The Indian Navy's continuous deployment in the Gulf of Aden dates to October 2008, when a surge in Somali piracy pushed New Delhi to station a warship on the internationally recommended transit corridor. That mission never lapsed, and it has escorted thousands of merchant ships of many flags since. Operation Sankalp is the second strand, launched in June 2019 after attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman, to assure the passage of Indian-flagged vessels and India-bound energy cargoes; it is run in coordination with the shipping, external affairs and petroleum ministries, since the cargo, the crew and the diplomacy all sit in different departments. The rationale is blunt: India imports the large majority of its crude oil, a heavy share of it from West Asia, and a very large fraction of Indian trade by volume moves by sea. Indian nationals also crew a substantial share of the world's merchant fleet, which is why hijackings far from Indian waters still produce Indian hostages, as the Lutuf and Sibu 1 seizures did.