New Delhi: Months after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vice president Ram Madhav said during a visit to the United States that India had stopped oil imports from Iran and Venezuela under pressure from Washington, Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament and former foreign secretary and ambassador to the US Harsh Shringla has narrated a similar sequence of events while speaking at a recent public event. Madhav had apologised for his remarks made in April and retracted his statements. Shringla said on October 6, while participating in a discussion at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI), that he had discussed with an American diplomat visiting India when Joe Biden was the President of the United States that the Indian government had stopped importing oil from Iran and Venezuela after the US said it should do so. Shringla responded to a video clip of his remarks taking off on social media by sharing his own video post on X on October 28. In it, he said that what he had said was in the interest of India’s energy security and accused the Congress party of spreading “another false narrative”. He said his remarks were removed from context, but did not deny or retract the remarks.The Congress party is among many others who have shared Shringla’s remarks about US officials pressuring India to not purchase oil from Iran, then Venezuela and now Russia, over the years. Party spokesperson Supriya Srinate claimed that his remarks showed that “Narendra Modi has always surrendered before America”.The opposition party’s state units, including in election-bound Uttar Pradesh, questioned the Union government’s priorities, saying it was only a “dhurandar”, a tough all-rounder, when it came to “attacking students”.𝗔𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗙𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗲 𝗡𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝘆 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀. | 𝗘𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝗲𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵A conversation on India’s foreign policy cannot be reduced to selective clips and misleading interpretations.In my conversation with Dr. Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, I made it clear that India’s energy security and national interest will always come first. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji, India’s foreign policy is guided by strategic autonomy and a nation-first approach.Congress must stop taking statements out of context to mislead the people of India. A party that has a history of yielding to external pressure on matters of vital national interest has little ground to question India’s commitment to strategic autonomy.In a democracy, political arguments must be built on facts, not false narratives.@BJP4India @PMOIndia @pradip103 @deepakmhaskey @RaviTripati_BJP @vijai63#IndiaFirst #NationalInterest #StrategicAutonomy #IndianForeignPolicy #CongressExposed— Harsh V Shringla (@harshvshringla) October 28, 2026Oil pressure precedes current US administrationShringla said at the discussion hosted by ASPI, in which he was in conversation with Asia Society global president and CEO Dr Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia that when he was in Washington DC, exemptions from the ‘Iran sanctions’ would feature in his discussions with his US counterparts.“In other words, certain countries, including India, were exempt from sanctions imposed by the United States because we had a huge dependency on import of Iranian oil and of course many of our refineries were suited to refining Iranian crude,” he told Rudd.He said the officials he spoke to on the exemptions had conveyed that they understood why it was needed. “And then, suddenly one day, those exemptions were off the table,” he said, referring to the growing unpredictability of trade ties with the US.“So I remember telling one of our US colleagues, who would come down to Delhi when I was foreign secretary, who came down to tell us that we [India] should…start slowing down on the purchase of Russian oil. This is during the Biden administration,” said the MP.“So I told him, I said, ‘You know, I was in DC when you got us to wean ourselves of Iranian oil, and that was a huge effort and at that time’, I think, we said [at the time] that ‘OK, if that’s what it is, then we [will] stop’. And we stopped buying Iranian oil.”“We don’t buy any Iranian oil today, which I think is fortunate, considering that there would have been supply constriants,” Shringla says in a video clip of the event last week, that has been circulating on social media.Shringla went on, saying, “Then, at some stage, we were told to stop buying Venezuelan oil. And we said, ‘Hello? We have invested $6 bn in Venezuela in capacities and you are asking us to stop?’ And today, you are saying ‘stop buying Russian oil’. Now, we have an obligation for about a 150 billion…” he said, before he was interrupted by his co-participant in the discussion, Rudd, who mentions Texas Oil.“Have you thought of Texan Oil? That’s obviously going to be safer,” Rudd says.Shringla responds, ‘Yes, absolutely, but you are right – we have increased our purchase of American energy, there is no doubt about that. And we’ve diversified. We’ve gone into buying oil from Nigeria, Venezuela, Australia…Brazil, Guyana.”He then said India upping oil purchases from the United States has reduced the trade deficit [for the United States]. “But our concern is that if you look at the trade figures, 50 per cent of our oil was coming from Russia over ’23, ’24, ’25 and parts of 2026 as well.”“So if you [all countries] have to stop purchasing Russian oil, you are going to have a serious, I would say, energy situation in your hands. We have a distinct possibility that not only would energy prices go through the roof – it would affect our inflation figures here [in India] – but I think it would have an impact on global energy security. That’s a concern.“Because we are today not just the third-largest buyer of energy, we are probably the largest…and if we stop buying that quantity – over 2 million barrels of Russian oil a day – I think we are going to be in some difficulty on a global…for global oil prices.”Rudd responds that dealing with the Trump administration is “tricky”, and not just for India but other countries as well.India’s purchases of Russian crude have fallen sharply in recent months. Imports declined by nearly 29% between July and September, from approximately 2.57 million barrels per day to 1.82 million barrels per day, according to Kpler ship-tracking data on October 21.Overall trade relationship discussedThe discussion also went over the US Congress passing the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, authorising hefty tariffs of up to 100% on buyers of Russian oil. Shringla described the issue of tariffs as a “major factor” in the US–India relationship since the start of the Trump administration and said that it appeared to be surrounded by not one but several “Damocles’ Swords”.While US President Donald Trump has issued a temporary waiver to India on the so-called “Russian Sanctions Act”, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been pressing New Delhi to substitute Russian imports with alternative options – chiefly Texas light crude and heavily discounted Venezuelan heavy crude.Also read: In Meeting With Rubio, Jaishankar Raises US’s ‘100% Tariff’ Law Against Russian Oil Customers“Pursuant to section 115(a) of the Graham Act, I hereby waive the application of any duties provided for in sections 112 and 113,” Trump said in an executive order exempting India from the punitive tariffs on October 23.This is the first time that India is named in such a Bill in the US. Other countries on which 100% duties are to be imposed are Turkiye, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Slovak Republic, UAE, Singapore, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic.Previous references to US pressure retractedMadhav had apologised on X for his statement, made at the Hudson Institute conference held in Washington, saying that he had made an incorrect assertion about US pressure regarding Indian oil imports.“What I said was wrong,” he wrote on April 24 after an outcry over his remarks. “India didn’t agree to stopping import of oil from Russia anytime. Also it vigorously protested 50% tariff imposition. I was trying to make a limited counterpoint to d [the] other panelist. But factually incorrect. My apologies,” he wrote.More recently, Union minister for petroleum and natural gas Hardeep Singh Puri said at a public event that India faced no pressure from the US to reduce Russian crude oil imports. Puri said, “I never felt anything,” when asked about pressure from Washington.ASPI has released the full discussion on its website. It continues for well over an hour and the conversation dwells on US–India relations in some detail.