India moved within hours of the Iran-Israel ceasefire to stake out a commercial and diplomatic position in the Gulf, dispatching senior envoys to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha and Muscat on Wednesday with portfolios that include energy supply contracts, reconstruction tenders and renewed labor mobility agreements for an Indian workforce that drained from the region during six weeks of war.

The flurry of activity, announced in a late-morning statement from the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, was framed by officials as a long-planned outreach that had been held in reserve pending a credible halt to hostilities. The ceasefire, brokered in Islamabad and effective at 00:00 GMT on Wednesday, gave Indian planners the window they had been waiting for. Senior officials said Prime Minister Narendra Modi convened a small group of cabinet colleagues and the foreign secretary on Tuesday evening to authorize the dispatch.

“India is not seeking a strategic role in the security architecture. India is seeking the practical role it has always played in the Gulf, multiplied by the scale of what comes next,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra said at a brief press interaction at South Block. He declined to put a number on the contracts under discussion but said the missions had been instructed to “engage on everything that touches Indian workers, Indian refiners and Indian builders.”

The timing carried a subtext that few in the region missed. Pakistan, India’s neighbor and rival, hosted the talks that produced the framework now taking effect, and Islamabad has used the moment to press for a wider diplomatic profile in Gulf reconstruction, including a proposed engineering corps deployment to assist with port and refinery repairs in southern Iran. Indian officials, without naming Pakistan, signaled discomfort with that prospect.

“There is a difference between mediating a text and executing the work that follows,” one senior MEA official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the conversations were sensitive. “The work that follows is what we are organized for.”

The Indian outreach is organized around three distinct tracks, according to officials briefed on the missions. The first concerns long-term crude supply arrangements with Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company that had been quietly renegotiated during the war, when Indian refiners drew heavily on emergency cargoes from both producers. New Delhi hopes to lock in extended volumes at the term prices that prevailed before the OPEC+ production hike of April 1, when Brent was still flirting with $125. Brent settled near $98 on Wednesday as ceasefire optimism took hold.

The second track involves reconstruction tenders that Gulf governments are expected to issue on behalf of damaged Iranian infrastructure, particularly around Bandar Abbas, the Asaluyeh gas processing complex and several power stations targeted in the final week of strikes. Indian state-owned firms, including the engineering arms of NTPC and ONGC, have begun internal scoping work, officials said, with Larsen & Toubro and a handful of Indian construction majors also expected to bid. The Saudi-led Reconstruction Coordination Cell, announced last week in a joint statement with Qatar and Oman, has not yet defined procurement rules, but Indian envoys are pushing for transparent international tendering rather than bilateral allocations.

The third track addresses labor. An estimated 1.9 million Indian nationals work in the six Gulf Cooperation Council states across construction, retail, healthcare and domestic service. During the war, roughly 340,000 returned to India on evacuation flights organized through the Indian Air Force and chartered carriers, according to MEA figures released last week. Many lost employment when projects were paused or scaled back, and there is concern in state governments along India’s western coast that returning workers face limited domestic absorption. New Delhi is pressing Gulf capitals for guaranteed re-entry on existing visa categories and for new bilateral mechanisms to streamline recruitment as reconstruction begins.

“This is where the human geography of the war meets the political geography of the recovery,” said Constantino Xavier, a fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi who studies India-Gulf relations. “Three hundred thousand workers do not return without political consequences. The Modi government is moving fast because it has to.”

The economic stakes for India are considerable. Remittances from the Gulf account for roughly a third of India’s $125 billion annual inflows from migrant workers, by far the largest source country, and a sustained interruption would ripple through household budgets in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Equity benchmarks in Mumbai reflected the morning’s optimism, with the Nifty 50 closing up 1.6 percent on volumes well above its monthly average. The rupee strengthened modestly against the dollar.

Officials in Abu Dhabi and Riyadh received the Indian envoys cordially, according to people familiar with the meetings, but cautioned that procurement frameworks would take weeks to finalize and that Tehran’s own preferences would carry weight in any contracts touching Iranian territory. Iran’s transitional reconstruction authority, announced Tuesday in Tehran, has not yet published guidance on foreign contractors, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commercial arm, which controls significant pieces of Iranian heavy industry, remains a question mark in any procurement architecture.

China, which has positioned itself as a major creditor and contractor across the Gulf and Iran for more than a decade, is expected to compete vigorously for the same work. Chinese state media on Wednesday highlighted Beijing’s role in pressing for the ceasefire and noted what it called the “complementarity” of Chinese engineering with regional needs. A senior Chinese diplomat is scheduled to visit Tehran on Friday.

The Indian dispatch is the second consequential foreign policy move from New Delhi in 10 days. Last week, Modi hosted Australia’s prime minister for a bilateral that produced a joint Indo-Pacific maritime statement, and the foreign secretary traveled to Tokyo on Monday for a previously scheduled 2+2 ministerial. Officials denied any sequencing intent but acknowledged that the Gulf push closes what one called “a busy fortnight of positioning.”

Kwatra said the envoys would return to New Delhi by the weekend and that the prime minister was likely to convene a Cabinet Committee on Security review in the coming days. Officials said additional steps, including a possible Modi visit to the region in May, would be announced once the picture from the four capitals came into clearer focus.