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‘Every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves,’ argued Lord Curzon, one of the few British viceroys in India to develop a lasting emotional attachment to the country. Curzon possessed a perceptive grasp of history and geography. It was geopolitics, for Curzon, that held the key to keeping India under British control.

In particular, having travelled across the larger Middle East in his formative years, Curzon understood the importance of the Persian Gulf for India’s westward security. Following in the footsteps of the Portuguese general Albuquerque, Curzon believed that a permanent British base in the Gulf could serve as a bridgehead to Bombay. The Persian Gulf is landlocked in all directions except the southeast. Mastery over the Gulf of Oman and the larger western Arabian Sea translated into control of the Persian Gulf. Geographically, Muscat is closer to Mumbai than Kolkata. If British ships could control the waterways of the Gulf, a seamless maritime highway would connect London’s interests in the larger Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. After all, other European powers had penetrated the East through the oceans. By the early twentieth century, when Curzon served in India as the Queen’s viceroy, Pax Britannica was writ large over the Persian Gulf. The cords of commerce connected the destinies of the Gulf sheikhdoms with the Indian subcontinent.

While contemporary India is no sea-spanning empire with extractive tendencies, implicit echoes of British policy inform India’s policy towards the Gulf. Delhi’s strategy radiates a strategic legacy of the Raj – a geopolitical imperative that informed the seasoned hands of the British Indian Foreign Office. Clinical calculation is back. In a departure from its post-independence past, Delhi now refers to the Gulf as its ‘extended neighbourhood’.

In the late 18th century, the British position in the Gulf was not without its challenges. Competitors like France desired to control its waters. From roughly around 1835, the rulers of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, the al-Qasimi empire, Umm al-Quwain and Bahrain entered into a ‘Trucial system’ with British India. The Arab chiefs forfeited their right to wage war by sea in return for British protection from any external aggression. Kuwait and Oman also had similar longstanding agreements with the British. This system effectively placed the Gulf under the sphere of influence of British India. In time, British India’s political resident, headquartered in Bushire, would come to control, directly and indirectly, the destinies of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Sharjah, Muscat, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

By the 19th century, another gambler entered the arena: Russia. Safeguarding India’s ramparts from Russian influence was crucial to protecting Britain’s Asian empire. Any Russian presence in southern Persia would directly threaten the security of British India. In essence, there was a direct interlinkage between the security of the Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf. After coming to India as the Queen’s viceroy in 1899, Curzon was aghast at the Foreign Office’s inertia on matters relating to the Gulf. He started sending home incessant dispatches about Britain’s tenuous policy in the region. After much prodding, the then-Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Lansdowne, proclaimed a British version of the Monroe Doctrine in the Persian Gulf. ‘If any other power established a naval base or fortified port in that sea, Britain would regard it as a very grave menace to her interests and would resist with all the means at her disposal’.

By 1903, Curzon was touring the Gulf states in a flamboyant display of British India’s naval prowess. Armed with an impressive flotilla, he visited Muscat, Sharjah, Bandar Abbas, Bahrain, Kuwait and Bushire. At various moments during the trip, he reminded the local sheikhs and chiefs that British naval protection had kept order in the region and facilitated trade and commerce. Curzon’s obsession with the Gulf reached such a crescendo that many in the Foreign Office circles even referred to the Persian Gulf as the Curzon Lake. Articulating Curzon’s view of the Persian Gulf, the then Times of India editor wrote:

British supremacy in India is unquestionably bound up with British supremacy in the Persian Gulf. If we lose control of the Gulf, we shall not long rule in India… The moment it became known that Russia, or Germany, or France, or any other powerful nation, had planted a post within easy reach of the shores of India, an ineffaceable impression of the impermanence of British rule would be produced throughout Hindustan.

Another British official who embodied the geopolitical vision of the Raj was Olaf Caroe. During his long career in the Indian Political Service, Caroe even served as acting resident in the Persian Gulf. By the start of the Second World War, he was made the Foreign Secretary to the Government of India. Reminiscent of Curzon, Caroe paid great attention to the unyielding facts of geography. As the historian Peter John Brobst puts it, ‘they both had a clear sense that what British India was up to was what preceding empires had done’. Brobst further argues, ‘Geopolitics is a condition, not an ideology. Geopolitics moves with empires; it doesn’t necessarily change’.

In linking the Persian Gulf to India, Caroe took a step further than Curzon. He referred to the vast region between the Euphrates and Indus as ‘Southwest Asia’. The Persian Gulf formed the throbbing heart of this interconnected zone. Caroe was also deeply aware of India’s pre-British influence in the Arab Gulf and southern Persia. Indian merchant families had crisscrossed the region’s waters since the time of the Harappan civilisation, which traded with Akkad, Sumer, and the Omani Peninsula. In his book Wells of Power, Caroe reasoned:

India retains a living interest in all waters and routes leading to the Indian Ocean, and the connexion of Bombay with Arab trade will be maintained. It is impossible to see Gulf problems in correct perspective unless the view includes India, which, despite partition, still stands at the centre of the Ocean that bears its name.

By the time of the First World War, Germany had emerged as another rival menacing British India’s ‘informal empire’ in the Gulf from the West. While the Russians sought access through Persia, Germany established close ties with the Ottomans. Britain’s hegemony in the Atlantic forced Germany to look to the Persian Gulf for access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Not being a Mediterranean power further hobbled German maritime ambitions. The much-trumpeted Berlin-Baghdad railway was a product of this thinking. Like many of their European predecessors, the Germans also believed that the Gulf was the gateway to India.

The world wars of the 20th century both confirmed the wisdom of the view developed by Curzon and Caroe. During the First World War, Indian troops under British control occupied Mesopotamia. In 1920, Britain formed, and assumed control of, the League of Nations Mandate for Mesopotamia, whose territories – extending from Basra in the south to Mosul in the north – became modern-day Iraq. The Indian army was also deployed in other theatres of the Middle East and East Africa to secure British interests.

The story in the Second World War was no different. The British war machine operated on the oil pumped from Iraqi fields in Mosul and Kirkuk, while the Iranian oil fields in Abadan also proved significant. At London’s behest, the Indian army was deployed in Iraq and Iran to serve imperial interests. As Srinath Raghavan argues, India was the ‘central strategic reservoir of the British Empire’. Without much choice of their own, multitudes of Indian men sailed across the seas to defend the empire. British power depended on Indian sacrifices.

Barring its prominence in war and conflict, the first quarter of the 20th century also marked the pinnacle of trading ties between India and the Gulf. Bahrain, Muscat, and Kuwait’s external trade was predominantly linked to India. British planners also envisioned an earlier version of the present India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor. The idea was to connect undivided India with the Middle East through a railway line. The project would enable Delhi to access the Mediterranean and Central Europe – an ambition that remains relevant today.

The tumult of independence and the need to maintain stability in the new republic drained the energies of India’s political elite after 1947. On external matters, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed a break from the past. Like Curzon and Caroe, he too was a keen scholar of world history. He argued that given India’s size, geography and teeming resources, India would play a ‘pivotal’ role in the security of Asia and the larger Indian Ocean region. At one instance in 1946, he stated that India was the ‘pivot of Western, Southern and Southeast Asia’. Put otherwise, Nehru was not oblivious to the geopolitical heritage that he inherited from the Raj. For example, India’s relations with Nepal and Bhutan as states under its implicit sphere of influence symbolised a lingering inheritance of the Raj. Partition might be a chip on India’s shoulder, yet India remained at the heart of the Indian Ocean.

The difference in Nehru’s outlook and that of the Raj arose in military terms. While the Raj backed its foreign policy pronouncements with military deterrence, post-1947 India relied on its civilisational and cultural history to maintain its influence in Asia. During much of the Cold War, India’s implicit preference for the Soviet Union smoothed its ties with socialist and secular regimes in the Middle East. Nasser’s Egypt and Ba’athist Iraq were the central pillars of India’s West Asia (Middle East) policy.

Yet, independent India largely ignored the old Indo-British connection to the Persian Gulf. Delhi remained sceptical of Pakistan’s close ties with the Gulf Arabs. Distrust of the US also spilt into India’s external outlook. Anything to do with American allies was a red line in India.

The post-Cold War period triggered a profound realignment in India’s strategic posture. Economic travails at home forced India to cast aside stale ideas of protectionism and central planning. As the Indian economy integrated into international markets, Delhi’s appetite to play a larger role on its western periphery multiplied. Rising energy requirements, needed to propel the domestic economy, a vibrant diaspora in the Gulf countries, and the importance of keeping sea lanes open propelled India to re-establish its longstanding relationship with the Arab Gulf states.

The sentiment in the UAE and Saudi Arabia was also positive. As a former Indian ambassador to Riyadh told me, senior members of the royal family asked, ‘Why has India forgotten us?’ From the Gulf perspective, expanding ties with India made sense. Delhi was a significant market for Gulf oil, as well as an emerging Asian power with a shared maritime geography. At the same time, an expanding services sector made India an attractive economic partner.

The terrorist attacks on Mumbai in 2008 created firmer political ground for India-Gulf ties. For a long time, royals in Riyadh had been sympathetic to Islamabad’s argument over the Kashmir issue. However, as terrorists struck Mumbai in 2008, the Gulf monarchies quickly perceived the attacks as a case of state-sponsored terrorism against civilians; in their eyes, this had nothing to do with any ‘popular uprising’ in Kashmir.

The perpetrators had arrived in Mumbai via the maritime route. The Persian Gulf littoral was closer to Karachi than Mumbai. As a senior Indian diplomat serving in the region put it, ‘A point that particularly worried the Gulf was that they were next door to Pakistan. India is far away compared to the Gulf and has a navy. Yet [India] was wounded. What about us? We can’t sustain such an attack’. Moreover, for many royals in the Gulf, ‘the attack was very personal. The Taj Hotel has an iconic status in the Gulf. Many people in the Gulf had lived in the Taj since childhood’.

Witnessing the terror attack live on their television screens had a powerful impact on the political elite in the Gulf monarchies. Following the attacks, India initiated intelligence and security cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in counter-terrorism in quick succession.

From India’s perspective, 2014 marked a pivotal point in the country’s foreign policy outlook with the assumption of office by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He demonstrated a willingness to rethink India’s engagement with the world. After this point, the legacy of the Raj began to shape India’s external outlook more forcefully. Breaking away from past conventions, Modi made the Gulf states an immediate foreign policy priority. Since 2014, Modi’s successive visits to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain have infused personal political capital in these relationships. India’s new enthusiasm for cooperating with Israel also fits well with the cooperation between Israel and the moderate Gulf Arab monarchies, such as the UAE and Bahrain. While Saudi Arabia may not publicly voice it, given the situation in Gaza, Riyadh shares Delhi’s affinity for Tel Aviv.

During his visits to regional countries, Modi pays homage to martyred Indian soldiers who died in the world wars fighting for British India. Modi’s visits are an implicit acknowledgement of British India’s role in the Indian Ocean region in the pre-1947 period. For example, during his 2017 visit to Israel, Modi paid tribute at the Indian War Cemetery in Haifa. He acknowledged the role played by Indian soldiers from Mysore, Hyderabad and Jodhpur who ‘liberated’ Haifa in the First World War. In 2023, during his visit to Egypt, Modi went to the the Heliopolis Memorial to commemorate the 4,000 Indian soldiers who died fighting for British India in the Middle Eastern theatre during the First World War.

Two years earlier, India’s external affairs minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, made his own visit to pay tribute to Indian soldiers who lost their lives during the First World War at the Talpiot Cemetery in Israel. Jaishankar has also publicly spoken about British India’s role in shaping the geopolitical equilibrium in Asia. In 2021, he made the first explicit articulation, by any Indian minister, of British India’s strategic relevance in the Gulf and the broader Indian Ocean region, while discussing the sacrifices made by Indian soldiers in the Gallipoli Campaign during the First World War.

It is worth quoting Jaishankar in full:

You are all aware that during World War I, over 1.3 million Indians served overseas at the cost of 74,000 casualties… From the trenches of the Western Front to the deserts of Mesopotamia, from Central Asia to East Africa, Indian valour and fortitude were in evidence across vast geographies of conflict…

Gallipoli is, of course, but one – even though an important – example of India’s global military footprint in the modern era. The World Wars revived opportunities for far-off deployments of Indian power after a considerable gap in its history. But they do remind us of two underlying truths: one, the seamless nature of the world, and two, the global impact of India. Both realities were unfortunately obfuscated by recent history that divided the world into artificial compartments, even while downsizing Indian power…India is today in the midst of reclaiming history and reasserting its interests beyond orthodox silos. It is evident in the Act East policy, the Indo-Pacific vision, reviving ties with the Gulf and West Asia, and the outreach to Africa. It is equally clear that connectivity – a connectivity that Gallipoli so strongly symbolises – has become even more salient in the 21st-century Great Game. As Indians look at the world with fresher and clearer eyes, global battlefields where we have shed blood to determine momentous outcomes are both a reminder and an inspiration.

For an Indian minister to allude to historical events where Indians have ‘shed blood’ for advancing British causes would be labelled blasphemous even a few years ago. Yet, as Jaishankar’s speech shows, a good place to begin thinking about India’s expanding role on the international stage is to revisit the history of British India. The ghosts of Curzon and Caroe haunt the corridors of New Delhi.

Structural factors like maritime security cooperation also carry a slight tinge of British Indian thinking in our times. Consider Oman. Following its long history of ties with British India, Muscat became the first Gulf Arab country to promote naval cooperation with independent India after 1947. Oman’s position at the entrance of the Gulf of Oman and onwards to the Persian Gulf makes it crucial for any major seapower. Muscat is also the first regional player to conduct biennial military exercises with all three services of the Indian military. In 2018, the Indian Navy was granted access to the deep-sea port of Duqm under a broad logistics agreement. Delhi’s maritime cooperation with the UAE and Saudi Arabia has also grown gradually over the last few years.

Meanwhile, Delhi has conducted regional maritime operations during times of crisis. In 2019, 23 Indian naval vessels were deployed in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman to protect the country’s vital sea lanes of communication as regional uncertainty escalated. Again, in early 2024, the Indian Navy deployed 12 warships in the western Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden for anti-piracy operations to counter Houthi rebels and Somali pirates operating in regional waters.

Apart from directly safeguarding India’s commercial and security interests, Delhi’s growing presence also aims to balance China’s increasing influence in the broader Arabian Sea region. What Russia was to Curzon, China is to Jaishankar. As a former Indian ambassador to Oman argued, ‘India is concerned about the southern and western Indian Ocean. So our understanding is that the Australians don’t have that reach. The Japanese are not interested, because they have problems in their region. And as the US concentrates on that side, it will be India which will have to bear the responsibility of the western Indian Ocean, right up to the coast of Africa and even beyond.’

Invoking Curzon and Caroe does not imply that India has the intention to assume any responsibilities as a regional security guarantor for the Gulf in the same way that British India once did, at least not in the foreseeable future. Nor is India nostalgic about bygone empires. Indians are fiercely protective of their independent identity (as are the Arab Gulf states). Nonetheless, the ideas that animated Curzon and Caroe refuse to be forgotten. The centrality of India in the Indian Ocean region will, sooner or later, compel it to play a greater security role in its peripheral areas. As India’s economic size and interests grow, its security perimeter will expand accordingly. It is a case of when, not if.

Reflecting on the perennial dilemma of Indian policymakers perched in Delhi, a former foreign secretary and national security advisor said, ‘We have too much history for our own good’. Perhaps, therein lies the rub.