Desert Rose Called Adenium
On thousands of balconies across India, a peculiar, striking plant grows. It grows into a bonsai. It can be traced from the high-rises of Mumbai to the sprawling terraces of Delhi. It has a swollen, bulbous base, twisting branches, and a sudden eruption of vivid pink or crimson flowers. In India, it is known colloquially as the Desert Rose.
Botanists know it by its scientific name: Adenium obesum. The species name, obesum, refers to that fat, water-storing trunk (an evolutionary adaptation to survive prolonged drought). The genus name, Adenium, is a direct geographical stamp. It derives from Aden, the ancient port city on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
Every Indian tending a Desert Rose is cultivating a piece of Yemen. The plant traveled across the Arabian Sea along ancient maritime trade winds. Those same winds connected the subcontinent to southern Arabia for millennia. Today, the flower thrives in the quiet sanctuaries of Indian homes. It is a beautiful survivor from a land currently being ground into ash. It stands as a living motif for Yemen itself. Built to endure drought and capable of startling beauty.
India and Yemen, Before the War
The flight from Muscat begins its descent into Hyderabad. Among the returning software engineers and Gulf laborers is a man on wheelchair with a shattered femur. He carries a folder full of Arabic medical records. He is from Sanaa. His journey here required a multi-day overland gauntlet through checkpoints to reach a functioning airport in Oman. He comes to India because his own country’s healthcare system has been systematically dismantled by high-explosive ordnance and blockades. When the immigration officer at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport stamps his medical visa, no words are exchanged. There is only a quiet administrative nod.
It is a modern tragedy rendered mundane by routine. Thousands of ordinary Yemenis are broken by a decade of airstrikes and grinding urban warfare. Every year, they travel to Indian cities like Hyderabad, Kochi, and Bengaluru for complex surgeries and cancer treatments. These treatments are no longer possible at home. They come because a human corridor connects the Indian subcontinent to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. It is one of the oldest living arteries in the world.
The Malabar-Aden Corridor
Long before the British East India Company drew lines across the Indian Ocean, dhows traversed these waters. They sailed between the Konkan coast and the Gulf of Aden, riding the seasonal monsoon winds. This was the Malabar-Aden corridor, one of the ancient world's great maritime superhighways.
It was a trade born of geography and mutual desire. From the ports of Gujarat and Kerala came spices, timber, and woven textiles. From the highlands and coastal markets of Arabia Felix came frankincense, myrrh, silver, and Arabian horses. When the monsoon blew southwest, the Indian merchants sailed to Yemen. When the winds reversed, the Arabs sailed to India.
This was not a colonial extraction. It was the meeting of two civilizations acting as equals. The merchants who settled in each other's ports built mosques and intermarried. They wove their cultures into the local fabric. They did not conquer; they traded. They left behind a legacy. It was etched into the bloodlines, the architecture, and the very language of the Indian Ocean rim.
The Hadhrami Diaspora and the Highland Surnames
In the harsh, arid valleys of eastern Yemen lies the Hadhramawt. It is a region of ancient mud-brick skyscrapers and deep-rooted tribal lineages. Over the centuries, waves of Hadhrami Arab merchants, scholars, and Sufi teachers migrated across the ocean. They settled in coastal communities from East Africa to Indonesia. In India, they found homes in Gujarat, along the Konkan coast, and in Kerala. They also settled deep inland in the princely state of Hyderabad.
The Nizams of Hyderabad maintained a legendary private army composed significantly of Hadhrami Arabs (the Chaush). They were prized for their martial prowess and unyielding loyalty. But the Yemeni footprint in India was not strictly military. It was often intellectual and spiritual. Many Indian Muslim families today trace their ancestry back to this Yemeni emigration. It is a living testament to a time when borders were porous to those who carried knowledge and goods.
Look closely at the genealogical fabric of the subcontinent, and you find even deeper, more subtle threads. Consider the surname Yazdi or Yezdi, carried by a number of Indian Muslim and Parsi families. The name is often associated with the Iranian city of Yazd. Among certain Indian Muslim lineages, it carries an older, different origin.
It is also a phonetic echo of the Zaydi Shia highlands of northern Yemen. The Zaydis were known for their fierce independence and distinct theological tradition. They represent the same religious and tribal demographic from which the modern Houthi movement emerged. That a permutation of their name survives as a family identifier in India is a breathtaking cultural artifact.
It is not a rigid claim of direct political descent, but rather a genealogical whisper. It reminds that the mountains currently being pummeled by coalition airstrikes once exported people. These people wove themselves into the Indian story.
The Port of Aden
By the mid-twentieth century, the port of Aden was a British colonial possession. Yet it remained a thrumming, cosmopolitan hub. It was one of the busiest ship-bunkering ports on the planet. Here, the wealth of the Gulf met the immense labor pool of the Indian subcontinent.
Around 1948, a teenager named Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani left the dusty town of Chorwad in Gujarat. He boarded a ship for Aden. He was not looking for adventure; he was looking for a wage. In the suffocating heat of the Yemeni coast, young Dhirubhai worked as a dispatch clerk. Later, he managed a filling station for A. Besse & Co., a major Aden-based trading house.
Aden was his university. It was in the chaotic, polyglot markets of the Yemeni port that Ambani learned the mechanics of global trade. He watched how commodities were priced, how currency fluctuations could be arbitraged, and how capital moved across the ocean. He absorbed the ruthless, pragmatic calculus of the souk. When he returned to Bombay in 1958, he carried with him the seed capital. He also brought the sharp commercial instincts that would eventually build Reliance Industries.
The man who constructed India's largest private enterprise learned the foundational lessons of capitalism in a Yemeni port. He did so while pumping gas and shuffling invoices. Today, the nation that hosted his early ambitions is being bombed into the Stone Age. Its ports are blockaded, and its economy is shattered. The contrast is devastating.
The Operation Raahat
The Gulf oil boom transformed the Arabian Peninsula. Thousands of Indian professionals traveled to Yemen to build and run its institutions. At the heart of this modern migration were nurses, predominantly from Kerala. They became the backbone of the Yemeni hospital system. In Sanaa, Taiz, and Hodeidah, Malayali nurses delivered Yemeni babies and treated Yemeni illnesses. They also sat by the beds of the ailing. It was the continuation of a two-thousand-year-old corridor, now defined by healing rather than trade.
Then came March 2015.
The Saudi-led coalition launched Operation Decisive Storm. The skies over Yemen filled with fighter jets, and the ports were sealed by naval blockades. The war was sudden, total, and indiscriminate. Thousands of foreign workers, including over 4,000 Indians, were trapped in a country with no neutral zones. The Houthis controlled the streets; the Saudis controlled the airspace.
What followed was Operation Raahat, a geopolitical masterclass in non-combatant evacuation. India possessed two crucial assets: heavy strategic airlift capability and the trust of both warring factions. Because of these, New Delhi was uniquely positioned to execute a rescue. The effort was spearheaded on the ground by General V.K. Singh. He was a former Indian Army chief turned government minister.
Indian naval vessels (stealth frigates and destroyers) navigated the perilous waters of the Gulf of Aden. They docked at Yemeni ports, while Air Force C-17s and civilian Air India flights pierced the airspace. Indian diplomats negotiated directly with Saudi commanders for two-hour "bombing pauses" over Sanaa airport. Concurrently, they worked with Houthi checkpoints on the ground to allow buses of terrified expatriates to pass.
Over eleven days, India evacuated 4,640 of its own citizens. It also rescued 960 foreign nationals from 41 other countries (including Americans, Britons, and Pakistanis). Their own governments lacked the ground access, military clearance, or diplomatic capital to get them out.
Operation Raahat was a triumph of logistics, but it was fundamentally enabled by history. The Houthis knew the Indians as healers and teachers; the Saudis knew them as vital economic partners. For a brief window, the guns paused out of residual respect. That connection preceded the war by millennia.
The Silence of New Delhi
Since that dramatic rescue, India has largely stepped away from the Yemen conflict. India maintains excellent relations with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. Yet New Delhi has resolutely refused to play the role of mediator.
This silence is not apathy. It is the calculated result of India's doctrine of strategic autonomy. New Delhi operates on a simple, unsentimental premise. Trade with all but align with none. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are critical providers of crude oil and massive sources of expatriate remittances. Iran offers the Chabahar port corridor, a vital strategic bypass into Central Asia. Israel provides cutting-edge defense technology. To step into the Yemeni quagmire as a peace broker would require taking a stance. That stance involves state-sponsored militias, maritime blockades, and territorial integrity. It would force a choice that would inevitably alienate one indispensable partner to satisfy another.
But there is a deeper, colder recognition in South Block. Indian diplomats understand what Western capitals often pretend not to. The Yemen conflict is fundamentally a war of territorial control and regime survival. It is disguised as the protection of regional spheres of influence. For Riyadh, an autonomous, Iran-aligned militia on its southern border is an existential threat. For Tehran and the Houthis, maintaining that exact pressure point is a vital strategic move.
There is no honest compromise to mediate here. Any concession by one side is viewed as a fatal capitulation by the other. Even if Riyadh or Tehran had formally asked India to intercede, New Delhi would have quietly, firmly declined. The cost of failure is too high, and the architecture of the war is too absolute.
The Lingering Debt
Thus, the geopolitical machinations grind on, far above the heads of the people bleeding in the dust. The ancient Malabar-Aden corridor has been reduced to a one-way street for the desperately ill.
The Yemeni man with the shattered femur rests in a pristine, air-conditioned hospital room in Hyderabad. He looks out the window at the Indian monsoon. A Malayali nurse checks his vitals and adjusts the IV drip. She works with the same practiced efficiency her predecessors brought to the wards of Sanaa before the bombs fell.
They are connected by blood, by trade, by centuries of shared oceans. The patient heals in India. Above his home, the sky remains filled with the shrieks of jet engines. It echoes with the devastating roar of high explosives. He is safe, for now, in a land that remembers his ancestors. But you cannot cure a fractured country in a foreign hospital. When his bone knits and his visa expires, he will have to return to the 'Fortunate Land'. Back in Yemen, he will wait in the dark for the next strike.
On hospital bed he spent his days remembering how it all begun in 2014.
We will discuss the beginning of war, in the next chapter.
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