Sainil Nagare

The first thing to state clearly is that India is not literally “running out” of fuel at the national level as of March 29, 2026. The Government of India has publicly said petroleum and LPG supplies are secure, while Reuters reports that India has roughly 60 days of oil and fuel supplies and about 74 days of total storage capacity.

At the same time, the ongoing war involving Iran and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz have created genuine stress: price spikes, panic buying in some places, pressure on LPG and industrial users, and emergency diversification of imports. So the real issue is not immediate national exhaustion, but strategic vulnerability created by dependence on external supply lines and maritime chokepoints.

That broader pattern has very deep historical parallels. Ancient and medieval India did not depend on imported crude oil, of course. But Indian states repeatedly depended on critical external commodities—especially warhorses, metals, salt, and other strategic supplies—whose movement could be disrupted by war, hostile intermediaries, piracy, blockade, or control over ports and passes. In that sense, today’s fuel anxiety has a very old historical structure: India has often been rich in population, revenue, and markets, yet exposed whenever essential supplies came through narrow, contested routes.

The ancient lesson: Kautilya already assumed supply shocks would happen

A striking ancient parallel appears in the Arthashastra. Kautilya advised the state to store large quantities of oil, grain, sugar, salt, medicinal goods, timber, metals, weapons, and other necessities in forts and storehouses so they could last “for years” in times of need. This matters because it shows that ancient Indian political thought already recognized a fundamental truth: a strong state is not only one that produces wealth, but one that can survive disruption—siege, war, trade interruption, or natural crisis.

Even Chandragupta Maurya can bessen asking his officials to maintain Kishtagara i.e. silos of foodgrains in order to avoid crisis of shortage.
In modern terms, this is very close to the logic behind strategic petroleum reserves and emergency stockpiling. The comparison with today is direct.

Modern India is responding to the Iran-related crisis through stockholding, diversified sourcing, and state management of supply and distribution. Kautilya would have immediately recognized the logic: when lifeline commodities are vulnerable, the state must act before scarcity turns into panic. The continuity is remarkable—even if the commodity has changed from oil and salt to crude and LPG, the governing principle remains the same.

The medieval parallel par excellence: India’s dependence on imported warhorses

The strongest medieval analogy to today’s oil dependence is not grain but warhorses. For many centuries, several Indian polities lacked a sufficient local supply of high-quality cavalry horses. Historian Satish Chandra asserts that battle of Tarain (1192) was a war of movement rather than strength in which Ghorids took advantage of turkoman horses to defeat heavy cavalry and infantry of Chauhans.

As a result, kingdoms across north and south India started to depended heavily on horses imported from Arabia, Persia, Central Asia, and Khorasan.
Scholars of early medieval Bengal, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Deccan all note that good warhorses often had to come from outside India, and that the routes bringing them in were vulnerable to warfare, raiding, and middlemen.

This is structurally very similar to India’s relationship with imported hydrocarbons today. In the same way that modern India can refine fuel but still remains exposed to the security of supply routes and shipping lanes, many medieval Indian states could field armies but remained dependent on foreign cavalry inputs. If those supplies slowed, became expensive, or fell under rival control, military capacity weakened.

In short: today’s oil was yesterday’s horse. Both were not merely commodities; they were the energy systems of their age.

What is different today—and why that difference matters

There is, however, one major difference between the past and the present. Ancient and medieval Indian states usually lacked the modern state’s ability to create large, integrated buffers across the subcontinent. They could stock forts, secure ports, negotiate with traders, or conquer routes—but they could not build nationwide petroleum logistics, import from 40-plus sources, or rapidly substitute one supplier with another. Today’s India can do exactly that. Reuters reports that India has diversified crude sourcing widely and increased domestic LPG production while arranging alternative cargoes from countries such as the United States, Russia, and Australia. That makes the modern Indian state far more resilient than most of its premodern predecessors.

Yet the vulnerability has not disappeared; it has only changed scale. In the medieval period, loss of horse supply could reshape campaigns and dynastic fortunes. Today, oil and gas disruption can push up inflation, hurt transport, affect fertilizers and industry, disturb household cooking fuel, and generate panic buying even before actual scarcity sets in. That is why the state has had to publicly deny rumors and manage distribution carefully. The commodity changed, but the political consequences of disruption remain immense.

Conclusion

The best historical comparison for today’s Iran-related fuel anxiety is this: modern India’s dependence on imported oil resembles premodern India’s dependence on imported warhorses and other strategic commodities moved through vulnerable routes. Ancient thinkers like Kautilya understood the need for reserves. Medieval empires like Vijayanagara and the Delhi Sultanate understood the dangers of relying on foreign-controlled supply lines. What we are seeing today is not an entirely new crisis, but a technologically updated version of a very old historical problem—when a civilization is powerful, yet one essential input comes through someone else’s corridor.

So the deeper lesson from history is not merely that India has faced scarcity before. It is that Indian states have repeatedly survived such moments through three methods: stockpiling, diversification, and control over routes. Those were the answers in the age of forts and cavalry; they remain the answers in the age of refineries and tankers.