourse in which the men perished.

Strait of Hormuz is the world's most critical oil choke point. Some 20 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products flow through it every day, which is nearly a fifth of the world's oil consumption and a quarter of global seaborne oil trade. The vulnerability for India is immediate: about 40 per cent of the country's crude imports have traditionally gone through Hormuz while it imports almost 90 per cent of the oil it consumes. The war between the United States, Israel and Iran's closure of the strait to shipping allied to the West in this spring had quick repercussions. India's crude basket, which was in the sixty to seventies dollar range for much of the fiscal year, jumped over one hundred and thirteen dollars a barrel by mid-March. Each $1 of that migration shows up on Indian gas stations, shipping costs, insurance bills and ultimately the inflation numbers a government must explain.

The destination of the Hormuz crude oil

The strait is consumed by Asia. It is its second largest customer, thus India cannot afford a fight over it.

~20

M BARRELS/DAY

China

37.7%

India

14.7%

Other Asia

13.9%

South Korea

12.0%

Japan

10.9%

Europe & others

8.3%

United States

2.5%

Crude oil and condensate destinations, first quarter 2025, Strait of Hormuz. Based on U.S. EIA analysis using tanker tracking data from Vortexa.

India has rushed to minimize the risk. Almost seventy percent of the crude is now coming from outside of Hormuz from some forty nations, and about a hundred million barrels are in commercial and strategic storage, perhaps 45 days cover, officials say. However, spreading out suppliers is not the same as breaking out of the chokepoint, as the alternatives are limited. The total capacity of the pipelines that would go around Hormuz (Saudi and Emirati lines) peaks around five million bpd, or roughly one-fourth the normal flow level. Even a long closure will be painful and India is aware of that.

Add the trade relationship on top, and the prime minister's reticence begins to sound more like cold arithmetic than timidity. India's biggest bilateral trading partner is the United States, with bilateral trade valued at approximately $131.8 billion in the previous fiscal year and India enjoying a trade surplus of approximately $41 billion. The two governments have a goal of $500 billion in trade by 2030, and they are in talks on a bilateral deal that would relax the harsh tariffs once excused by an American president who labeled India the “tariff king.” In Evian, that president announced a deal “near.” Indian officials termed the meeting was filled with “off-the-charts positivity.” Three coffins were a diplomatic inconvenience to be dealt with, not a reason to confront, when faced with figures such as these.

$131.8bn

India – US two way trade in FY 2024-25 is characterized by a ~$41bn Indian surplus.

$500bn

Target agreed to by both governments that is applicable to trade.

~40%

Of India’s crude imports historically transit the Strait of Hormuz

3

Two other tankers were attacked the same week, with the loss of Indian crew on Settebello.

What Evian had to say.

So, the meeting in Evian-les-Bains was a matter of saying what had to be said without saying what hurt. The prime minister was raising the sailors, albeit obliquely, at their first meeting in 16 months. He said he was talking about freedom of navigation, ensuring the strait remains open for the global economy, seafarers who deserve to work “without fear,” and his optimism that once Washington and Tehran sign the truce expected this week, seafarers' safety will be foremost. He didn't mention the deceased. He did not state the strikes. He didn't tell us the name of the country which launched the missiles, but the President of that country was sitting at his side. When President Obama was asked explicitly if he had any words for the grieving families, his response was “we love all those people,” “we love all of you,” “seafaring is a rough profession” and “that's what's been happening throughout time.” Later in the day, in a barely noticed move, Washington took the “Indo” out of the name of its key military command in Asia, a small linguistic backpedal from a term New Delhi had prized as a reflection of its importance.

It never was a question of outrage or arithmetic. Even a State may grieve its dead and yet may negotiate a tariff schedule. The price paid by India was leverage.

The case the silence skips:The case, the silence skips,

The trickier question resides here. It was never a question of outrage versus arithmetic for the choice India made. Great powers do both at once all the time, and so can a government protest the slaying of its citizens, and yet negotiate a tariff schedule. What India did do was to trade away leverage to attempt to get something tangible in return for its bodies. Not theatrics, but mechanisms: ensure safe passage corridors for crews, under the flag of the ship, in conflict zones; ensure war-risk insurance and compensation, again under the flag of the ship, in conflict zones, and that there are clear rules for it; ensure a transparent inquiry into why a commercial vessel, carrying no weapons, was struck instead of boarded and detained; ensure a clear legal avenue for the families who are now left with questions and no answers. These are the things that seafarers' representatives have been asking for and these are the things that go unwon when grief is filed under “concerns raised.”

The stakes are more clearly defined in a global frame. People's wars are becoming eras in which the men who power the oil and goods are increasingly expendable. All the crew on these tankers were Indian, but the cargo was Iranian, the flag was Palauan, the missile was American, and the war was none of their. In the increasingly international enforcement of sanctions and blockade, the engine rooms and crew quarters of the fleets they can never own are manned by the labour export workers of the global south, whose countries bear the brunt of these punitive measures. No one else will press for their protection at the highest table available to a country if a country that supplies one in eight of the worlds sailors won't. The Philippines, Indonesia and the rest are watching what type of precedent this sets.

None of this is about having to pretend that a relationship with Washington is disposable. It isn't; and a responsible government can't act like it is. However, there is a distinction between being prudent and giving in and that distinction is whether or not the dead purchased anything at all. India arrived at Evian with three new graves and a long memory for strategic patience. It departed with kind messages, an already-impending trade agreement, and a strait still dominated by the guns of men other than themselves. The crews ought to have been more than the cost of doing business. For the time being, that's essentially what they were.