Days before the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hammad Thani, arrived in India to a warm welcome from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an Adani company and a Qatar company signed a joint venture that increases Gautam Adani’s footprint in maritime operations in the Gulf region – a morale booster for the tycoon after lost ground in South Asia and a credibility crisis in the West. Adani Harbour Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited, incorporated a joint venture company with Sea Horizon Offshore Marine Services and an individual named Jamal A Rab AM Al Yafei in Qatar.
The joint venture is named Al Annabi Marine Services. It was incorporated on February 12, five days ahead of the Emir’s visit to India. The JV company will carry out the business of ships’ operations and management. Adani Harbour Services holds 49 percent stake in it.
APSEZ shares rose briefly on February 13 after the company informed the National Stock Exchange of the joint venture.
The joint venture adds to the Adani maritime empire’s already significant presence in the Gulf. APSEZ is present in Dubai through its majority acquisition of Astro Offshore, an offshore support vessel company. On the Mediterranean side of West Asia, Adani Ports is also in Israel, where it operates Haifa Port in partnership with the Israeli Gadot group.
While little is known about Al Annabi, the website of the Qatari promoter, Sea Horizon, describes the company as offering various maritime services including barges to accommodate workers employed in offshore projects, towing services, and other offshore services. Information could not be obtained about Al Yafei, who is the other party named as a promoter.
When the Emir arrived in India on the evening of February 17, Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke with protocol to receive him at the airport. Photographs tweeted by the PM showed him receiving the Emir on the red carpet at the bottom of the stairs to the aircraft. The two leaders inspected a guard of honour and Modi hugged the Emir in his customary manner. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar was also present.
Now, it’s rare for an Indian prime minister to receive a visiting head of state at the airport. Modi has done this only for four others: US Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and UAE President Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan. MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal described Modi’s welcome to the Emir as a “special gesture for a special friend”.
Adani’s big move in Qatar ahead of the visit of the Emir hews to a pattern of deal-making by the businessman, a long-standing friend of Prime Minister Modi. From Bangladesh to Greece, from Sri Lanka to Israel, wherever Prime Minister Modi has gone on bilateral visits, Adani has not been far behind. Recently it emerged that the government relaxed border security rules to allow Adani to develop a solar farm close to the India-Pakistan border in Gujarat. During the Emir’s visit, the two countries have signed an agreement to elevate their bilateral relationship to a strategic partnership, and will look at the possibility of signing a free trade agreement. India-Qatar bilateral trade is in the region of $15 billion, most of it LPG and LNG exports from Qatar, which is India's biggest supplier of these two types of fuel.
Before this, the Emir was famous in India for keeping eight former Indian navy personnel in custody for 18 months, from the end of August 2022 to mid-February 2024 on charges that neither government has spoken about publicly. Seven of them were freed after a pardon from the Emir and returned to India just before Modi visited Qatar in February 2024. Qatar continues to hold one person, Commodore Purnendu Tiwari, for reasons not publicly stated.
At the time they were incarcerated, for some of that period in solitary confinement, the Qatar Investment Authority invested Rs 4,300 crore in Adani Green Energy in August 2023, months after the Hindenburg report which sent Adani shares crashing, profiting from the subsequent rise in the valuation.
Qatar hosts about eight lakh Indians, the largest expatriate community in that country. It was also the first country to object to blasphemous remarks made by Nupur Sharma, then a spokesperson for the BJP, in June 2022. The Emir cancelled lunch with Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu, who was touring Qatar at the time.
This is the Emir’s second visit to India after 2015. A decade is a long gap for such visits between friendly countries, though Prime Minister Modi and External Affairs Ministers have both visited in the last 10 years. In this period, Qatar’s geopolitical heft has far exceeded its size. The tiny country with an ambitious ruler hosted the football World Cup in 2022, which increased its international profile.
Since the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict in October 2023, Qatar has negotiated between Israel and Hamas. Unlike many western countries, India has not listed Hamas as a terrorist group. But the BJP routinely attacks political rivals as “terror supporters” when they highlight Israel's atrocities in Gaza.
For Adani, whose cup of woes has brimmed over with troubles over his secretive deals in Sri Lanka, from where the company has pulled out of a solar farm project, and Bangladesh, where his electricity export deal with the previous Sheikh Hasina government had run into trouble, plus the US indictment (now in limbo after Trump’s suspension of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act), the deal in Qatar is a reprieve. For India, it is small consolation after the Indian Navy’s loss in Qatar.
The Navy veterans episode has put paid to the defence cooperation between the two countries. Once described as a “pillar” of bilateral ties, it finds no mention in the latest joint statement. It was also absent from the joint statement during Modi’s visit last year. The India-Qatar Defence Cooperation Agreement, signed during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s November 2008 visit, was extended for a further five years in 2018, but was not renewed at its expiry in 2023. There have been no joint naval exercises for the last three years.
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