A four-term MP and former UN Under-Secretary-General argues that India's decades-old posture of deliberate ambiguity in West Asia — treating the region as an economic hinterland rather than a strategic theatre — is reaching the end of its useful life.

The author's central argument is that the geopolitical conditions that made India's transactional posture workable have changed on two axes: American retrenchment and the emergence of new regional security architectures that exclude India.

• US "selective engagement": the argument that Washington's withdrawal from a guarantor role has created a "security vacuum" is contested but analytically significant. The collapse of the US-led regional security architecture after the 2003 Iraq War, the JCPOA withdrawal, and the uneven responses to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping have all contributed to this perception.
• The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement — the specific trigger for this piece — is described as bringing together Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan into a collective defence arrangement. The author presents this as a hard-power realignment that India should read as a structural signal, not an isolated event. The pact links Gulf capital, Turkish naval and defence-technology capabilities, and Pakistani military manpower.
• India's absence: West Asian capitals, the author argues, no longer treat non-alignment or multi-alignment as a virtue. They seek security partners with credible hard-power commitments — and if India does not offer them, others will fill that role.

Figure 1 — The Gulf region: key states, chokepoints and India's stakes

The six GCC states plus Iraq form the core of India's West Asian engagement — oil supplier, remittance source, diaspora home and the land corridor for IMEC. The Strait of Hormuz (right edge) carries roughly 20% of global oil trade.

• Active maritime security partnerships at the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Oman, Gulf of Aden, Bab-el-Mandeb and the waters off the Somali coast — through joint patrols, permanent logistics-access arrangements and interoperable surveillance networks.
• Defence manufacturing and technology as leverage: offering Gulf states Indian platforms (BrahMos, Pinaka are named) and embedding bilateral and "minilateral" security frameworks with the UAE, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
• Strategic deterrence without Cold War-style entanglement — the stated aim is a "deterrence web" that safeguards Indian interests and reassures partners without locking India into the obligations of a formal alliance.
• Workforce and diaspora diplomacy as a supporting frame: mutual recognition of qualifications, joint skills programmes.

• Energy fragility: drone strikes on Gulf oil infrastructure (Abqaiq 2019 is the reference case; Houthi strikes have added to this record) demonstrate that even the most capital-intensive facilities remain vulnerable to low-cost asymmetric attacks. India currently imports roughly 85% of its crude; the Gulf accounts for a disproportionate share.
• Diaspora exposure: approximately 9 million Indians live and work in Gulf countries. Regional instability — as experienced during the Kuwait evacuation in 1990 (Operation Pawan in Kuwait / Operation Safed Sagar) — can trigger rapid, costly evacuation requirements. India has successfully evacuated nationals from Yemen (Operation Raahat, 2015) and Lebanon — the operational capability exists, but it is reactive rather than deterrent.
• The IMEC dimension: the piece implicitly frames IMEC security as contingent on Gulf stability. The corridor runs through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, whose security posture the Mecca Agreement is now partly reshaping.
• Supply-chain contagion: the Red Sea disruptions triggered by Houthi operations in 2024–25 added roughly 10–14 days to Asia–Europe shipping via the Cape of Good Hope reroute, sharply raising freight costs and demonstrating exactly the fragility the author describes.

• Multi-alignment is not the same as passivity. India's Operation Raahat (Yemen), its counter-piracy deployments in the Gulf of Aden under the Combined Maritime Forces, and the India–UAE CEPA (2022) and the India–Saudi Arabia Strategic Partnership Council (2019) are evidence of active, if quiet, engagement. The argument conflates diplomatic restraint with strategic absence.
• The "Mecca Agreement" is contested. The pact's precise scope, binding commitments and operational content are not yet clear in open sources. Treating it as a fully formed counter-architecture risks overstating its cohesion — Saudi–Pakistani relations have historically been transactional rather than deeply strategic, and Saudi–Turkish interests diverge on several regional files (Muslim Brotherhood, Libya, Qatar blockade legacy).
• Hard-power projection carries real costs. India's naval capacity, while growing, is already stretched across the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and its own waters. Permanent logistics access in the Gulf would require basing agreements that could complicate India's other relationships, particularly with Iran (Chabahar dependency) and with states that view external military presence with suspicion.
• The Iran factor. Any India–Gulf security architecture that excludes or alienates Iran complicates the Chabahar port project, cuts across India's Eurasian connectivity ambitions via the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), and risks losing the leverage India has historically derived from its neutrality on the Sunni–Shia axis.
• Partisan authorship: Tharoor writes as an Opposition MP and former UN official; his policy preferences should be read alongside the present government's stated approach, which has been to deepen bilateral ties through economic and defence mechanisms rather than formal security architecture.

• GCC — Gulf Cooperation Council: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman.
• Bab-el-Mandeb — strait between Yemen (Djibouti coast) and the Horn of Africa; entry to the Red Sea and Suez route; Houthi operations since October 2023 have effectively disrupted the lane for many carriers.
• Strait of Hormuz — between Iran and Oman; roughly 20% of global oil and about one-third of global LNG pass through it; Iran has threatened closure multiple times.
• IMEC — India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor; announced September 2023 at G20 New Delhi; a railway and sea-lane corridor through UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan/Israel and Greece, intended partly as a BRI alternative.
• Operation Raahat (2015) — India's evacuation of approximately 4,741 Indian nationals and 960 foreign nationals from conflict-affected Yemen, across 26 flights and 7 naval voyages; the largest Indian civilian evacuation since the Gulf War airlift.
• INSTC — International North–South Transport Corridor: India–Iran–Russia–Central Asia rail and road corridor; India's stake in this route constrains how far it can oppose Iranian interests.
• Minilateral — a small, issue-specific coalition of like-minded states, distinct from a treaty alliance; the Quad is the most prominent contemporary example.

A professor who was part of the Law Commission's BIT expert team argues that India is about to revise its 2015 Model BIT without the consultative process that would give the outcome legitimacy — and that this "democratic deficit" is the more serious problem, not just the legal text.

• The 2015 model tilts too far toward the state. The author and others have argued that the model excludes pre-establishment rights (the right to enter and invest, not just protections after investment), imposes a mandatory domestic litigation filter before international arbitration, and so narrows the definition of "investment" that many modern investments — including contractual and intellectual-property claims — may fall outside it.
• What the revised model is expected to address (reported, not confirmed): easier access to international arbitration, stronger and more predictable fair-and-equitable treatment, and investment-facilitation measures that make India a more legible destination for foreign capital.
• The balancing act: pulling the pendulum back toward investor protection without creating the liability exposure India faced under the old treaties — particularly around tax policy, where the retrospective-taxation episode was the proximate cause of several arbitration claims.

The author's more original point is not about what the treaty should say, but about how the revision process should work. He introduces the concept of "democratic deficit" into the BIT debate.

• "Democratic deficit" refers — originating in European debates about EU institutions — to the gap between decisions taken by technocrats or executives and the oversight of elected legislatures or affected citizens. In the treaty context: international economic agreements with binding domestic consequences are negotiated behind closed doors by officials, with limited parliamentary visibility.
• India's constitutional position on treaties: unlike legislation, treaties in India are concluded by the executive under the prerogative power of the Union. Parliament does not ratify trade or investment treaties; it does not vote on them. This places India close to the Westminster tradition but distant from the US system (Senate ratification) or the EU system (European Parliament consent for trade agreements).
• What other countries do:
  • The UK and Australia place negotiated treaty texts before Parliament before ratification, under a "constitutional convention" or statutory requirement (the UK has the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010).
  • Norway held two rounds of public consultation — 2008 and 2015 — on its model BIT.
  • Colombia released its model for public comment.
  • India itself, in March 2015, circulated its draft model BIT for public comment and engaged the Law Commission of India (LCI), which produced its 260th Report with expert recommendations — though not all were incorporated in the final text.
• The four-step process the author recommends:
  1. Form an external expert core team — international lawyers, economists, academics — as a sounding board.
  2. Invite industry bodies, arbitrators, law firms and civil-society organisations to submit views.
  3. Release the draft in the public domain for open comment.
  4. Place the draft on the floor of Parliament and engage relevant parliamentary standing committees — the author chairs the Standing Committee on External Affairs.
• The key qualifier: the process must not be a box-ticking exercise. The author explicitly calls for engagement with dissenting views — an acknowledgment that consultation can be formal without being substantive.

• Foreign investment flows: India attracted USD 70+ billion in FDI in 2023–24. A credible investment protection framework reduces the "regulatory risk premium" that foreign investors build into their cost of capital in India. The EU–India FTA (concluded January 2026) has a separate Investment Protection Agreement still under negotiation — the model BIT revision will shape that negotiation directly.
• Arbitration pipeline: India faces ongoing investment arbitration claims running to several billion dollars. Revising the model prospectively is neutral on existing claims, but a stronger treaty signals India's willingness to be held to higher standards going forward.
• Parliamentary oversight as a constitutional question: the broader issue — whether Parliament should have any role in treaty-making — is an unresolved one in Indian constitutional law. No statute requires parliamentary ratification of trade or investment treaties. This is the "democratic deficit" in the Indian institutional context, distinct from the procedural point about public consultation.

• BIT / Bilateral Investment Treaty — a treaty between two states protecting cross-border investments; typically includes Fair and Equitable Treatment (FET), Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) and National Treatment (NT) clauses, and investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS).
• ISDS — Investor–State Dispute Settlement; allows foreign investors to sue host governments in international arbitration tribunals (ICSID, UNCITRAL rules), bypassing domestic courts.
• Law Commission of India 260th Report — the LCI's review of the draft 2015 model BIT; a notable example of expert statutory oversight of India's treaty-drafting process.
• All-affected principle — in democratic theory, the idea that all those whose interests are affected by a decision should have a role in making it. The author uses it to justify external consultation on the BIT.
• CRAG Act 2010 (UK) — Constitutional Reform and Governance Act; places a statutory duty on the UK government to lay treaties before Parliament for 21 sitting days before ratification.
• UNCTAD — United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; publishes model investment treaties and tracks global BIT networks.