There is a particular genius to Indian political theatre. It requires a straight face, a nationalistic backdrop, and an audience conditioned to mistake inconvenience for patriotism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered all three in Hyderabad on Sunday, when he urged India’s 1.4 billion citizens to stop buying gold for a year, reduce fuel consumption, revive work-from-home, and curtail foreign travel. All in the name of the West Asia crisis.
Within two hours, the Prime Minister was reportedly on the campaign trail, his convoy a moving kilometre of diesel-drinking SUVs, outriders, and support vehicles, enough to fill a modest fuel depot. The sacrifice, it seems, is for the rest of us.
Let us be fair though. These asks belie a genuinely serious problem, and a government that knows exactly what it is doing. Crude oil has surged from roughly $70 per barrel to around $126, driven by escalating tensions around the Strait of Hormuz. Global stockpiles are drawing down at nearly 5 million barrels per day, the fastest depletion on IEA record. Aramco’s CEO has said that even if the strait reopened tomorrow, the market would not normalise until 2027 if disruption persists beyond a few weeks. This is not noise. This is the kind of number that keeps finance ministers awake at 3 a.m.
Now read the three asks again, not as a lifestyle appeal but as an arithmetic problem. The RBI’s forex reserves have fallen from $728.5 billion in late February to roughly $690.7 billion by May 1. That is $38 billion spent defending the rupee in nine weeks. The rupee touched a record low of 95.27 to the dollar on May 4. Gold imports run at roughly $17 billion a month in normal years, and that figure is climbing sharply at current prices. Foreign travel is the second-largest discretionary foreign exchange drain from Indian households. Fuel is the third. Taken together, Modi’s three asks are not an energy conservation message. They are a defence of India’s current account, with India’s citizenry tasked with the duty.
The government faces an additional headache it has not advertised loudly. India’s public sector oil companies, HPCL, BPCL, and IOC, are reportedly losing around 18 rupees per litre on petrol and 30-35 rupees per litre on diesel, because pump prices have been frozen since April 2022. Daily losses are estimated around 1,600 crore rupees. The government has already cut excise duty. A retail price hike is the third lever, and the most politically combustible one. Asking citizens to consume less fuel is, conveniently, a way of reducing losses without touching the pump price. Even so, a price hike seems inevitable.
The gold appeal is the most revealing part of the speech. Governments do not ask citizens to defer a centuries-old cultural practice on a Sunday afternoon unless the import cover mathematics are looking genuinely uncomfortable. That is not foreign policy messaging. That is a quiet signal that the trajectory is tightening.
To give Modi credit where it is due, India is not uniquely exposed. Every major oil-importing economy is staring at the same chart. The question is how governments respond. Asking a bride’s family in Tamil Nadu to postpone her wedding jewellery while the state apparatus flies ministers on foreign junkets and rolls out helicopter campaigns is theatrical. The Prime Minister himself has a packed international travel schedule in the weeks ahead, because geopolitics cannot work on video calls.
There is nothing wrong with asking citizens to share the burden of a genuine crisis. What grates is the asymmetry of who actually bears it. The VIP convoy does not shrink. The foreign delegations do not cancel. The government fuel accounts do not face public audit. Only the citizenry does.
India has survived oil shocks before. It will survive this one. But the next time a Prime Minister asks the country to tighten its belt, it might land better if he could demonstrate, even briefly, where exactly his own belt has been tightened.
