DC Edit | India Needs To Stand By All Citizens Stuck In War Zones

India has often stressed that sea lanes like the Strait of Hormuz must always be kept open. Each time an event has taken place endangering the shipping lanes out of West Asia, which has historically offered free passage for global trade, India has protested but without so much as raising a modicum of sympathy for the seafarers who have risked becoming collateral damage in a war that has nothing to do with them.

The waters around Iran and Oman and the Strait of Hormuz today are like floating prisons in which over 1,500 ships are dawdling, unsure of whose orders to follow to attempt navigation or simply stay put regardless of the discomfort caused to sailors and loss to shipowners and operators.

Neither the US whose President Donald Trump started this Iran war on February 28 in tandem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Iran appears concerned about innocent people dying in the waters or in Gulf nations like Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar on which Iran rained missiles because they host American military bases. There have been fatalities among people of 20 nationalities in the Iran war.

India has suffered quite a bit of collateral damage among the neutral nations that have nought to do with the fighting ever since a match was lit in the tinder box of a region with an Iran proxy in the Hamas of the Gaza Strip running a bloodcurdling raid into Israel on October 7, 2023. The diplomatic protests lodged with the US, which attacked three ships sailing under the flags of various nations in four days this week, have caused no ripples. India’s condemnation of Iranian attacks on Gulf nations in which Indians also died has largely been ignored.

The best thing that could happen now is that the principal antagonists in the US and Iran come to some kind of early agreement on ending one of the most foolish wars ever waged in the West Asian region that has stuck out like a sore thumb in an otherwise largely peaceful world. It is no more a question of who or what started the latest conflagration. The only way forward is for everyone involved, most of all Israel, which has destroyed Gaza and is waging a war in southern Lebanon and sometimes targeting Beirut, to arrive at the simple conclusion that there are no winners, and only losers in a modern war.

Mr. Trump may have dropped a huge hint of peace when he called off a two-day renewed aerial assault on Iranian military targets. Scepticism is a natural enough corollary considering someone calculated this may be the 38th occasion on which he is saying that Iran wants a deal so badly that it is even prepared to hand over to a third party its enriched uranium. However, optimism springs eternal, as evidenced on this occasion in stock markets bouncing back and crude oil prices declining.

The reopening of the Hormuz is said to be one of the points in the draft proposals that form negotiating points in the promised peace deal. To ensure that it remains open without any conditions or toll collection is important for world trade in which all nations are involved. As the combatants weaponised the waters of the strait in a blockade and a counter blockade, they might see it as a minor point. It is India that must be seen backing its citizens who are at risk more, by way of generous compensation to the kin of those killed in the Iran war. It is not enough to ask ship owners and maritime organisations to pay solatium.