The Pulse | Society | South Asia

The Gulf War and Flawed Diplomacy Fuel LPG Crisis in India

While India’s pro-U.S.-Israel position in the war has not drawn public ire, the LPG shortage is becoming an issue in upcoming assembly elections.

A street vendor refuels a motorbike with petrol from a water bottle, Udaipur, India.

On March 16, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee led a massive protest rally in Kolkata. Participants carried cut-outs of cooking gas cylinders and chanted slogans criticizing the Narendra Modi government’s failure in maintaining the supply of Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) across the country in the aftermath of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. “Why didn’t the government prepare an action plan in advance?” asked Banerjee, one of India’s key opposition leaders.

In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin alleged that the “severe LPG cylinder shortage” happened because of the Modi government’s “wrong decisions,” including foreign policy failures. “No foresight. No precautionary measures either. It is the public who suffers trouble because of them,” alleged Stalin. His party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), organized protest rallies across the state on March 15.

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are among four states that will vote in state assembly elections next month. Three of them — West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala — are ruled by opposition parties and Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has limited presence in these states, is desperate to make inroads.

But it is not just the states heading to elections that are seeing protests against the Modi government’s poor preparedness for LPG shortages. Across India, people are angry as they are having to wait in long queues all day to buy cooking gas cylinders.

Cooking gas cylinders, until recently, were easily available. They would be delivered a day after a request for a cylinder was registered. They are now delivered, if at all, after a month and are being sold at higher rates on the black market.

Until recently, the Modi government refused to admit that a crisis was looming. It was only on March 18 that the government acknowledged that the LPG situation in the country was “worrisome.”

Fuel prices haven’t yet been raised at petrol stations, but people are worried. The stock market has been badly hit — roughly $240 billion in investor wealth got wiped out in just about a week as the crisis intensified. The Indian rupee has hit record lows and is trading at about 92.47 rupees per U.S. dollar.

The LPG and fuel crisis in India has been triggered by the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which began on February 28. Both sides have not only targeted military sites but also destroyed oil and gas facilities and infrastructure. Compounding this is the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway through which Gulf oil and gas are transported via tankers to the Arabian Sea and onward to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Iran has targeted tankers traversing the Strait and permitted the tankers of just a few countries to pass through the waterway. This has left Gulf oil producers with no sea route by which to safely deliver oil and LNG.

India, which is deeply connected to West Asia for energy, trade, and migration, imports roughly 85-90 percent of its crude oil and a major part of its LPG/LNG from the region. Over........

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