Summoning an ambassador is the geopolitical equivalent of writing a scathing Yelp review after getting food poisoning. It is cheap, performative, and entirely useless at preventing the next disaster.
Yet, when an Indian merchant sailor is killed in a drone or missile strike in the Middle East, the diplomatic machinery in New Delhi defaults to this exact ritual. The Ministry of External Affairs calls in the Iranian envoy. They sit in a well-appointed room, exchange stern diplomatic notes, issue a press release expressing "deep concern," and go back to business as usual.
Meanwhile, thousands of Indian seafarers remain floating targets in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
This diplomatic theater does not project power. It projects helplessness. It exposes a structural vulnerability that New Delhi desperately tries to hide behind the facade of strategic autonomy. The lazy consensus among foreign policy analysts is that India is playing a delicate, sophisticated balancing game in the region.
The truth is far less flattering. India is letting its citizens die at sea because it lacks the stomach to enforce real maritime security, hold state sponsors of asymmetric warfare accountable, or reform a broken global shipping system that uses Indian labor as human shields.
The Flag of Convenience Scam
To understand why summoning an envoy is a joke, you have to understand how global shipping actually works.
When a drone strikes a merchant vessel, the target is rarely a ship flying the Indian tricolor. It is almost always a ship registered in Panama, Liberia, or the Marshall Islands—the notorious "Flags of Convenience." These are regulatory tax havens where shipowners register vessels to dodge taxes, bypass labor laws, and avoid stringent security requirements.
Consider the typical casualty of these regional maritime attacks. The ship is owned by a shell company in London, operated by a management firm in Singapore, flagged in Monrovia, and crewed almost entirely by sailors from South Asia.
When a state-backed militia or a rogue military force strikes that ship, who is responsible?
- The flag state (Liberia) has no navy to protect them.
- The owner (hidden behind layers of corporate brass plates) collects the insurance payout.
- The operating country washes its hands of the security risk.
India provides roughly ten percent of the global seafaring workforce. It is the second-largest supplier of merchant navy officers and crew in the world. Yet, when an Indian sailor dies on a foreign-flagged vessel, New Delhi treats it as an isolated diplomatic incident rather than a systemic failure of national security.
By summoning the Iranian envoy, India pretends the issue is a bilateral diplomatic dispute. It is not. It is a regulatory and military failure. India allows its citizens to board ships that are structurally unprotected, sailing through active combat zones, under flags that offer zero military protection.
If New Delhi wanted to protect its people, it would ban Indian seafarers from sailing on vessels transiting high-risk zones unless those vessels carry armed security details or are escorted by state navies. But doing so would disrupt the global supply chain and upset Western shipping conglomerates. So, instead, we get tea and diplomatic protests.
The Myth of Indian Navy Escorts
The Indian Navy loves to showcase its operations in the Arabian Sea. The public relations machine regularly pushes out high-definition videos of commandos boarding vessels, rescuing crews, and deterring pirates.
But do not confuse policing with protection.
The Indian Navy is playing a reactive game of whack-a-mole. It does not have the capacity, nor the mandate, to escort every merchant vessel carrying Indian crew members through the Bab el-Mandeb strait or the Strait of Hormuz. The navy can rescue a crew after an attack, but it cannot prevent a loitering munition from smashing into a bridge wing and killing a watchkeeper.
True maritime security requires convoy escorts. It requires the kind of hard-nosed, systematic escort operations that the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian tried—and largely failed—to sustain because of a lack of international coordination and political will. India refused to officially join that coalition, choosing instead to run its own independent patrols.
Why? Because joining a Western coalition would upset Iran, India’s partner in the Chabahar Port and its supposed gateway to Central Asia.
India has traded the physical safety of its seafarers for the geopolitical illusion of the International North-South Transport Corridor. It is a terrible trade. The Chabahar project has dragged on for decades with minimal economic return, while the immediate threat to Indian lives in the western Indian Ocean is real, active, and lethal.
The Chabahar Hostage Situation
India cannot hold Iran accountable because Iran holds the keys to India’s transit ambitions.
Every time a drone launched by Iran-backed groups hits a ship, New Delhi must calculate the cost of its reaction. If India pushes too hard, Tehran can slow-walk the Chabahar Port agreement or harass Indian shipping directly in the Persian Gulf.
This is not strategic autonomy; it is geopolitical hostage-taking.
Iran knows this. They understand that India’s dependence on regional stability makes it weak. When India summons the Iranian envoy, both sides know it is a performance. The Iranian diplomat nods politely, promises an investigation that will never happen, and goes back to the embassy. The shipping lanes remain just as dangerous, and Iran continues to test the limits of what India will tolerate before it takes actual, retaliatory action.
If a state-backed actor killed an Indian soldier on the land border, the response would be swift and militarized. When a state-backed actor kills an Indian citizen at sea, the response is a diplomatic memo. This double standard exists because the ocean is viewed as a lawless gray zone where responsibility can be diluted through maritime law.
The Solution New Delhi Ignores
If India wants to stop its sailors from being collateral damage in Middle Eastern proxy wars, it must abandon diplomatic politeness and implement three concrete, disruptive changes:
Mandate Sovereign Escorts or Ban Transit
India must refuse to clear Indian seafarers to work on vessels transiting the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, or Persian Gulf unless those vessels are part of a declared naval convoy or carry active-duty military protection teams. If shipping companies want cheap, highly skilled Indian labor, they must pay for the security infrastructure to keep them alive.Hold Flag States Financially Accountable
India should lead an international coalition of seafaring nations—including the Philippines and Ukraine—to demand that open registries (Flags of Convenience) contribute to a global maritime security fund. If Panama and Liberia want to collect billions in registration fees, they must pay for the naval patrols required to keep those ships safe.Impose Real Geopolitical Costs
Stop treating Iran with kid gloves. If Tehran-backed groups continue to target shipping lanes vital to Indian trade and lethal to Indian citizens, India must freeze its investments in Iranian infrastructure. Strategic autonomy is worthless if it requires the quiet sacrifice of Indian citizens to maintain.
Summoning envoys will not stop the drones. Demanding accountability, pulling investment, and deploying hard naval power will. Until New Delhi realizes that diplomatic theater is no shield against shrapnel, Indian sailors will continue to pay for India's geopolitical hesitation with their lives.
