A review of the impact of the transformative India-UAE relationship (2015-2026) on New Delhi’s ties, the balance and risks, in the evolving situation in West Asia
Few bilateral relationships in India’s foreign policy portfolio have been re-engineered as deliberately, or as rapidly, as the one with United Arab Emirates. A decade ago, this relationship was essentially transactional: UAE was a source of hydrocarbons and a destination for Indian labour. Today, it is among India’s most institutionally dense and strategically consequential partnerships, spanning defence, energy security, fintech, space, education, civil nuclear cooperation, and connectivity architecture. This transformation was forged by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MbZ) and Prime Minister Modi.
The partnership’s built on deliberate political signals, sustained leadership engagement, and mutual recognition of converging interests in a fragmenting global order. Here is a lowdown on the institutional bridges that connect the two countries within the turbulence in the wider Gulf since 2025.
1. Inflection Points
When Modi’s new government in Delhi sought a strategic partner in the Gulf in 2014, UAE emerged as the natural choice. This stemmed from UAE’s liberal outlook, its status as India’s largest Gulf trading partner, its hosting of the region’s largest Indian diaspora (making up nearly a third of UAE’s resident population), and its own interest in a deeper partnership.
Three critical events shaped India-UAE ties. In August 2015, Modi visited Abu Dhabi — the first by an Indian PM in 34 years. The Modi visit ignited a positive chemistry between the leaders, and re-energised political contact, setting in motion near-annual high-level engagement.
The impact is perhaps best exemplified in the second defining moment: in 2017, India invited MbZ as Chief Guest to the 2017 Republic Day celebrations. The visit culminated in a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement and provided an institutional scaffolding for key developments in the decade that followed.
Finally, in 2019, UAE invited MEA Sushma Swaraj as Guest of Honour to OIC’s Foreign Ministers meeting in Abu Dhabi, despite vociferous Pakistani objections. It signaled UAE’s preparedness to prioritise substantive partnership with India over reflexive OIC rhetoric and solidarity on Kashmir.
What followed from these three events is history. Since 2015, PM has visited UAE eight times, one of Modi’s most frequently visited destinations. The two countries have logged 13 leadership-level exchanges, virtually unmatched in India’s ties with any other Gulf state.
2. Bridges, Traditional and New
The India-UAE relationship is uniquely multi-dimensional. People-to-people ties remain the most resilient layer. The number of Indians in UAE has more than doubled between 2015 and 2024, from 2.2mn to 4.5mn. Today, they form over a third of the population, contributing to workforces across construction, healthcare, technology, and finance. Understandably, India’s remittances from UAE are among the largest from any single country.
Energy remains foundational. UAE has boosted India’s much-needed LNG sourcing diversification. It is now India’s second-largest LNG supplier after Qatar, while India is ADNOC Gas’s largest customer. Bilateral trade has been transformed by the 2022 Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), negotiated in barely 88 days, underscoring the nations’ mutual trust and commitment.
CEPA was a bold decision by UAE to break ranks with GCC to forge a bilateral FTA. As UAE’s first such agreement ever, and New Delhi’s first in West Asia, CEPA lifted non-oil trade by roughly 65% and pushed overall bilateral trade beyond $100 billion, with both governments targeting $200bn by 2032.
In parallel, investments have deepened: UAE is India’s seventh-largest FDI source, with cumulative inflows exceeding $22bn against pledges of up to $75bn. Bharat Mart, a 2.7mn sqft hub at Jebel Ali, with roughly 1,500 showrooms, gives Indian MSMEs a gateway to West Asian, African, and European markets.
Against this backdrop of flourishing diaspora and symbiotic economic growth, education and innovation have emerged as promising frontiers. UAE hosts fully operational overseas campuses of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, alongside a CBSE office in Dubai serving 266 affiliated schools and over 4.7L students.
In fintech innovation, UAE built its Jaywan debit/credit card system based on India’s RuPay platform and was the first to sign a Local Currencies Trade Settlement Mechanism (LCTSM), which has already resulted in over 10% of bilateral trade now transacted in rupees and dirhams. A similar LCTSM was recently signed with Indonesia during Modi’s July 2026 visit.
Defence cooperation is a critical dimension that has matured from counter-terrorism coordination to joint exercises, including Desert Cyclone (army), Gulf Waves (navy), Desert Flag (air force), and the India-UAE-France trilateral Desert Knight. Civil nuclear cooperation, anchored in the SHANTI framework, can potentially extend to large reactors and small modular reactors, leveraging UAE’s position as the only GCC state generating a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power.
3. Continuity In UAE Leadership
A defining strength of the relationship is that it has been institutionalised down the generations, rather than resting on the rapport of any single leader pair, durable as the Modi-MbZ relationship has been. The founding vision of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan has been carried forward by MbZ, and increasingly by the next generation. Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed visited India in September 2024, and Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum followed in April 2025, both at PM Modi’s invitation. Neither visit was merely ceremonial.
Both yielded concrete outcomes across defence, nuclear cooperation, energy, and education, reinforcing the point that the relationship is deliberately being future-proofed against leadership transitions on either side. MbZ’s visit to India in January 2026 underscored the partnership’s institutional depth, exemplifying the two countries’ treatment of high-level summitry not as a reset mechanism, but as a coordination platform for an already close working relationship.
4. BAPS Hindu Temple, Beyond Religion
Modi inaugurated the BAPS Hindu Mandir in Abu Dhabi in 2024. As the largest Hindu temple in West Asia, built on land gifted by the UAE leadership, its significance is beyond religious architecture. It stands as a marker of UAE’s civilisational and religious pluralism within a Muslim-majority federation, complementing initiatives such as the Abrahamic Family House, in signalling Abu Dhabi’s project of interfaith tolerance as state policy.
For Indian diaspora, such cultural diplomacy deepens confidence in the depth and durability of bilateral trust. Confidence is further reflected in cooperation on the Lothal Maritime Heritage Complex, which acknowledges centuries of maritime and civilisational linkage predating the modern relationship.
5. Modi's Impactful May 2026 Visit
Modi’s brief stopover in Abu Dhabi on May 15, 2026, en route a European tour, was not compressed in substance. Its centrepiece was the Strategic Defence Partnership Framework Agreement, elevating an earlier Letter of Intent into a formal framework covering defence-industrial collaboration, advanced technology, training and exercises, special operations, maritime security, and cyber defence.
On energy, ISPRL and ADNOC concluded a Strategic Collaboration Agreement expanding UAE participation in India’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) to 30mn barrels, alongside cooperation on a strategic gas reserve, while IOCL and ADNOC signed a separate long-term LPG supply agreement.
Storing 5.86mn barrels of crude in the Mangalore cavern in 2017, UAE remains India’s only overseas partner for its SPR programme. Investment commitments totalling roughly $5bn were announced during the visit, including Emirates NBD’s $3bn stake in RBL Bank and a $1bn ADIA-NIIF infrastructure partnership. The visit’s timing, amid Iranian strikes on Gulf shipping and Emirati territory, carried added weight; India condemned the attacks and called for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, while notably declining to endorse UAE’s harder line on Iran.
6. Regional Economic Cooperation: IMEEC and I2U2
Beyond the bilateral track, India and UAE have jointly invested in mini-lateral architectures intended to reduce dependence on any single corridor or bloc. Unveiled at the 2023 G20 Summit, the IMEEC envisions linking Indian ports to the Gulf and onward to Europe via UAE, potentially cutting transit times significantly, although momentum has been hindered by the Gaza conflict and Red Sea disruptions. Not to be deterred by regional developments, India and UAE operationalised a Virtual Trade Corridor during Modi’s May visit.
Similarly, the I2U2 grouping with India, Israel, UAE, and US was conceived for cooperation on food security, renewables, logistics, and integrated food parks. By most recent assessments, this has become largely stagnant, overtaken by bilateral tracks that have proven more durable. Neither should be written off, as they illustrate a broader lesson: declaratory mini-lateralism in West Asia requires sustained implementation machinery, not summit announcements, to survive a volatile region.
7. Navigating Geopolitical Churn
The India-UAE relationship has been tested by a significantly turbulent regional environment. In May 2026, UAE ended its 59-year membership in OPEC, a move driven partly by frustration that its production quota had lagged well behind ADNOC’s growing capacity, and partly by a broader recalibration of Gulf alignments, amid the US-Israel-Iran conflict.
Abu Dhabi’s security ties with Israel have also visibly deepened beyond the Abraham Accords. During the 2026 Iran war, in which UAE absorbed several hundred Iranian ballistic missiles and thousands of drones, Israel reportedly deployed an Iron Dome battery and operating personnel to Emirati territory. This marked the first time the system had been stationed outside Israel or US, and speaks to the direction taken by UAE for future partnerships.
For India, this churn has required careful navigation, rather than alignment. New Delhi has expressed solidarity with UAE and condemned attacks on Emirati territory and nationals, while continuing to maintain a working relationship with Tehran and refraining from endorsing Abu Dhabi’s hawkish Iran posture. This is multi-alignment under genuine stress-test conditions, and has, so far, held.
8. Balancing Abu Dhabi and Riyadh
The UAE-Saudi relationship has shifted from a close partnership toward open rivalry over oil policy, Yemen, regional leadership, logistics corridors, and competition for capital, talent, and corporate headquarters. This rivalry is compounded, from New Delhi’s perspective, by Riyadh’s growing defence axis with Islamabad and Istanbul — a cause for alarm.
Nevertheless, India has strong incentive to avoid being cast as a party to the UAE-Saudi rivalry. NSA Ajit Doval’s back-to-back visits to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in April 2026 exemplify the calibration required. Saudi Arabia is of course custodian of Islam’s two holiest mosques, a central pillar of global energy markets, and home to some 2.7mn Indian workers, giving Riyadh a claim on Indian attention that cannot be subordinate to the deepening India UAE relationship.
New Delhi’s approach has therefore been to treat the Gulf not as a binary choice but as a space in which its standing with both capitals is a strategic asset. This shows most clearly in how India continues to strengthen ties with Abu Dhabi at pace, while maintaining visibly comparable engagement with Riyadh.
9. Contrasting Defence Architectures
Looking at India-Israel-UAE and Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey axis, it is important not to read the India-UAE Strategic Defence Partnership Framework as a mirror image of the emerging Saudi-led one. The Indo-Emirati framework is explicitly a defence-industrial and technology cooperation arrangement enabling Indian defence exports such as the Akash missile system, BrahMos and the Tejas fighter, alongside co-development and interoperability. There is no mutual-defence clause and no provision for Indian troops on Emirati soil.
Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri has emphasised that the framework is not directed at any third country and implies no alliance commitment. This contrasts sharply with the Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of September 2025, which commits each side to treat an attack on one, as an attack on both, effectively extending Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent to the kingdom.
The pact has since widened into a broader quadrilateral conversation involving Turkey, Egypt and Qatar, aimed at containing Iran and constraining Israeli military latitude. UAE, notably, is absent from it. This asymmetry is instructive: the India-Israel-UAE dimension of Gulf security is functional and capacity-building, while the Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey axis is treaty-bound, identity-inflected, and considerably more binding.
10. Perils of Alignment
None of this is to suggest India’s UAE tilt is without risk. The clearest one is that a Saudi leadership already uneasy about regional isolation may interpret New Delhi’s deepening defence and technology ties with UAE and Israel as evidence of an implicit bloc.
This, in turn, could reinforce Riyadh’s incentive to lean further into Islamabad, the very outcome that New Delhi’s decade-long effort at de-hyphenating itself from Pakistan in Gulf capitals has sought to avoid. A second peril concerns Iran: any perception that New Delhi has aligned with UAE-Israel positions, during an active conflict, could jeopardise Chabahar, connectivity, and energy-diversification options cultivated with Tehran.
A third concern centres around the diaspora: India’s 2.7mn workers in Saudi Arabia and comparable populations elsewhere in the GCC depend on relationships that a perceived tilt toward Abu Dhabi could complicate. Finally, there is the structural risk of entanglement. Since India’s core security preoccupations lie in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, against Pakistan and China, deeper Gulf security commitments carry an opportunity cost in attention and resources. These risks are manageable, provided New Delhi treats the UAE relationship as just one pillar of a multi-vector Gulf policy rather than a substitute for it.
For the Future
Four priorities should guide the next phase of the India-UAE relationship.
Precedence of implementation over announcement. The string of frameworks, LoIs, and signed MoUs will only translate into durable influence if corridors are built, investment pledges converted into disbursed capital, and defence-industrial cooperation is moved from paper to production.
India should maintain visibly comparable engagement with Saudi Arabia in energy, investment, and defence dialogue to avoid perceptions of exclusive alignment with Abu Dhabi, while exploring where India’s standing with both capitals can ease friction.
IMEEC and I2U2 deserve renewed investment through discrete, deliverable pilot projects, including a port-modernisation tranche and a food-security corridor.
India must continue to preserve its channel to Iran even as Gulf partnerships deepen and extend the diaspora-welfare and cultural-diplomacy model, piloted through the BAPS temple, to its wider Gulf presence.
Institutionalising regular 2+2-style dialogues with UAE, alongside contingency planning for diaspora protection and energy-supply disruption, could further embed a relationship whose strength lies in steady consolidation, rather than headline-grabbing declarations.
A decade on from Modi’s 2015 visit, the India-UAE relationship stands as a rare example of a bilateral tie deliberately re-engineered from transactional dependence into structural interdependence. It is anchored in CEPA, energy, defence frameworks, educational campuses, and temples, and sustained across leadership generations on both sides.
Importantly, it has been tested, not broken, by a Gulf convulsed by OPEC realignment, an active Iran conflict, Israel’s deepening footprint, and a hardening Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey axis, precisely because New Delhi has refused to convert deepening engagement with Abu Dhabi into a bloc commitment against any third country.
The way forward, thus, lies in consolidating this by converting frameworks into delivered projects, sustaining equally serious ties with Riyadh and Tehran, even as the UAE relationship deepens, reviving IMEEC and I2U2 through concrete pilots more than summitry, and extending similar institutional depth in areas of trade, education, fintech, and diaspora welfare to the rest of the Gulf.
