The engine room of the oil tanker MKD VYOM was where he spent his working hours. Omani authorities have not yet officially released his name, and vessel manager V.Ships confirmed only that one crew member in the engine room had died, but this much is known: he was Indian, he was aboard a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel sailing the Gulf of Oman on 2 March 2026, and he did not survive. A bomb-carrying drone boat struck the ship roughly 52 nautical miles off Muscat. The explosion tore through the engine room. He was the first confirmed Indian fatality in the escalating military confrontation between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
A War That Wasn’t Theirs
The conflict that claimed his life began on 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched a co-ordinated military campaign against Iran, reportedly codenamed Operation Epic Fury by Washington and Operation Roaring Lion by Jerusalem. Strikes fell on Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed. Within hours, Iran responded with Operation True Promise IV, firing hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones at US military bases and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, striking Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Oman. Airports were damaged. Residential towers were hit. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, ordinary Indian men and women who had come to the Gulf for a wage found themselves directly in a war zone.
Nine Million in the Line of Fire
There are roughly nine million Indians living and working in the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. That figure represents nearly 66 per cent of all non-resident Indians worldwide. Indians form the largest single expatriate community in the UAE, making up approximately 30 per cent of the country’s total population, with an estimated 3.5 million residents. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Indians account for about 25 per cent of the population each, with Kuwait hosting close to 978,000 Indian nationals. Oman has around 680,000 Indians, the second-largest diaspora community in that country. In Qatar and Bahrain, Indian professionals dominate engineering, healthcare, and the services sector while tens of thousands of labourers work in construction and industry. Walk into any grocery store or construction site in Dubai or Doha on an ordinary day and you are more likely to hear Malayalam or Hindi than Arabic.
These are not abstract statistics. These are people who wired money home every month, who kept their children in school in Kerala or Karnataka or Uttar Pradesh on Gulf wages, who endured the kafala system’s indignities in silence because the alternative, the village, the debt, the drought, was worse.
Debris and Death
Besides the mariner killed on the MKD VYOM, an Asian worker whose nationality Bahrain’s Interior Ministry confirmed only as “Asian” died on 2 March when debris from an intercepted Iranian missile struck a foreign ship undergoing maintenance at Salman Industrial City. Given that South Asians, and Indians in particular, dominate the shipyard and industrial labour force in Bahrain, the possibility of an Indian connection is being investigated. Two others were seriously injured in the same incident. The UAE, struck by 174 ballistic missiles, eight cruise missiles, and 689 drones in total, reported Indian nationals among those injured across Abu Dhabi and Dubai from falling debris. The three confirmed fatalities in the UAE were nationals of Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
A separate tanker, the Palau-flagged Skylight, struck near Oman’s Khasab Port, had 15 Indians among its 20 crew members. All were evacuated, but four sustained injuries. The rescued crew members were brought ashore, dazed, smelling of fuel and smoke.
The Embassy at Work, the Family at Home
The Indian Embassy in Muscat moved with notable speed. Within hours of the MKD VYOM attack, it posted on X that it was in close coordination with Omani authorities to facilitate the safe and early repatriation of Indian nationals on board. The statement expressed deepest condolences and pledged all possible assistance. The body of the mariner is expected to be repatriated to India once Omani authorities complete their documentation procedures, a process that takes days or weeks when a vessel is in international waters and a death remains under investigation.
Somewhere in India, a family is waiting. V.Ships confirmed the death and said it was in contact with the crew member’s family. That is what they have received. A statement. And silence.
Stranded, Then Slowly Heading Home
On land, it was not much better. Air India, IndiGo, and other carriers suspended flights as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Syria, and the UAE closed their airspace. About 20,000 passengers were stranded in the UAE alone, with nearly 8,000 more stuck in transit in Qatar. Dubai International Airport halted operations after sustaining damage in an Iranian attack.
Rakib Sikdar, a 37-year-old security guard from Dubai Silicon Oasis who had been working in the UAE for seven years, told Scroll that on the evening of 28 February he had broken his Ramzan fast and was about to call his family back home when his roommates pulled him outside. “We ran outside and saw what seemed like a drone fall down,” he said. Later that night, with explosions continuing across the city, Sikdar summed up the feeling of millions: “We are scared but we can’t even go back because the airports are closed.”
By 3 March, the mood had begun, cautiously, to shift. IndiGo operated 10 special relief flights from Jeddah to Indian cities including Hyderabad, Mumbai, Delhi, and Ahmedabad. SpiceJet ran four special flights from the UAE. Air India Express resumed services from Muscat to Kochi, Kozhikode, Mangaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, and Tiruchirappalli. Both the UAE and Qatar announced they would cover hotel and meal costs for all passengers stranded by the airspace closures, a gesture that provided immediate relief to tens of thousands of Indian workers with limited savings and nowhere to go.
At Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru, there were smiles and exhaustion in equal measure as passengers arrived from Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Saurabh Shetty from Mangaluru, who works for an oil company in Abu Dhabi, told PTI his experience had been “worrisome and scary.” Niruban from Coimbatore told PTI there had been some delay due to drone activity but that Abu Dhabi authorities had arranged transport to hotels and ensured everyone’s safety within hours. Girimalappa Kerur, originally from Bilgi in Bagalkot district, had been on his way to Paris on a business trip when the airspace shut around him. “We could hear explosions,” he told PTI, “and we were told around 15 missiles were intercepted in Abu Dhabi.”
Union Minister Prahalad Joshi confirmed India was fully prepared to bring back every stranded national, with multiple state governments, from Punjab to Karnataka to Andhra Pradesh, activating dedicated helplines and direct outreach to their citizens in the Gulf. Around 9,000 Indians in Iran, including approximately 1,200 medical students, the majority from Jammu and Kashmir, remained stranded in a country under active aerial bombardment. Altaf Khan, a 30-year-old resident of Srinagar, told The Federal that his 19-year-old sister Sobia, a first-year medical student in Tehran, had managed a brief call with the family. “The fear was evident in her voice,” he said. “She told us that sirens have been going off frequently and that they could hear loud explosions near their campus.” His parents, he added, had neither been eating nor sleeping.
What the Gulf States Did
Gulf governments, consumed by their own security emergencies, still moved to protect all residents. Qatar suspended in-person schooling nationwide and shifted to remote learning until further notice. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry activated air raid alerts and urged every resident, citizen and migrant alike, to move immediately to the nearest safe location. Civil defence teams in Manama worked through the night at residential buildings struck by Iranian drones, conducting firefighting and rescue operations. The Emirates Red Crescent activated its emergency response function to assist those displaced or injured in the strikes. Kuwait scrambled its air defences and intercepted 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones in total, per government figures. Oman, which had been Iran’s preferred diplomatic back-channel and sustained comparatively lighter impact than its Gulf neighbours, co-ordinated maritime rescue operations and worked with the Indian Embassy on repatriation logistics. It was, under the circumstances, about as much as anyone could have done.
An Old Argument, a New Bill
None of the Indians who died or were hurt on those tankers or in those ports had a vote in Washington, Tel Aviv, or Tehran. They came to the Gulf because India’s economy did not need them enough, and the Gulf did. They built the airports now pocked with missile craters. They stacked cargo on the ships now burning in the strait.
Former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia Talmeez Ahmed, who has observed the Indian labour story in the Gulf for decades, noted simply that people’s apprehensions were understandable. He pointed out that earlier regional conflicts, the Iran-Iraq war, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, were at least geographically contained. This one is not. Somewhere off the coast of Oman, the hull of the MKD VYOM still sits on the water. The engine room is dark. The sea around it does not care who started the war.
Subscribe Deshwale on YouTube
