New Delhi, June 10 -- The war keeps finding the Gulf's Indians. Last Wednesday a barrage aimed at Kuwait ended with an Indian national dead at the country's main airport. This Wednesday morning the drones came back, to Kuwait again and to Bahrain, the two countries that anchor India's diaspora in the Gulf, and the distance between this war and Indian lives shrank a little further.

respond to any American attack proportionately, "but very harshly and swiftly."

For most of the world this is another rung on an escalation ladder. For India it is a neighbourhood. More than eight million Indians live and work in the Gulf by official estimates, and Kuwait and Bahrain hold some of the densest concentrations: construction workers, nurses, driver...