Jaishankar tells the Consultative Committee that 10 million Indians sit inside the West Asia war zone

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar chaired a Consultative Committee meeting on India's relations with West Asia in New Delhi on 7 September. He said India was working to protect 10 million of its citizens in the Gulf and the wider West Asia and North Africa region, and to keep energy, fertiliser, trade and connectivity moving while the war continues.

Minister of state Pabitra Margherita and foreign secretary Vikram Misri sat with him. Jaishankar's public note listed long-standing work in trade, investment, energy, maritime affairs and people-to-people ties. The new content was the welfare file for a diaspora large enough to populate a medium Indian state, set against a conflict that has already lasted six months and closed or thinned the sea lanes those citizens and cargoes use.

In July the Prime Minister chaired a fourth special meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security on the same theatre. The Cabinet Secretary told that session that LPG sources had been spread across more suppliers and that refineries were running above 100 percent utilisation to hold petrol, diesel and other products. Fertilizer stocks and seafarer safety were on the same agenda. Rural LPG booking gaps later widened under the Hormuz squeeze and were cut back to 25 days on 7 September, a domestic echo of the same supply file.

Jaishankar has spent the year on the phone to the region. After the U.S.-Israel campaign against Iran opened, he spoke to Iranian foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar, Saudi foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, Kuwait's Sheikh Jarrah Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, Bahrain's Abdullatif bin Rashid Al-Zayani, Qatar's Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman and the UAE's Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed. In July he was in Gulf capitals. In early September he put West Asia on the table with Poland's Radoslaw Sikorski, next to Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek that a war in one region does not stay there. He named energy security, maritime trade and supply chains, and said the Global South pays first. Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian was in that room. India's line, repeated on 7 September, is dialogue rather than the battlefield, plus a running operation to keep fuel, urea and passports moving.

A Consultative Committee does not issue orders. It tells Parliament's members what the ministry is doing. The useful facts from Monday are the 10 million figure, the pairing of citizen welfare with fertilizer and fuel, and the presence of the foreign secretary at the table. Those three points say the West Asia file is no longer only a diplomatic talking point. It is a population, a stockpile and a set of routes, all of them still inside the war.