India Discovers the Diplomatic Downside of Being Best Friends With Both Netanyahu and a Country He Subsequently Goes to War With

Prime Minister Modi’s February Israel Visit Produces Effusive Hugs, ‘Great Friend’ Declarations, and Days Later a Regional War Affecting India’s Cooking Gas

Bohiney.com | The London Prat

NEW DELHI, India – In late February 2026, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Israel for two days of meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which Netanyahu praised Modi as his ‘great friend,’ Modi distributed his signature hugs with the enthusiasm that has become his diplomatic trademark, and both leaders posed for photographs suggesting that the India-Israel relationship was in excellent health. Three days after Modi returned to New Delhi, Israel and the United States launched military operations against Iran, which immediately restricted movement through the Strait of Hormuz, which immediately affected global oil shipping, which immediately affected India’s supply of cooking gas and petroleum, which immediately affected the 140 crore Indians who use cooking gas and petroleum, which immediately produced memes.

The sequence was not subtle. India found itself in the position of a country whose closest ally in one relationship had just started a war with a country whose energy supplies India depended on, at a moment when India’s Prime Minister had just publicly embraced the ally’s leader and been photographed looking extremely supportive. The foreign policy calculation that produces these moments – maintaining multiple bilateral relationships with countries that are adversaries of each other, which is the standard position of a major non-aligned power with global economic interests – is sensible in principle and awkward in execution when the adversaries decide to start shooting at each other within 72 hours of a diplomatic visit.

The Fuel Crunch

India imports approximately 85 percent of its crude oil, with significant volumes coming from the Middle East and transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s restrictions on shipping movement in response to the military campaign raised insurance costs and created supply uncertainty that translated, in the domestic market, into higher petrol and cooking gas prices and the specific social anxiety that accompanies the possibility of fuel shortages in an economy where LPG cylinders are a household necessity and petrol price increases are immediately visible at every filling station. The Modi government, which had built significant political capital on its cooking gas distribution programme, found the programme’s beneficiaries paying more per cylinder at the precise moment that its leader’s diplomacy had most visibly aligned India with the party responsible for the situation.

Social media users expressed this irony with the creativity that Indian internet culture brings to political humor. A satirist reworked a popular hymn to appeal to Modi to use his friendship with Netanyahu to resolve India’s fuel crunch, which is both genuinely funny and a fairly precise description of the only diplomatic lever available: Modi asking his great friend to do something about the war he had just started. Cartoonists drew Modi wearing a gag. Comedians mimicked his hugs. The government asked platforms to take down the content. The fuel remained expensive. The Strait of Hormuz remained restricted. These things are not related except that they all happened because of the same war, and the humor and the censorship and the fuel prices are all downstream of a geopolitical event that India’s government neither caused nor could control but whose effects it now has to manage while its leader’s diplomatic photographs continue to circulate.

India’s Strategic Position

India’s broader strategic challenge – maintaining relationships with the United States and Israel while also maintaining economic links with Iran, Russia, and the Arab world – is one of the defining features of its foreign policy for the past several decades and one that has generally been managed with considerable diplomatic skill. The current moment is more difficult than most, because the war is not a distant conflict affecting India indirectly but an active military campaign whose first-order economic effects are felt in Indian households. The Hindu has covered India’s diplomatic maneuvering with the sustained attention the paper brings to foreign policy, noting that India has avoided taking a public position on the war while seeking to protect its economic interests through bilateral discussions with all relevant parties. This is the correct strategic approach and produces the specific image of a government simultaneously not commenting on a war and paying more for the fuel the war has made expensive.

The ADB’s April 2026 economic outlook noted India’s growth forecast at 6.9 percent despite the energy shock, with lower US tariffs on Indian goods providing some offsetting benefit to the negative pressures. India is the exception in a regional growth slowdown. That its government is simultaneously managing fuel prices, satirist crackdowns, a diplomatic awkwardness with Israel, and an AI summit that produced one Guinness record and one robot dog is the condition of governing a country of 1.4 billion people in a complex world, and reflects both the ambition and the daily reality that exist simultaneously in the same administration’s in-tray.

The India-Israel relationship’s future in the shadow of the war is genuinely uncertain. India has significant interests in the Middle East across its diaspora community of approximately eight million Indian workers, its energy imports, and its trade routes. It also has a longstanding position of solidarity with the Palestinian cause dating from the non-aligned movement that previous governments maintained alongside ties with Israel. The current government has moved India closer to Israel than any prior Indian government while also maintaining the formal position of supporting Palestinian statehood. How these positions are managed when Israel is conducting a regional war that India’s population is directly paying for in fuel prices is one of the more complex foreign policy challenges of the Modi government’s current term, and the memes are the public’s compressed, satirical version of a genuinely complicated question about whose friendship India is buying and at what price.

For more satirical brilliance visit Private Eye. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/