For decades, India's foreign policy in the Gulf defied explanation. From the oil boom of the 1970s until Manmohan Singh took office in 2004, the density of India's interactions with the region, be it in the form of migration, financial remittances, or trade, surpassed by multiple orders of magnitude India's diplomatic and strategic ties with the Gulf states. Bureaucratic lethargy, the legacy of the Cold War, the lasting effect of Nehruvian non-alignment, and religiously rooted solidarity with Pakistan have been cited as factors that explain this puzzling feature of India's foreign relations in the Gulf. The rapid improvement in India's relations with the Gulf states during the Manmohan Singh years has proved no less puzzling. India's sudden interest in the region has been attributed to the improvement in relations with the US in the wake of the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal and to the desire of the Gulf states to cultivate partnerships eastwards in Asia.

But such factors pale by comparison to the size of India's economic and security interests in the region. During the 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, India carried out the largest airlift in history by evacuating over 170,000 Indian nationals who had escaped Kuwait via Iraq to Jordan. International sanctions placed on Iraq and occupied Kuwait cut India off from its two main suppliers of crude oil and forced it to purchase oil from the spot market at a massive premium, driving it to the brink of default. The 1990–91 Gulf crisis was ample demonstration that India's own economic and security interests were closely intertwined with those of the region, a lesson that has remained with Indian policymakers. Since then, India's dependence on energy imports from the region, the size of its diaspora, and the financial remittances they send home to their families have grown precipitously. Why India's foreign policy may have neglected the Gulf region, and why the region may then have captured the attention of Indian foreign policymakers, are among some of the questions that this volume seeks to answer.