The paper's Thursday piece tracked India's post-blockade supply shift toward US and Middle East barrels as Hormuz pressure hit March loadings. Friday's customs data pushes the story inside out. India's Russian crude imports surged to roughly 1.5 million barrels per day in March, up from 1.04 million in February — a 90% jump delivered in the final weeks before Washington's sanctions waiver expired on April 11. [1]

The chronology is the story. Delhi bought aggressively from Russia, simultaneously maintained rising Middle East purchases despite Hormuz porosity, and continued the discounted Iranian flow through shadow-fleet channels. It bought from all three partners in the same month, using the waiver as a window before it closed. [2] The US sanctions regime depended on India's compliance being binary. India treated it as a calendar.

The policy problem now cuts both ways. If Washington lets the waiver lapse without meaningful enforcement, the architecture dissolves into advisory. If it enforces, Indian refiners — BPCL, Reliance, Indian Oil — will shift volume openly to Iranian and Venezuelan grades the Treasury lists as prohibited. The choice is capitulation or acceleration. Neither is what the sanctions were designed to produce.

A hegemon that cannot price its own sanctions no longer has sanctions. It has a ledger of expired waivers.

-- PRIYA SHARMA, Delhi