Defending their baseline through an incredibly tense, headline-driven session, domestic buyers engineered a late-afternoon recovery to rescue Indian equity benchmarks from an aggressive geopolitical sell-off on Monday, July 13, 2026. The NSE Nifty 50 crawled up 4.10 points to settle at 24,211.00, surviving an intraday plunge to 24,000.20, while the BSE Sensex managed a fractional gain of 47.01 points to close at 77,616.40. The initial risk-off panic was triggered by Tehran executing a sudden closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz shipping lane following intense missile exchanges with U.S. Navy assets, a development that instantly spiked Brent crude by 3% to $78 a barrel and forced the rupee down to 95.62 against the dollar. This energy shock hit just ahead of the highly anticipated domestic retail inflation print, with economists bracing for June CPI to breach the RBI’s 4% threshold for the first time in 16 months due to a punishing 40% monsoon deficit that has stalled Kharif crop sowing by 20%. Despite the visible macroeconomic headwinds and a 0.6% slide across mid-and-small-cap counters, the main indices found a solid structural safety cushion via a massive shift in capital flows: Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) flipped into aggressive buyers, pumping ₹15,157 crore into Indian equities so far in July to reverse four months of persistent outflows. Simultaneously, corporate boardrooms showed strong resilience against rising external pressure as New Delhi effectively brushed aside a aggressive 12.5% labor-linked tariff threat from Washington, leaning instead on a 15% year-on-year surge in Q1 goods exports and rapidly diversifying its global market footprint through newly activated free trade agreements.