Iraqi elections: An opportunity for India

The current obsession with the Bihar election on November 11, 2025 notwithstanding, India also needs to focus on another election taking place on the same day, 4,000 kilometres away, in Iraq.

Features and significance

While some systemic features of the sixth Iraqi parliamentary election are relatively easy to comprehend, others may make even hardened Bihar pollsters blink. There are 7,744 candidates for 329 seats with 32 parties and a large number of independents in the election based on proportional representation. Nearly 40% of candidates are below 40 years of age. In an otherwise patriarchal society, close to a third of the candidates are women, leveraging a quarter of seats reserved for them. The results might trigger months of horse-trading among the three sectarian groups, broadly based on Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish parties, before a majority coalition emerges. The incumbent Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, projects himself as a “Sushasan Babu”, claiming to have completed over 2,582 long-delayed projects in his three-year rule. He has added a million new jobs to the already bloated bureaucracy. His detractors accuse him of being pro-American. The polity and electioneering are characterised by corruption, disbursal of freebies and rampant kleptocracy institutionalised by a disingenuous “Muhasasa” system that reserves nearly a thousand lucrative positions for the winning coalition. These flaws and the violent suppression of youth protests in 2019-20 have engendered popular apathy. Only 21 million of the 30 million eligible voters have registered, and less than 40% of the latter are likely to vote, resulting in nearly three-fourths absenteeism. Nevertheless, the biometric voter I-cards are reportedly changing hands for around a hundred dollars. Thanks to numerous militias running amok, guns, goons and ethno-sectarianism are more abundant than in Bihar’s badlands. Kurdish separatism, lingering Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorism, and Iranian patronage of several Iraqi Shia militias are additional complications. Further, the election boycott call by populist Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, whose party got the highest number of seats in the previous election, would leave the field to the ruling Shia Coordination Framework. While Mr. al-Sudani is widely expected to continue, the fractured Iraqi polity has resulted in a new Prime Minister after every past election. Nevertheless, after the tumultuous legacy of the Saddam era repression, wars, terrorism and sectarian strife, holding elections at regular intervals marks Iraq’s return to imperfect democratic normalcy.

Second, the coming parliamentary elections have regional and even global significance in view of Iraq’s geostrategic importance and status as OPEC’s second-largest producer. During the past two decades of turmoil, the divided country has been an arena where the animosity between the U.S. and Iran played out. In case a decisive election results in stable governance, Iraq can resume its unencumbered sovereignty. It has already negotiated a withdrawal of the U.S.-led multinational force by September 2026, deployed since the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. Iran is determined to maintain its stranglehold on Shia militias in Iraq, as well as use Iraq as a market and conduit for busting the U.S. sanctions. But Tehran has been significantly weakened by Israeli military actions over the past two years, which have attenuated Iranian military might, curbed its nuclear and missile capabilities, and decimated its regional proxies. The Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policies and “Snapback” of the UN sanctions have also hamstrung Iranian economy. Pro-Iran Iraqi militias have largely eschewed military actions against the U.S. and Israel. A strong, nationalist elected government in Baghdad could take advantage of a weakened Iran to begin the delicate but crucial process of disarming the heavily armed militias by either co-opting them into regular armed forces or metamorphosing them into political parties. Similarly, Kurds leveraged the disarray in Baghdad to deepen their longstanding quest for autonomy through the ‘Kurdistan Regional Government’. As Baghdad gets its political and security act in place, this process might get reversed.

The Iraqi oil and gas sector has remained largely unaffected by political and security flux, Iraq has been producing around 4.5 mbpd and exporting nearly 3.6 mbpd, with China and India being the top two customers in 2024. It claims 5.5 mbpd production capacity and has signed multiple agreements with Chinese, American, and other Western oil and gas majors to ramp up production to 7 mbps by 2029. Reducing gas flaring is a priority to utilise it as a fuel for power generation.

India-Iraq ties

India had close ties with Iraq during the 1980s, with nearly $10 billion worth of construction projects and oil exploration blocks. In 2024-25, total bilateral trade was $33.35 billion, making Iraq our eighth largest trade partner, albeit with a balance of 9:1 in Iraq’s favour due to our dependence on crude. As Russian oil supplies recede, Iraq is likely to resume its role as India’s largest crude supplier, further tilting the trade imbalance. Once the electoral dust settles, India should rebalance its bilateral ties by prioritising highest level re-engagement. Apart from reviving the socio-economic complementarity, such synergy would ameliorate the emerging power vacuum in the northern Gulf. It would also show that the ties between our two democracies are not transactional, but based on mutual interests and shared values.

Mahesh Sachdev, Retired Indian Ambassador specialising in the Arab world and oil issues