External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday spoke about India’s decision to allow an Iranian naval vessel to dock in Kochi amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, describing the ships as having been “caught on the wrong side of events”.
Speaking at the 2026 Raisinia Dialogue in New Delhi, Jaishankar outlined the sequence of events involving the Iranian ships.
“Here’s the situation. We got a message from the Iranian side that one of the ships, which presumably was closest to our borders at that point of time, wanted to come into our port. They were reporting that they were having problems. On the 1st March, we said you can come in and it took them a few days to sail in and then they docked in Kochi. There were a lot of young cadets. When the ships had set out and when they came here, the situation was totally different,” Jaishankar said.
“They were coming in for a fleet review, and then they got in a way caught on the wrong side of events,” he added.
The comments come in the context of three Iranian naval vessels that found themselves at the centre of the escalating war between Iran, the United States, and Israel in the first week of March.
The ships — IRIS Dena, IRIS Lavan, and IRIS Bushehr — had been operating in the Indian Ocean and had participated in the International Fleet Review and MILAN 2026 exercises hosted by the Indian Navy in Visakhapatnam earlier in February.
Jaishankar stressed that India’s approach was guided by humanitarian considerations.
“One obviously had a similar situation in Sri Lanka, they took the decision which they did and one of them unfortunately didn’t make it… We approached the situation from the point of view of humanity, other than whatever the legal issues were and I think we did the right thing,’ Jaishankar added.