Maj Gen Sanjeev Dogra (Retd)
sanjeev662006@gmail.com
There is a strip of water in the Persian Gulf, barely thirty-three kilometers wide at its narrowest, that has the quiet power to make India’s finance minister stare at the ceiling at two in the morning. The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a geographical feature. It is a pressure valve for the global economy, and right now, with the Iran war escalating, someone has locked it shut. Brent crude has crossed 104 dollars a barrel. Asia’s LNG prices have surged by 143 per cent. Shipping insurance rates have hardened. And somewhere in a Delhi suburb, a family is quietly calculating whether it can still afford the cooking gas cylinder this month.
India imports roughly 85 per cent of its crude oil. That is not a statistic. It is a structural vulnerability wearing a price tag. Every time West Asia catches fire, India pays. Every time a tanker captain recalculates his route, an Indian trucking company rewrites its freight rates. The Iran crisis, in this sense, is not a foreign affair. It has arrived, uninvited, at every Indian kitchen table.
Here is the thing about human beings: we are constitutionally good at adapting. We were not the fastest or strongest, but we had the capacity to look at a changed situation and quietly recalibrate. History is, at its core, the story of inconvenience producing invention. India knows this intimately. In 1991, with foreign exchange reserves covering barely three weeks of imports, the country stared into an economic abyss and leapt into reform. The liberalisation that followed was painful, disorienting, and ultimately transformative. Crisis, in the Indian story, has a peculiar habit of arriving as a threat and departing as a capability.
The most vivid proof of India’s adaptive muscle was the pandemic. In March 2020, a country of 1.4 billion people was told, with approximately four hours’ notice, to stay indoors. Supply chains snapped. Hospitals improvised. And yet, within months, India had the world’s largest vaccine drive underway, administered not by gleaming private hospitals alone but by Anganwadi workers and army nurses in the remotest corners. The jugaad spirit, that distinctly Indian genius for improvisation, ran the country’s pandemic response as much as any official policy did.
The parallel to the current energy crisis is not forced. Covid-19 disrupted supply chains globally; the Hormuz crisis disrupts energy supply chains specifically. The pandemic forced India to build domestic vaccine manufacturing it had previously outsourced; the energy crisis is forcing India to develop domestic energy production it has long deferred. The mechanism is identical: acute external pressure accelerating internal capability that comfort had postponed.
India is not powerless here. It is simply required to play its hand with more intelligence. In the short term, the playbook is familiar: diversify crude sources towards Russia, the United States and West Africa; draw down strategic petroleum reserves; use diplomatic balance to maintain access to Gulf supplies; and resist the temptation to subsidise fuel prices in ways that blow a hole in fiscal accounts. Coal, for all its environmental inelegance, will keep the lights on while the world sorts itself out. Pragmatism, not purity, is the short-term virtue.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj did not defeat the Mughal and Adilshahi empires by fighting them on their preferred terrain. He adapted his warfare to the hills and the monsoon. Strategic adaptation, in the Indian tradition, is not weakness. It is intelligence wearing the clothes of patience. India’s current energy strategy needs exactly this quality. We cannot outmuscle the global oil market. But we can, gradually and deliberately, redesign our economy so that the next Hormuz crisis lands with less force. Every electric bus that displaces diesel demand is a small act of strategic independence. Every gigawatt of solar capacity that reduces thermal dependence is a quiet geopolitical statement. These are not romantic metaphors. They are arithmetic.
The medium- and long-term demand structural redesign, and India has, for once, most of the tools it needs already in hand. The country has crossed 267 gigawatts of installed renewable capacity, with solar and wind now accounting for more than half the national grid. But raw capacity is not the same as resilience. A renewable-heavy grid without adequate storage is like a brilliant student who cannot sit exams under pressure. Expanding battery storage, pumped hydro and smart grid infrastructure is therefore not a peripheral task. It is the central one.
Green hydrogen, backed by nearly twenty thousand crore rupees under the National Green Hydrogen Mission, addresses the sectors that electricity alone cannot reach: steel, fertilisers, shipping and heavy freight. These are the industrial sinews of the economy and they currently run almost entirely on imported fossil fuels. Designated hydrogen hubs at ports like Kandla and Paradip are early chapters in what must become a far longer book. The investment is patient capital, but the payoff is strategic sovereignty in the industries that matter most.
Electric mobility deserves its own mention, because it is the most visible and immediate lever available. India already leads the world in two-wheeler volumes. Accelerating the electrification of that fleet, combined with electric buses on urban routes and electrified freight rail on major corridors, would cut diesel demand in ways that compound over years. The consumer, faced with lower running costs, needs relatively little persuasion. What is needed is charging infrastructure at scale, financing that reaches the middle- and lower-income buyer, and manufacturing capacity that keeps prices honest.
Behind all of this sits a discipline that Indian energy policy has not always maintained: treating the energy transition as a strategic project of the same seriousness as defence modernisation. The funds, the timelines, and the political attention given to security matters must now be extended to energy security. An India that generates its own power, stores it reliably, and moves its goods without perpetual dependence on imported hydrocarbons is an India that no distant strait can hold to ransom.
In the near term, India will manage. It always does. Oil prices will be painful, inflation will tick up, the rupee will test the patience of the Reserve Bank, and the Union Budget will carry quiet scars. But the Indian economy will not collapse from an oil shock of this magnitude. It is large enough, diverse enough, and more domestically anchored than it was a decade ago. Some would argue that this moment, with the Strait of Hormuz under pressure, is precisely the right time to undo the Indus Water Treaty and realign it to tackle the energy crisis. Revisiting an arrangement that has long constrained India’s ability to fully harness its hydropower potential on the northern rivers could unlock vast, clean, and domestically controlled energy capacity, turning a geopolitical constraint into a strategic advantage.
The more consequential question is what India does with the lesson. If this crisis, like its predecessors, is filed under managed and moved on, then the next one will find India in roughly the same structural position: deeply exposed, rapidly improvising, and paying a development tax it cannot easily afford. If, however, this crisis accelerates the transition from fossil fuel dependency to domestic clean energy the way 1991 accelerated economic reform, then the present disruption will have been, in retrospect, a gift in disguise. Unwrapped painfully, but a gift nonetheless.
India has all the ingredients: sunshine in abundance, wind on the coasts, technical talent, and a democratic mandate from a population tired of paying more for the same liter of petrol every few years. What it needs now is the urgency that only genuine crisis supplies and that, at least, the Strait of Hormuz is providing in generous quantities.
India will bend. India always bends. The question, the only interesting question, is whether this time it bends in a direction that actually changes the shape of the problem, rather than simply absorbing the same shock one more time and returning, exhausted, to where it began. History suggests optimism. Caution suggests urgency. And the petrol pump queue, lengthening quietly every morning, suggests we should probably get on with it.
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