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When Iran and the United States finally signed the “Islamabad Memorandum,” the name of the agreement itself told an uncomfortable story for India. Pakistan – a state with a weaker economy, difficult international reputation and a history of instability – had become the principal channel between Tehran and Washington. Pakistani officials transmitted proposals, hosted negotiations, maintained communication with Iran, coordinated with Gulf governments and cultivated access to the Trump administration. The ensuing agreement bore the country’s capital’s name.

New Delhi, meanwhile, watched from the margins.

India had greater economic stakes in the conflict than Pakistan: It depended heavily on energy supplies passing through the Strait of Hormuz, had millions of citizens living and working across the Persian Gulf, claimed a strategic interest in Chabahar, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the International North-South Transport Corridor and maintained relations with Iran, Israel and US, frequently presenting this diplomatic reach as evidence of ‘strategic autonomy.’ Yet, when these relationships should have created influence, India possessed little.

The contrast between Islamabad and New Delhi exposes a deeper flaw in Indian foreign policy. India’s strategy of multi-alignment was designed to prevent dependence on any single power, allowing New Delhi to work simultaneously with competing states. Instead, in West Asia, it increasingly became selective alignment. Relations with Israel and US acquired political priority, while relations with Iran were reduced to cautious diplomacy, delayed infrastructure projects and abandoned economic mechanisms.

The Iran war revealed the price of this choice.

The cost of selective alignment

Academic debates on Indian foreign policy have long revolved around the transition from non-alignment to strategic autonomy and, more recently, multi-alignment. Ian Hall described multi-alignment as an effort to build multiple partnerships without entering binding alliances or surrendering independent decision-making. Its purpose was not neutrality, but to maximise India’s room for manoeuvre by ensuring that no single partnership excluded cooperation with another.

Other scholars have stressed continuity in India’s West Asia policy. Nicolas Blarel, for example, argued that Indian governments often compartmentalised regional relationships, developing ties with Israel, Iran and the Arab states separately rather than treating the region through a single ideological framework. Such compartmentalisation allowed India to work with adversarial states at the same time.

Also read: Modi’s Embrace of Netanyahu: The Strategic Bankruptcy of Spectacle Diplomacy

Under Narendra Modi’s government, however, another element became prominent. Hall’s work on the reinvention of Indian foreign policy shows how Hindu nationalist ideas, status seeking and domestic political communication increasingly shaped New Delhi’s external relations. Foreign policy was no longer only an exercise in balancing material interests, but also a part of a civilisational narrative about a more assertive and ideologically self-confident India. Israel occupied a special place within this transformation.

The relationship was no longer managed quietly as a useful defence and intelligence partnership. It became highly public, personalised and politically symbolic. The ideological affinity between Hindutva and Israeli nationalism – their shared language of civilisational threat and terrorism........

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