The INSTC Needs Azerbaijan, So Jaishankar Went to Baku

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar spent Friday, October 23, 2026, in Baku on his first standalone trip to Azerbaijan in eight years. He called talks with Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov very productive and said they had charted a pathway forward after Baku sided with Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in May 2025.

The day was built around freight, oil and a presidential audience, not a public retraction. Jaishankar also called on President Ilham Aliyev, passed on greetings from President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and put the 7,200 km International North-South Transport Corridor at the centre of the readout.

Jaishankar Spends One Day in Baku After an Eight-Year Gap

The Ministry of External Affairs had flagged a one-day official visit on October 22. The last standalone Indian foreign-minister trip to Azerbaijan was Sushma Swaraj’s bilateral stop of April 4-6, 2018. Jaishankar had been in Baku in October 2019, but only as part of then Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu’s delegation to a Non-Aligned Movement summit.

This stop followed the first in-person meeting of the two countries’ heads of government, when Modi spoke with Aliyev on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek on September 1, 2026. Working-level contact had already resumed. The sixth round of foreign office talks was held in Baku on April 3, 2026, with Secretary (West) Sibi George sitting across from Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov. Minister of State Kirti Vardhan Singh then led India’s delegation to the seventh CICA summit in Baku on October 15, 2026.

Bayramov did not pretend the past year had been smooth. He said it was no secret the two sides had held different viewpoints on different issues, then described a long, positive and fruitful discussion. Jaishankar invited him to India at his convenience and said both countries, in his phrasing, are independent-minded and can make their own call on the important issues.

We have a common interest in really promoting peace and progress and prosperity. And threats like terrorism, conflict, and instability are our common enemies.

S. Jaishankar, External Affairs Minister of India, press remarks in Baku

Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal later said security issues, terrorism and common threats were discussed, and that both sides agreed they must work together on peace, prosperity and security. Jaishankar posted the same message from the talks themselves.

Held productive discussions with FM @Bayramov_Jeyhun of Azerbaijan.

Our talks charted a pathway forward for our relationship. Agreed to deepen political consultations, exchange visits, enhance economic activities, build connectivity and foster people-to-people ties.

Exchanged… pic.twitter.com/1v0Yy1bEMX

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) October 23, 2026

Only Three Capitals Stood With Pakistan in May 2025

The freeze that this visit is meant to loosen began in public, with a foreign ministry note from Baku, and then hardened in a presidential readout in China. Jaishankar had already named the split in Parliament before he ever booked this trip.

HOW THE SINDOOR SPLIT UNFOLDED

1. May 2025: India launches Operation Sindoor against terror targets in Pakistan after the Pahalgam attack.
2. May 7, 2025: Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry says it is in solidarity with the people of Pakistan and condemns military attacks against Pakistan that killed and injured civilians.
3. July 28, 2025: Jaishankar tells the Lok Sabha that only three countries besides Pakistan opposed the operation, identified as Azerbaijan, China and Turkey.
4. September 2025: Aliyev meets Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif at the SCO summit in Tianjin. In the Azerbaijani presidency’s account, he congratulates Pakistan on a victory over India and says brotherly relations take precedence, including after what he described as Indian pushback in international organisations.

Azerbaijani media also claimed India had blocked Baku’s bid for full SCO membership. New Delhi said the Armenia and Azerbaijan applications were not taken up in Tianjin because of time constraints. Indian travellers, meanwhile, were told to skip Baku the way they were told to skip Turkey. The political cost sat on tourism and on the calendar of senior visits, not on ONGC Videsh’s existing Caspian holding.

On the morning Jaishankar saw Aliyev, some Azerbaijani commentators still used the day to repeat that Pakistan is family and that Kashmir is Pakistan’s cause. That is the noise New Delhi is choosing to work around. Baku did not put a correction to the May 7 note on the table beside the INSTC talking points.

Pleased to call on @presidentaz Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan in Baku this morning.

Conveyed the greetings of @rashtrapatibhvn and PM Modi. Discussed strengthening the relationship between our two countries. Appreciate his positive sentiments for this shared endeavour.

🇮🇳🇦🇿 pic.twitter.com/jfCBS1kCDY

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) October 23, 2026

The Corridor India Cannot Build Around Azerbaijan

Jaishankar said both countries are invested in the International North-South Transport Corridor and had agreed to coordinate more closely on it. The corridor is a 7,200 km mix of ship, rail and road meant to move freight among India, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia and Europe. The shortest western branch still has to climb out of Iran and across Azerbaijan if cargo is to avoid the long sea route around Europe.

That geography is why a one-day stop in Baku is a freight decision as much as a political one. India has spent years trying to give Mumbai a land-and-Caspian path toward Russia and Europe that does not depend on the Suez queue or on China’s east-west Middle Corridor alone. Azerbaijan sits on that western branch whether New Delhi likes the rest of Baku’s alliance chart or not. Armenia is on the map too, which is why a thaw with Baku cannot be a swap of one Caucasus partner for the other.

The unfinished Iranian rail stretch toward Astara has been the known gap on that branch. Closer working ties with Baku do not pour that concrete, but they do decide whether Azerbaijan treats Indian cargo as a priority once the rails are in. Jaishankar’s own list after the meeting ran in a straight line: political talks, exchange of visits, more economic activity, better links, and people-to-people contact. Freight was the item that does not work if Azerbaijan stays frozen out.

ONGC Kept Its Caspian Stake as Oil Trade Collapsed

Energy was the other load-bearing file. Jaishankar said the two sides had agreed to deepen work in oil and energy and to spread it into other fields. The commercial reality underneath that line is lopsided. India’s overseas oil company, ONGC Videsh, has put more than $1.2 billion into the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli fields and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline since March 2013. On November 29, 2024, it closed a $60 million Equinor stake purchase for an extra 0.615 percent in ACG and 0.737 percent in the pipeline, taking the holdings to 2.925 percent and 3.097 percent. The field contract runs to December 31, 2049.

Trade did not keep pace with that stake. The Embassy of India in Baku records bilateral trade of $401 million in 2025, with Indian exports at $226 million and imports, mostly crude, at $175 million. Two years earlier the same relationship had peaked at $1.882 billion, almost all of the drop coming out of Azerbaijan’s oil sales to India, not out of Indian exports, which stayed near $220 million across the period.

INDIA-AZERBAIJAN TRADE, 2022 TO 2025

Jaishankar has spent 2026 arguing that India will buy oil where it can, including a public defence of Russian oil purchases while in Kyiv, and Baku is being treated as another source in that hunt. Complementary economies, he said, still leave room to grow trade and investment. The table says the room is almost entirely on the crude line that shrank.

What the August Peace Track Changed for New Delhi

Jaishankar welcomed the August peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia and said he hoped it would lead to durable peace. He also restated India’s line that disputes should be settled through dialogue and diplomacy, and said the two ministers had discussed West Asia, Europe and Eurasia, including the hit to food, fuel, fertiliser and finance in the Global South.

The document he was nodding to is the joint declaration signed in Washington on August 8, 2025, by Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, with the United States as witness. Foreign ministers initialed a draft peace treaty the same day. A full, ratified treaty is still not the same thing as that declaration. Azerbaijan has kept a demand that Armenia change constitutional language Baku reads as a claim on Nagorno-Karabakh.

On the Washington peace track’s first anniversary, the United States, Armenia and Azerbaijan said the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, a multimodal transit link through southern Armenia toward Nakhchivan, was moving from vision to work, with engineering surveys under way and Azerbaijani highway and railroad approaches nearly complete on Baku’s side. The same note said Azerbaijan had lifted transit restrictions toward Armenia, that close to 60,000 tons of goods had moved to and from Armenia through Azerbaijan in a year, and that 20,000 tons of oil products had gone to Armenia. Washington also pointed to a $201 million grant to a Trans-Caspian enterprise fund for the east-west Middle Corridor.

For India, the usable fact is narrower. A Caucasus that is no longer in active war is a Caucasus through which INSTC cargo can be planned without writing a conflict clause into every timetable. That is the change that makes a Baku visit worth a Friday on the minister’s calendar even while the May 2025 note stays on the record.

Yerevan Remains India’s Arms Customer in the Caucasus

India is not emptying its Armenia file to make room for Aliyev. Yerevan has been the first foreign buyer of the Akash air-defence system and a launch customer for Pinaka rocket batteries, and it has also taken Swathi weapon-locating radars. Guided Pinaka rockets for Armenia were flagged off in January 2026. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh has kept a separate track with Armenia’s defence minister and general staff, including a new format for talks between the two headquarters.

That split is the part of the map the Baku photo cannot hide. Pakistan remains Azerbaijan’s political and military partner. India remains a supplier to the army that fought Azerbaijan. Jaishankar’s formula, that both countries make their own call, is how New Delhi describes sitting in both rooms. It is also why this visit does not read as a full alignment. Trade delegations and INSTC meetings can move without a defence pact, and that appears to be the design.

Diplomatic relations themselves are old. India recognised Azerbaijan in December 1991 and opened ties on February 28, 1992. The inter-governmental commission on trade and science dates to April 2007 and has met six times, most recently in Baku on October 25, 2023. The machinery was always there. The political permission to use it is what failed in May 2025 and what Friday was meant to switch back on.

Students, Flights and a Fire Temple on the Same Day

The practical list from Baku is modest, which is how a repair visit often looks when no treaty is ready.

WHAT THE BAKU TALKS PUT ON PAPER

• INSTC work: Closer coordination on the North-South corridor, with no new construction timetable attached in public.
• Energy: A pledge to deepen oil and energy work and to look at other sectors, on top of ONGC Videsh’s existing ACG and pipeline stakes.
• Visits: Bayramov invited to India; trade delegations and other exchanges to resume.
• ITEC seats: Jaishankar asked that Azerbaijani professionals return in larger numbers to India’s technical training programme, which already offers about 30 courses a year and had taken more than 230 Azerbaijani scholars by December 2024.
• Air links: Daily flights already exist; both sides had earlier agreed a ceiling of 42 flights a week, though IndiGo’s seven Delhi-Baku services have been suspended since January 26, 2026, leaving Azerbaijan Airlines on 14 weekly flights, with an Air India codeshare added on August 3, 2026.

Jaishankar thanked Azerbaijan for helping evacuate Indian nationals, especially students, from Iran during the conflict earlier in 2026, and for the way it looks after Indian students already in the country. The embassy puts the Indian community at about 1,000 people, including about 350 students. Tourism had been the consumer face of the relationship until the boycott: Azerbaijan recorded 166,944 Indian visitors in 2025, the fourth-largest inbound source after Russia, Turkey and Iran, and issued 32,154 visas to Azerbaijani citizens for travel to India.

Late in the day he went to the Ateshgah fire temple on the edge of Baku, a sandstone compound whose walls still carry Indian merchants’ marks. The embassy brief counts 23 inscriptions there, 18 in Devanagari and 2 in Gurmukhi, some opening on Ganesh and some naming Guru Nanak’s stay between 1511 and 1521. Jaishankar called the temple a symbol of the historical and cultural connect between the two peoples. It was the one stop on the schedule that did not need a joint statement, and it was also the one that did not ask Baku to unsay May 2025.