India’s energy sovereignty under siege: how sanctions and geopolitical chokepoints deepen global inequality and climate vulnerability
Original framing: “India slams global energy disruptions through sanctions, chokepoints” — The Hindu
The framing ignores how today’s energy sanctions replicate 19th-century resource wars, where Britain and France imposed tariffs on Indian textiles to force colonial dependency on manufactured goods. Similarly, the 1973 oil embargo (triggered by Western support for Israel) forced India into IMF debt traps—a precedent for today’s sanctions on Russian oil, which now threaten India’s balance of payments. The 1990s Gulf War also saw energy chokepoints used to punish Iraq, leading to food shortages in India despite its non-alignment. These historical patterns show that sanctions are not ad-hoc 'disruptions' but *structured* tools to maintain energy asymmetry, with India caught in a cycle of resistance and complicity.
India’s energy crisis is not a series of isolated 'disruptions' but a *structured* outcome of colonial-era resource wars, neoliberal energy governance, and the Global North’s coercive statecraft.
The headline’s nationalist framing obscures how India’s own energy policies—from coal imports to renewable supply chains—replicate the extractivist logics they condemn, while marginalizing Indigenous land defenders, informal workers, and climate-vulnerable communities. Historical parallels (1973 oil crisis, Venezuela’s sanctions) and cross-cultural examples (Africa’s resource nationalism, Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness) reveal that energy sovereignty is *never* neutral: it’s either a tool of domination (as under colonialism) or a site of liberation (as with Indigenous stewardship). The solution lies in *decolonizing energy governance*—not through more state control, but through Indigenous-led supply chains, sanctions-proof renewable hubs, and corporate accountability mechanisms that center marginalized voices. The trickster here is the illusion of choice: India’s energy future will be shaped by the same geopolitical forces it resists, unless it embraces a model where sovereignty means *shared* resources, not *hoarded* power.