India just became the most important country in South Asia’s energy crisis. And its neighbours know it.
While the world’s shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz remain effectively closed to most nations, with Iran blocking US and Israeli linked vessels and the broader threat environment keeping commercial traffic at near zero, India has quietly negotiated something extraordinary. A safe corridor. A designated route along Iran’s coastline. A permitting process that allows Indian ships, and Indian ships specifically, to transit the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.
Twenty two Indian ships are scheduled to transit. Twenty of them are critical to India’s energy security. Nine have already exited Iran’s corridor. At least one tanker passed through after a payment of two million dollars. And all of this happened because Prime Minister Modi picked up the phone and called Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on March 12 and the two countries started talking while the rest of the world was shut out.
The question that India’s neighbours are now asking, quietly, urgently, and with no good alternatives, is simple.
Can we use India’s corridor too?
What India Has That Its Neighbours Do Not
India’s ability to negotiate directly with Iran and secure passage for its ships is not an accident. It is the product of decades of deliberate foreign policy choices that its neighbours, particularly Pakistan, either could not or did not make.
India never fully joined the Western sanctions regime against Iran. While the United States pressured New Delhi to reduce its Iranian oil purchases, India maintained the diplomatic relationship, kept the Chabahar Port project alive, and never positioned itself as an adversary of Tehran. When every Western nation and US ally was publicly condemning Iran, India maintained what its foreign policy establishment calls strategic autonomy, a studied neutrality that keeps doors open that others have shut.
That neutrality is now paying dividends that no amount of military alliance or Western partnership could have delivered. Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has been explicit, the Strait of Hormuz is operational but Iran will not allow US and Israeli linked ships to pass. The corridor is for friends. And India, in Iran’s current assessment, is a friend.
Pakistan, by contrast, occupies a far more complicated position in Iran’s strategic calculus. The two countries share a border and a history of tension, from proxy conflicts to sectarian friction to the ongoing instability in Balochistan that touches both sides of the frontier. Pakistan’s deep military and financial ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival, make it a particularly unlikely candidate for Iranian goodwill in the current moment. The same Gulf states whose oil Pakistan desperately needs are the states Iran views as complicit in the conflict or aligned with its enemies.
Sri Lanka and Bangladesh face a different problem. They are smaller, less diplomatically significant, and have no special relationship with Iran that would give Tehran any incentive to extend similar corridor privileges. They are not enemies of Iran. But they are not friends in the way India has positioned itself either.
The Numbers That Make This Urgent
To understand why India’s neighbours are watching the Hormuz situation with something approaching desperation, you need to understand what the corridor closure has already done to their energy economics.
Pakistan imports virtually all of its crude oil. Its foreign exchange reserves are critically low. It has been operating under IMF programme constraints that limit its ability to absorb energy price shocks. Petrol prices in Pakistan rose 25 percent in the three weeks between February 23 and March 16, one of the sharpest increases anywhere in the world. A prolonged Hormuz closure does not just raise Pakistan’s petrol prices. It threatens to make fuel simply unavailable at any price if Gulf crude cannot reach Pakistani ports.
Sri Lanka, which experienced a catastrophic economic collapse in 2022 triggered partly by a foreign exchange crisis that left it unable to pay for fuel imports, has no margin for error on energy supply. The memory of queues stretching for kilometres outside petrol stations, of hospitals running out of power, and of an entire economy grinding to a halt is still raw. Another energy supply disruption of that magnitude, in a country that is only beginning to stabilise, could be politically and economically devastating.
Bangladesh, the world’s largest garment exporter, runs its factories on energy that depends on stable Gulf supply chains. A prolonged disruption to its fuel imports does not just raise costs. It threatens the export engine that underpins the entire economy.
All three countries are watching India’s Hormuz corridor with the same thought. If India can get ships through, can India get our ships through too?
The Modi Pezeshkian Call and What Actually Happened
The diplomatic mechanics of how India secured its corridor access matter because they reveal the template that any other country would need to follow and why most cannot.
On March 12, Prime Minister Modi called Iranian President Pezeshkian directly. It was not a public call conducted through diplomatic press releases and formal communiques. It was a direct leader to leader conversation at a moment when most world leaders were not talking to Tehran at all.
Following that call, negotiations began regarding passage for 24 Indian ships. The arrangement that emerged required Indian vessels to take an unusual route, hugging Iran’s coastline, passing around Larak Island, through Iranian territorial waters, so that the IRGC Navy and port authorities could visually confirm each vessel’s identity. Ships were asked to cluster together to make them easier to monitor. The route was designed not just to allow passage but to keep the transiting vessels close to Iran’s coastal security infrastructure, providing Tehran with the reassurance that nothing passing through its corridor could be used against it.
One tanker paid two million dollars for passage. The financial dimension of the corridor, whether it represents a formal tariff or an informal arrangement, is significant for understanding whether other countries could access it at a price.
Could India Act as a Transit Hub
Here is where the analysis becomes genuinely interesting and where India’s neighbours are focusing their attention.
If Iran’s corridor is specifically permitting Indian flagged or Indian controlled vessels, could those vessels theoretically carry cargo destined for third countries? Could an Indian shipping company load Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi fuel requirements onto an Indian vessel, transit Hormuz under India’s corridor arrangement, and deliver to a regional port from which the cargo is distributed onward?
This is not a hypothetical that requires significant imagination. India did something structurally similar with Russian oil after the Ukraine war sanctions. When Western sanctions effectively closed direct Russian oil purchases for many countries, Indian refineries bought Russian crude at a discount, refined it, and sold refined petroleum products into global markets, including to countries that could not buy Russian crude directly. India became, in effect, a processing and transit hub for Russian energy that the West had attempted to isolate.
The Iran situation has structural similarities. India has access. Its neighbours do not. The question is whether India will use that access purely for its own energy security or whether it will quietly, through commercial rather than political channels, allow that access to benefit the broader region.
What Pakistan Would Have to Ask and What That Would Cost
For Pakistan specifically, approaching India for help with Hormuz access represents a diplomatic reversal of almost unimaginable proportions.
The two countries have fought four wars. They have not had normal trade relations for years. The political relationship is defined by mutual suspicion, the Kashmir dispute, cross border terrorism accusations, and a military standoff that has never fully resolved. Pakistani politicians who publicly advocated buying energy from India, at normal times, in normal circumstances, have faced severe domestic political backlash.
And yet the logic of geography, energy economics, and the current crisis is pointing toward exactly that conversation. Pakistan needs oil. India has access to the oil’s transit route. The price of Pakistani pride, in a prolonged Hormuz closure, is measured in fuel queues and blackouts and an IMF programme that could collapse if the energy import bill becomes unmanageable.
Whether Pakistan’s political establishment can bring itself to have that conversation, even quietly, even through back channels, even framed as a commercial rather than a political arrangement, is one of the most interesting geopolitical questions to emerge from the Iran conflict.
What India Should Do and What It Probably Will Do
India’s instinct, consistent with decades of strategic autonomy doctrine, will be to keep its Hormuz corridor firmly in the service of its own energy security first. Twenty of the twenty two ships in India’s current corridor arrangement are vessels critical to India’s own energy needs. The priority is clear.
But India is also a country that has been trying to position itself as the leader of the Global South, the voice of developing nations in a world increasingly divided between Western and non Western blocs. Refusing to share the benefits of its Iran corridor with smaller, more vulnerable neighbours while positioning itself as a champion of the developing world would be a contradiction that its foreign policy establishment will not miss.
The most likely outcome is a quiet, commercially structured arrangement, not a formal announcement, not a diplomatic fanfare, but a gradual expansion of what moves through India’s corridor that benefits regional neighbours while maintaining plausible deniability about the political dimensions of the arrangement.
India did not announce it was becoming a hub for Russian oil. It simply became one. The Hormuz corridor may follow the same pattern.
The Bigger Picture
Iran giving India a special pass at Hormuz while blocking US and Israeli linked ships is one of the most consequential individual diplomatic developments of the current conflict. It reveals that even in the middle of a war, geopolitical relationships that have been built over decades through patient, principled neutrality have real and immediate value.
India’s neighbours are watching. Some are envious. Some are desperate. And at least one, Pakistan, is facing the extraordinary possibility that the country it has defined itself in opposition to for seventy five years may hold the key to keeping its lights on and its petrol stations open.
The Strait of Hormuz has always been a chokepoint for the world’s energy supply. In March 2026, it has also become a mirror, reflecting back, with uncomfortable clarity, which countries built relationships that matter and which ones did not.
India built those relationships. Its neighbours are now learning what that is worth.