Whether the Iran war escalates into a more devastating confrontation or cools into a diplomatic mode this week, one fact is now beyond dispute: The Gulf has moved decisively to the very top of India’s strategic priorities. Geography alone should have made this happen long ago. The Gulf is not a distant theatre; it is India’s immediate neighbourhood, separated only by a narrow stretch of water and tied to the Subcontinent through deep economic, social, and security ties. India’s approach to the current war suggests that Delhi will no longer treat the Gulf as a peripheral region.

The Gulf’s new centrality also revives an older debate in modern India’s strategic imagination — the contest between the so‑called “Bombay School” and “Ludhiana School”. The terms may sound strange to contemporary ears, but they capture two enduring ways of thinking about India’s geopolitics.

The story begins in the late 18th century, when the British Raj, newly ascendant in the Subcontinent, confronted a dramatic external shock: Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798. His ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East exposed the vulnerability of the Indian empire’s western approaches. The result was the birth of the “Great Game”, the prolonged contest between Britain and its European rivals for influence across the territorial arc from the Levant to the Hindu Kush. Out of this crucible emerged two distinct strategic visions. Both saw the need for defending India well beyond its territorial borders. They diverged on questions of geographic focus and policy instruments.

The Bombay School, shaped by the commercial dynamism of the emerging Parsi and Gujarati........

© Indian Express