Houthi forces attacked the cargo vessel Tihamah near the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait on 11 August 2026, killing six people, according to Yemen’s internationally recognised government. The attack came barely two weeks after Saudi Arabia announced a 14-nation maritime defence alliance to protect shipping through the strait, the Gulf of Aden and the wider Red Sea corridor. What began in February as a war confined to the Strait of Hormuz has now acquired a second front.
For energy-importing states like India, the immediate concern is how far the crisis will spread and how long the disruption will last.
Widening War at Sea
The Hormuz crisis began with the strikes by the United States (US) and Israel on Iran on 28 February 2026, which targeted Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Tehran retaliated by declaring the Strait of Hormuz closed to shipping, and Iranian forces began laying mines in the waterway. Iran also authorised the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to board, and even attack, non-compliant vessels. The move intensified the confrontation and made wider maritime escalation harder to contain.
On 13 April, the US imposed a naval blockade on Iran, targeting vessels travelling to and from Iranian ports. On 5 May, Iran established what it called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority to regulate transit through the strait. That step followed Tehran’s late-March outreach to the Houthi movement, aimed at opening a second maritime front if pressure on Hormuz failed to produce concessions. Thereafter, commodity-vessel transits through Bab-el-Mandeb reportedly fell. Saudi tankers began reversing course mid-transit and rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope. Several vessels also switched off their automatic identification systems (AIS) to pass undetected.
The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement among Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan suggests that the southern Red Sea threat is increasingly viewed as part of the wider war’s maritime theatre rather than as an isolated security problem.
Another alarming development came on 10 September 2026, when Houthi forces captured the port city of Mocha and advanced along the coast towards the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. This territorial shift expands the Houthis’ capacity to influence and interdict shipping passing through the strait. Markets reacted immediately, with Brent crude rising to US$102 per barrel on 8 October 2026. Although the Houthis have claimed they would target only Saudi-linked ships in the Red Sea, ships may be owned, operated or insured by companies in different countries, leaving considerable room for miscalculation.
A Two-chokepoint Crisis
The Bab-el-Mandeb spillover does more than add another risk to an already disrupted energy corridor. Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb are the entry and exit points of a single maritime system linking the Gulf to the Mediterranean and beyond. Until now, shippers have absorbed the disruption at one strait by rerouting more heavily through the other. If both straits become inaccessible simultaneously, that flexibility disappears. A disruption once manageable through rerouting is now becoming a more fundamental interruption of the corridor.
The Bab-el-Mandeb spillover does more than add another risk to an already disrupted energy corridor.
The principal maritime alternative in such a scenario is the long passage around the Cape of Good Hope, which can add roughly two to three weeks to a voyage, depending on the route, and raise fuel, insurance and charter costs. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) recorded 69 attacks on shipping in the Red Sea between November 2023 and September 2024. The attacks disrupted shipping but did not cause a sustained closure of the strait. The crucial difference is that the present crisis sits atop an already disrupted Hormuz rather than a normally functioning corridor.
A risk that could previously be contained within the region could now disrupt global maritime trade.
Implications for India
India imports close to 90 percent of its crude requirements, a dependence that left it exposed when the Hormuz disruption began. Within weeks, the Middle Eastern share of its import volumes collapsed. Total crude imports nonetheless reached record levels during this period, sustained by a surge in supplies from Russia, Venezuela, the US and African countries.
This diversification, however, does not insulate India from a Bab-el-Mandeb spillover. The shift away from Middle Eastern suppliers reduces India’s dependence on a single set of producers without necessarily reducing its dependence on the maritime routes linking its new suppliers to India.
Much of the alternative sourcing now sustaining Indian refineries still depends on corridors running through or near the Red Sea, whether directly or through onward shipment to European and Gulf-adjacent markets. New Delhi’s strategic petroleum reserve compounds this vulnerability. The reserve facilities alone provide a buffer of around 9.5 days of crude requirements, while India’s total crude and petroleum storage capacity, including stocks held by oil marketing companies, amounts to around 74 days of cover.
The shift away from Middle Eastern suppliers reduces India’s dependence on a single set of producers without necessarily reducing its dependence on the maritime routes linking its new suppliers to India.
India has also borne a considerable human cost. Indian seafarers are among the largest national contingents in the global merchant fleet, with close to 18,000 serving in the Gulf region alone. By June, at least seven Indian seafarers had reportedly been killed since the war began. These deaths occurred in a conflict in which India is not a belligerent, a reminder that the human cost of chokepoint concentration often falls on the labour that keeps corridors running, not only on the states contesting them.
India’s connectivity ambitions face a related vulnerability. Both the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and the Chabahar-anchored International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) were conceived to reduce dependence on existing maritime and overland chokepoints. Yet the present crisis shows how difficult it is to insulate connectivity networks from instability across the wider region. A Bab-el-Mandeb spillover therefore puts both of India’s principal connectivity ambitions at risk.
Towards a Hedging Strategy
India’s response to the Hormuz crisis demonstrated the value of rapid, reactive diversification. If both chokepoints become contested simultaneously, diversification will have to move beyond the ad hoc measures adopted during the Hormuz disruption. Three lessons emerge for India.
The first is contractual. India should use the diversification of its crude suppliers to lock in longer-term arrangements with producers in West Africa, Latin America and North America. The second is storage. India’s strategic petroleum reserve remains too shallow to absorb a prolonged disruption on two maritime fronts. The third is naval. The Indian Navy’s Operation Sankalp is a useful starting point, but India’s escort and surveillance architecture will need to cover the approaches to Bab-el-Mandeb as well as the Gulf.
India’s response to the Hormuz crisis demonstrated the value of rapid, reactive diversification. If both chokepoints become contested simultaneously, diversification will have to move beyond the ad hoc measures adopted during the Hormuz disruption.
The Cape of Good Hope route also deserves reconsideration—not as a last-resort fallback but as a corridor New Delhi cultivates through deeper ports and refining partnerships across the West and Southern African coastlines.
Diplomacy offers India another form of insurance. India maintains simultaneous channels to Iran, the Gulf states, Israel and the United States. This reflects its longstanding commitment to strategic autonomy and gives it room to hedge in ways that more formally aligned powers cannot.
The crisis therefore exposes a deeper vulnerability: not any single strait, but India’s dependence on a handful of maritime corridors for its energy security. For Indian foreign policy, the Hormuz crisis presents a test: whether India will use this shock to diversify its corridors for good, or fall back on reactive improvisation once the immediate threat subsides.
Abhishek Mishra is an Associate Fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA).
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