An Indian national was killed in a Houthi attack on Dammam airport in Saudi Arabia. Since fighting between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis resumed in July 2026, at least two Indians have been killed and 14 wounded, and thousands of Indian pilgrims are stranded. The editorial argues that India should prepare for worst-case scenarios and take a more active diplomatic position.

• Dammam: on Saudi Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast, in the oil-rich Eastern Province.
• Zuqar Island: a Yemeni island in the southern Red Sea, part of the Hanish group, near the Bab-el-Mandeb.
• Prelims hook: Yemen borders Saudi Arabia and Oman, and faces the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.

Figure 2 — Areas of Houthi control in Yemen

The Houthis hold the densely populated west, including Sana’a and the Red Sea coastline facing the Bab-el-Mandeb; the shaded advance in the south-west reflects an assessment as of 14 September. Map courtesy BBC (data: ISW and AEI’s Critical Threats Project); reproduced with credit for educational use.

• Military limits: years of air strikes have not defeated the Houthis, who have built a capable army and naval force; Saudi infrastructure remains exposed to missiles and drones.
• Immediate priority: evacuate stranded pilgrims and prepare contingency plans for the diaspora.
• Diplomatic role: India, which has condemned the Houthi attacks and expressed solidarity with Saudi Arabia, should also work with Arab countries and Iran for a diplomatic settlement; the editorial links peace in the Gulf to de-escalation around Iran.

• Operation Rahat (2015): evacuation of Indians — and many foreign nationals — from Yemen, by sea and air via Djibouti.
• Later operations: Vande Bharat (2020), Ganga (Ukraine, 2022), Kaveri (Sudan, 2023), Ajay (Israel, 2023) and Sindhu (Iran and Israel, 2025).
• Lesson: evacuations depend on advance registration of nationals, standby naval and air assets, and agreements with neighbouring states for transit.

• Strategic autonomy: India maintains ties with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran and Israel at once; taking sides openly could hurt relations with one of them.
• Limited leverage: India is not a direct party and has limited influence over the Houthis; its most practical tools are consular protection and multilateral diplomacy.
• Maritime role: the Indian Navy’s deployments in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden since 2023 show a security contribution without joining coalitions.

The authors argue that India, despite its early advantage in IT services, has not built a presence in frontier AI. They warn that hosting data centres for foreign firms, without capability elsewhere in the AI value chain, risks locking India into its lowest-value link.

• The episode cited: on 12 June 2026, Anthropic suspended access to two of its models to comply with US Department of Commerce export controls; access was restored on 1 July after the controls were lifted on 30 June. (The op-ed names the models as “Claude 3.5 and Claude Mythos”; Anthropic’s own statement identifies them as Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5.)
• The authors’ inference: access to frontier AI may increasingly be governed like other strategic technologies, which strengthens the case for domestic capability.
• Earlier precedent: the US Framework for AI Diffusion (January 2025), which grouped countries into tiers for access to advanced AI chips, was rescinded in May 2025.

• IT model under pressure: India’s services exports grew by customising and maintaining software built abroad; AI that writes, tests and maintains code strikes at this labour advantage.
• Spending is necessary but not sufficient: what matters is a research and innovation ecosystem able to produce home-grown models.
• The “landlord” risk: tax holidays and cheap land, water and power for foreign cloud providers bring construction jobs and imported hardware, but limited value addition.
• Energy cost: round-the-clock data-centre demand may be met partly by coal at night until storage scales up, and the cost of firm power may fall on other consumers.
• Proposal: link State support for data centres to compute-access guarantees, reserved cloud capacity for Indian users, and local linkages in hardware and services.

• Strength: it connects R&D, employment, energy and industrial policy into a single value-chain view.
• Counterpoints: data centres support data sovereignty under the DPDP Act, 2023, and lower costs for domestic AI firms; packaging and testing units are a recognised first step into semiconductors.
• Balance needed: conditions on investors must not deter investment — the authors themselves call for a “calibrated” approach.
• Beyond frontier models: India’s advantage may also lie in applications and public digital infrastructure built on open or smaller models suited to Indian languages.