BY VK SHASHIKUMAR
#BridgesOfFriendship
On February 17, 2026, the Indian Navy’s Eastern Naval Command posted a welcome on X. The message was in Hindi and Farsi. It read: “Khoshomadid! Indian Navy welcomes IRIS Dena, of the Iranian Navy, on her arrival at Visakhapatnam to participate in IFR 2026 and MILAN 2026, reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations.” The hashtag was #BridgesOfFriendship.
IRIS Dena, a Moudge-class frigate of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, had sailed into India’s premier eastern naval base to join the largest maritime assembly India has hosted since independence. The International Fleet Review and Exercise MILAN 2026, organised by the Indian Navy, brought together 74 nations and 85 warships. Iranian Navy Commander Commodore Shahram Irani met Indian Navy Chief Admiral Dinesh Tripathi at Visakhapatnam and discussed the exchange of experience in long-range operations and escort missions. The exercises included anti-submarine warfare drills, air defence, maritime domain awareness, and search-and-rescue operations. Iran’s contingent marched in the International City Parade alongside personnel from 15 other nations. For ten days, the IRIS Dena was India’s guest.
A detail noted by Turkish state broadcaster TRT World adds a layer of texture: the IRIS Dena arrived in Visakhapatnam on February 16, despite confirmation that the Indian Coast Guard was detaining three Iran-associated “dark fleet” tankers seized off Mumbai the previous week. India was, simultaneously, seizing Iranian-linked vessels and hosting Iran’s frigate with ceremonial honours. Another detail: the US Navy had planned to send the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Pinckney to the exercise, but its deployment was cancelled at short notice for undisclosed operational reasons.
On February 25, the exercises concluded. IRIS Dena sailed out of Indian waters, heading home to Iran via the Indian Ocean.
On February 28, Operation Epic Fury was launched. Ayatollah Khamenei was killed.
On the night of March 3, somewhere in the waters south of Sri Lanka, a US Navy fast-attack submarine — identity classified — acquired the IRIS Dena. At approximately 5:08 AM local time on March 4, a single Mark 48 ADCAP heavyweight torpedo struck beneath the stern of the frigate, breaking its keel and sending it to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, 40 nautical miles south of Galle. Of the approximately 180 crew on board, 87 bodies were recovered by Sri Lankan rescuers. Thirty-two sailors were pulled from the water and taken to Karapitiya Teaching Hospital. Over 60 remain missing. The commander and several senior officers survived and told the Sri Lankan Navy they had been hit by a submarine attack.
US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth confirmed the strike from the Pentagon podium. “An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo. Quiet death.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine called it “an incredible demonstration of America’s global reach. To hunt, find and kill an out-of-area deployer is something that only the United States can do at this type of scale.”
It was the first sinking of an enemy warship by a US submarine since 1945. The first by any submarine since HMS Conqueror torpedoed the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982.
The sinking did not occur in the Persian Gulf, where the US–Iran war is being fought. It occurred in the Indian Ocean — within India’s strategic neighbourhood, in the maritime zone that India claims as its sphere of responsibility, in the waters that the IRIS Dena had just transited as India’s invited guest.
India’s former Navy Chief, Admiral Arun Prakash, called it “a senseless and inflammatory act” that would “spread alarm across the high seas and disrupt global seaborne commerce.” Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera asked: “Does India have no influence left in its own neighbourhood? Or has that space also been quietly ceded to Washington and Tel Aviv?”
The Indian government said nothing.
The Analytical Question — Why This Incident Reveals India’s Deeper Calculus
The sinking of the IRIS Dena is not merely a tactical event in the expanding US–Iran war. It is an analytical inflection point for understanding India’s posture on the entire crisis. Every tension in India’s strategic positioning is compressed into this single incident: a ship that was India’s guest, sunk by India’s closest defence partner, in India’s own maritime backyard, while India says nothing.
The surface reading of India’s silence is betrayal — of a guest, of a historical relationship, of its own claim to Indian Ocean primacy. That reading is politically potent but analytically shallow. The deeper reading requires asking a different question. Not: why is India silent? But: what is India preserving its position for?
This assessment advances a central thesis: the clerical leadership that governed Iran has been decimated; a new Iranian political order will emerge; and when it does, India will be the only major power positioned to serve as a bridge between that new leadership and the international community. India’s current posture — including its silence on the IRIS Dena — is not abandonment. It is the preservation of strategic position for a role that only India, by virtue of civilisational depth and structural elimination of every other candidate, can play.
The evidence for this thesis proceeds in five stages: the full diplomatic timeline that produced the current crisis; the structural constraints that make standing with Iran impossible in the present moment; the decimation assessment of Iran’s clerical architecture; the civilisational substrate that uniquely qualifies India; and the strategic patience framework that connects India’s current actions to its future positioning.
The 48-Hour Timeline — A Forensic Reading of India’s Movements
Any serious analysis of India’s posture must begin with the sequence of events between February 25 and March 4, 2026. The timeline is now the most scrutinised diplomatic sequence in Indian foreign policy since the 1998 nuclear tests. What follows is a reconstruction from official statements, diplomatic readouts, and on-record interviews.
February 16–25: IRIS Dena is hosted at Visakhapatnam for IFR 2026 and Exercise MILAN. The Indian Navy’s Eastern Naval Command publicly welcomes the frigate as a reflection of “long-standing cultural links.” Iranian Navy Commander meets the Indian Navy Chief. Exercises include anti-submarine warfare drills. The US cancels its planned participation at short notice.
February 25–26: Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducts a two-day state visit to Israel. The visit produces 27 bilateral outcomes: 16 agreements and 11 joint initiatives. India and Israel elevate their relationship to “Special Strategic Partnership.” A landmark defence MoU is signed covering co-development and co-production of the Arrow, David’s Sling, Iron Dome, and Iron Beam systems. A separate agreement provides for 50,000 Indian workers in Israel. In his address to the Knesset, Modi states: “India stands with Israel, firmly, with full conviction, in this moment, and beyond.”
February 28: Less than 48 hours after Modi’s departure, the United States and Israel launch Operation Epic Fury. Ayatollah Khamenei is killed. Over 40 senior officials are eliminated. CENTCOM strikes over 1,000 targets in the first 48 hours.
February 28 (evening) – March 2: India’s MEA issues a statement expressing “deep concern” and calling for “dialogue and diplomacy.” Modi calls the UAE president and “strongly condemns” Iranian retaliatory attacks on the Emirates. He calls Netanyahu to convey “concerns.” He calls the Saudi Crown Prince, Bahrain’s King, and Canadian PM Carney. On March 2, Modi chairs the Cabinet Committee on Security, reviewing crude supplies, shipping routes, and the safety of 9 million Indians in the region. The MHA issues an advisory to states to monitor “pro-Iran radical preachers.”
March 4: IRIS Dena, India’s guest of two weeks earlier, is torpedoed 40 miles off Sri Lanka. Eighty-seven dead.
India says nothing.
Conspicuously absent throughout: At no point does Modi, the MEA, or any senior Indian official call Tehran, express concern for Iranian sovereignty, name Khamenei, reference the Minab schoolgirls, or acknowledge the sinking of a ship that was India’s guest. India’s condemnation is directed exclusively at Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the Gulf states.
Israel’s Ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, told The Indian Express that the strikes were carried out during an “operational opportunity” that emerged after Modi’s departure, that the security cabinet approved the operation on Saturday morning, and that “nothing specific could have been shared” during the visit because no concrete plan existed at the time. This account is plausible on its face. But two observations complicate it. First, the “48-hour rule” — the proposition that no rational military planner would launch strikes triggering retaliatory ballistic missiles while a visiting head of state is physically inside the Knesset — is operational common sense, not conspiracy theory. Second, India’s pre-crisis actions suggest a government that anticipated the storm, not one caught in it.
The Pre-Positioning — Evidence of Anticipation
The evidence of Indian governmental anticipation is circumstantial but cumulative. Four data points merit assessment.
Chabahar: The zero-allocation signal. India’s Union Budget for 2026–27, presented on February 1 — 27 days before the strikes — allocated zero funding to the Chabahar port project for the first time in nearly a decade. The previous year’s allocation was ₹400 crore ($48 million). Reports indicate India transferred $120 million in financial obligations to Iran and informed the US Treasury it would “end all activities at Chabahar Port” as the sanctions waiver expiry approached in April 2026. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, when asked, said: “There has not been any allocation. I understand the importance of Chabahar. At the moment, this is all I can say.” She added that the issue involved “serious geopolitical considerations” and: “You will understand if I can’t say anything beyond this.” That phrasing — in a budget press conference, about a port — warrants close reading.
Energy preparedness: In early February, Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri informed the Rajya Sabha that India’s combined petroleum reserves provided a 74-day buffer. The government had already been diversifying crude sourcing away from Hormuz-dependent suppliers and toward Russian, West African, and US sources. When the crisis broke, the government directed oil marketing companies to halt petroleum exports to build domestic buffer stock — an order that does not materialise overnight.
The MHA advisory: The Ministry of Home Affairs’ advisory to state governments, issued on the night of March 2, instructed authorities to monitor and identify “pro-Iran radical preachers giving inflammatory sermons” and implement “preventive measures.” This is a pre-drafted contingency document. Its specificity indicates it was prepared well before the evening it was released.
The SCO trajectory: India’s posture in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation provides a longitudinal marker. In June 2025, India distanced itself from the SCO’s condemnation of Israeli strikes on Iran. By September 2025, at the SCO Summit in Tianjin, India reversed course and signed the declaration condemning the US and Israel. Analysts linked this shift to deteriorating India–US relations after Trump’s tariff announcement. In February 2026, India was back in the Knesset. This is not inconsistency. It is a posture that recalibrates continuously against the US–India equation.
Taken individually, each data point admits benign explanation. Taken together, they describe a government that was pre-positioning for a crisis it expected.
The Geopolitical Constraints — Why India Cannot Stand with Iran
The critical question is not whether India anticipated the crisis but why it responded as it did — with condemnation of Iran’s retaliatory strikes, solidarity with the Gulf states, and silence on the strikes that triggered the entire sequence. The answer lies in a structural analysis of India’s current strategic dependencies.
The US dependency: India’s relationship with the United States under the second Trump administration is the dominant variable in its foreign policy calculus. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign includes the threat of a 25 per cent tariff on any country trading with Iran. India’s Chabahar waiver expires in April 2026. The I2U2 framework (India, Israel, UAE, US) and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) are the architecture of India’s economic future in the region. A public condemnation of the strikes would jeopardise all of this for a symbolic gesture.
The Israel dependency: India is the single largest buyer of Israeli weapons, accounting for one-third of Israel’s foreign arms sales from 2020 to 2024. The February 2026 defence MoU covers co-development of missile defence systems central to India’s security architecture against Pakistan and China. India’s national security apparatus is structurally dependent on Israeli defence technology in ways that create binding constraints on its diplomatic freedom.
The Gulf dependency: Nine million Indians live across the Gulf states. Their remittances constitute a significant component of India’s foreign exchange inflows. India’s crude oil imports from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait — transiting the Strait of Hormuz — represent approximately 50 per cent of its total crude intake. India’s energy security, diaspora safety, and diplomatic standing are all contingent on alignment with the GCC states, every one of which was struck by Iranian retaliatory missiles.
The Iran counter-dependency — or its absence: Iran was India’s third-largest oil supplier before 2018; it is now a negligible source. Chabahar is strategically important but operationally stalled. Bilateral trade is minimal. Iran’s interference in India’s internal affairs — Khamenei’s 2020 comments describing the Delhi riots as a “massacre of Muslims” and condemning the revocation of Kashmir’s special status — eroded whatever residual goodwill existed at the governmental level. As Swarajya Magazine framed it: if the Iranians chose not to improve relations with India and instead interfered in India’s internal affairs, they are now without a friend in need precisely when they needed one.
The structural conclusion is unavoidable: in the current geopolitical configuration, standing with Iran would be imprudent to the point of recklessness. It would damage India’s relationship with the US, Israel, and the Gulf simultaneously — the three pillars of its entire West Asian strategy — while delivering nothing to Tehran that Iran does not already know.
Moral postures are free. Strategic consequences are not.
The Decimation Assessment — What Remains of Iran’s Clerical Architecture
The analytical question sharpens when one examines what India is being asked to stand with. The distinction matters: India’s critics conflate the Iranian state, the Iranian people, and the Iranian regime. These are three different entities, and their fates are diverging.
The first tier: eliminated. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader since 1989, is dead. The defence minister is dead. Over 40 senior officials were killed. CENTCOM confirmed over 1,000 targets struck in the first 48 hours, including IRGC headquarters, naval assets, communications infrastructure, and command-and-control centres. The theocratic apex of the Islamic Republic — the office that held absolute religio-political authority through the doctrine of velayat-e faqih — has been physically destroyed.
The second tier: largely eliminated or neutralised. The Assembly of Experts’ succession bench has been devastated. Trump’s claim that “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates” appears operationally supported. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been publicly confirmed alive. Hassan Khomeini is reportedly safe but has issued no public statement. Sadiq Larijani’s status is unclear. The Council on Foreign Relations assessment was direct: “Taking out Khamenei is not the same as regime change. The IRGC is the regime.” But the clerical hierarchy that legitimised the IRGC’s power — the religious architecture that distinguished Iran from a straightforward military dictatorship — that hierarchy is shattered.
The surviving institutional structure: A three-person Provisional Leadership Council — President Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Mohseni-Eje’i, and a Guardian Council cleric — is governing under constitutional provisions. The IRGC, despite losing its command layer, is executing retaliatory strikes with institutional depth. Ali Larijani and Foreign Minister Araghchi are the most prominent surviving political figures. But these are administrators and functionaries, not religio-political power holders in the Khamenei mould.
The analytical conclusion: The religious extremism-imbued clerical leadership that governed Iran since 1979 has been functionally decimated. The first tier is eliminated. The second tier is largely destroyed. Some notable figures survive. They may attempt reconstitution. But the institutional conditions for a Khamenei-style supreme leadership no longer exist. What emerges will be structurally different: an IRGC-dominated military authority, a reformed theocracy with diminished clerical power, a transitional government, or a fragmented landscape with competing centres — with the Kurdish, Baloch, Arab, and Azeri peripheries all in motion.
India’s critics are demanding that India stand with a regime that, in its previous institutional form, no longer exists.
The Last Bridge Thesis — Why Only India Can Reach Post-Clerical Iran
The preceding analysis establishes two facts: India cannot stand with Iran in the current moment, and the Iran that existed before February 28 is structurally gone. This section advances a third proposition: when new Iranian leadership emerges, India will be the only major power positioned to serve as a bridge between that leadership and the international community. This is not aspiration. It is a function of elimination.
The United States is disqualified. It killed the Supreme Leader, struck over 1,000 targets, and has explicitly called for regime change. No Iranian leadership can accept American mediation without appearing to legitimise the strikes that destroyed the previous order.
Israel is disqualified. It co-executed the decapitation. Netanyahu has stated the campaign will continue “until the Iranian people are free.” It is a belligerent, not a mediator.
The Gulf states are disqualified. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait were all targets of Iranian retaliatory strikes. Their relationship with Iran is defined by Sunni–Shia sectarian rivalry and territorial contestation.
Russia is compromised. Moscow’s strategic position is weakened by Ukraine and international isolation. Its relationship with Iran has always been instrumentalist — arms transfers, UN vetoes, energy coordination — rather than civilisational.
China is structurally ambivalent. Beijing’s relationship with Tehran is mercantile and strategic: oil for infrastructure, diplomatic cover for access. Its Belt and Road investment at Gwadar, 170 kilometres from Chabahar, makes it a structural rival as much as a partner.
Turkey is a competitor. Ankara’s neo-Ottoman ambitions, Sunni identity, and NATO membership prevent it from serving as a neutral bridge.
Europe is exhausted. The JCPOA’s failure, Britain’s colonial legacy, and the EU’s simultaneous mourning and regime-change signalling disqualify it from bridge-building.
That leaves India. And India’s qualification is not merely a function of elimination. It is a function of civilisational depth that no other major power possesses.
The Civilisational Substrate — What Connects India to Iran Is Not a Regime
The analytical error in the current debate is a category error. India’s critics treat the India–Iran relationship as a government-to-government equation and judge it by the standards of diplomatic reciprocity. This framework is inadequate. India’s relationship with Iran operates on a civilisational timescale, and civilisational ties are governed by a different logic than diplomatic ones.
The historical record: The Persian and Indian civilisations have been in continuous interaction for over twenty-five centuries. Cyrus the Great’s Achaemenid Empire shared a border with the Gandhara civilisation. Darius I’s inscriptions mention “Hindu” as a satrapy. The Mughal dynasty spoke Persian as its court language for three centuries. Urdu, spoken by over 230 million people across South Asia, is etymologically rooted in Persian vocabulary. The Charbagh gardens and the ghazal form are Persian cultural imports inseparable from Indian identity.
The Parsi dimension: India is home to one of the world’s largest Zoroastrian communities — the Parsis, who fled Islamic persecution in Persia over a millennium ago. They became some of the subcontinent’s most consequential institution-builders: the Tata empire, the Godrej conglomerate, nuclear physicist Homi Bhabha, conductor Zubin Mehta. The Parsi community is the human embodiment of Persian civilisational DNA woven into India’s modern institutional fabric. This is not a diplomatic relationship. It is a genetic one.
The infrastructure of connection: Chabahar port, before it became a sanctions chess piece, was conceived as a civilisational connector — India’s gateway to Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the ancient Silk Road geography that once made Persia and India co-anchors of Asian commerce. The International North–South Transport Corridor was envisioned as a restoration of trade routes that predated the colonial partitioning of Asia. India is the only major power that has physically invested in Iranian connectivity infrastructure against Western pressure and at financial cost.
The asymmetry of civilisational depth: No other major power has this substrate. China’s relationship with Iran is recent, commercial, and instrumentalist. Russia’s is geopolitical and transactional. The Gulf states’ is defined by sectarian opposition. America’s is adversarial. Europe’s is contractual. India’s is civilisational. And civilisational relationships survive regime changes. They survived the Mongol invasions. They survived colonial partitioning. They survived the Islamic Revolution. They survived the sanctions regime. They will survive Operation Epic Fury.
India’s commitment to Iran and its people — irrespective of whichever government holds power in Tehran — stems from this civilisational bedrock. It is not contingent on a regime. It is not transactional. It is this quality that makes India uniquely positioned for the moment that will come after the current crisis resolves.
The Eastern Naval Command understood this when it posted #BridgesOfFriendship. The bridge is not a hashtag. It is twenty-five centuries of shared civilisation. The torpedo does not change that. Nothing can.
The Strategic Patience Framework — Reading India’s Actions, Not Its Silences
If the analysis above is correct — that India cannot stand with Iran now, that the clerical order is decimated, that new leadership will emerge, and that only India has the civilisational standing to bridge to it — then India’s current posture is not capitulation. It is positioning. The evidence supports this reading.
The Chabahar signal is strategic, not terminal. Brahma Chellaney assessed the budget omission as a “tactical freeze, not a strategic retreat.” India has already transferred $120 million in committed funds. The 10-year operational agreement runs to 2034. Chabahar is India’s only viable route to Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. An exit would hand China a vacuum at Gwadar. The zero allocation avoids provoking Washington while preserving the institutional option for reactivation.
The CCS meeting focused on operational preparedness, not political positioning. The Cabinet Committee on Security session on March 2 reviewed crude supplies, contingency sourcing, strategic petroleum reserves, shipping route security, and national safety. The directive to halt petroleum exports was an operational buffer-building measure. These are the actions of a government managing exposure, not choosing sides.
The diplomatic sequencing is deliberate. Modi’s calls followed a specific hierarchy: Netanyahu, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain. The absence of a call to Tehran is calibrated avoidance of a gesture that would be interpreted by Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh as an alignment signal. The silence toward Tehran is the most eloquent part of the sequence.
The SCO trajectory reveals a calibrating posture, not a fixed one. India distanced from the SCO condemnation in June 2025, joined it in September 2025, and stood in the Knesset in February 2026. The variable in each case was the India–US equation. This flexibility, which critics read as incoherence, is precisely the quality that will allow India to pivot toward bridge-building when conditions permit.
The Swarajya Magazine analysis frames India’s posture as the first expression of a foreign policy doctrine “twelve years in the making”: India as net security provider for the Indian Ocean Region. Whether or not one accepts that characterisation, the underlying analytical point is sound: India’s response to the Iran crisis is not ad hoc. It is embedded in a strategic architecture that prioritises long-term positioning over short-term signalling.
The Costs and Limitations — What India’s Posture Sacrifices
A rigorous assessment must account for what India’s strategic patience costs. The critics are not entirely wrong. The costs are real, documented, and will compound.
Credibility in multilateral forums: India’s distancing from the SCO position, its silence on Iranian sovereignty, and the IRIS Dena incident have weakened its standing in forums where it claims leadership of the Global South. As The Diplomat assessed: “By standing with Israel, India has laid bare its fear of being excluded from the cool clubs of the Global North.” This affects India’s candidacy for a permanent UN Security Council seat and its leadership credibility in BRICS.
The asymmetry of condemnation: Condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on the UAE while not condemning the strikes that killed Khamenei creates a documented asymmetry that Iranian diplomatic and public memory will retain. As Asia Times observed: “Russia offers security cooperation. India offers a prime minister who visited Israel on the eve of war and cannot bring himself to utter even a word about Iranian schoolgirl innocents killed by US-Israeli bombs.” This is the kind of sentence that gets quoted in Tehran for decades.
The Indian Ocean sovereignty question: The sinking of the IRIS Dena — a ship that was India’s guest, torpedoed in India’s strategic neighbourhood — raises a question India’s strategic establishment cannot avoid. Dr. James Holmes of the US Naval War College explicitly invoked a “Modi Doctrine” for the Indian Ocean, analogous to the Monroe Doctrine, and asked how New Delhi would respond to warmaking in the subcontinent’s maritime environs. If India cannot protect a guest ship in its own waters, the doctrine is aspirational, not operational. This is the most pointed strategic cost of the current silence.
The China opportunity: India’s retreat from Chabahar and its visible alignment with the US–Israel axis creates space for China to deepen its position as Iran’s primary economic partner. If India’s tactical freeze extends too long, the strategic asset may be permanently lost.
The diaspora risk. Nine million Indians live across a war zone partly created by India’s allies. India’s inability to speak to Tehran — and by extension, to influence Iranian targeting decisions that affect Gulf infrastructure where Indians live and work — is a direct consequence of its alignment choice.
These are not trivial costs. But strategic analysis requires distinguishing between costs that are temporary and interests that are permanent. The perception of alignment will shift as the crisis evolves. The civilisational bond will not. The news cycle’s judgement lasts weeks. The bridge-building opportunity that emerges from India’s preserved position will last a generation.
The Assessment
Five analytical conclusions emerge from this assessment.
First: India’s posture on the Iran crisis is structurally determined, not morally chosen. The configuration of dependencies — on the US, on Israeli defence technology, on Gulf energy and diaspora economics — forecloses any public alignment with Iran. Standing with Tehran would damage all three pillars of India’s West Asian architecture while delivering nothing of strategic value. The critics demand moral clarity in a situation that does not permit it.
Second: The religious extremism-imbued clerical leadership that governed Iran since 1979 has been functionally decimated. The first tier is eliminated. The second tier is largely destroyed or neutralised. Whatever replaces it will be structurally different. India’s critics are asking it to stand with a regime that, in its previous institutional form, no longer exists.
Third: When new Iranian leadership consolidates, it will need interlocutors who are not compromised by the events of February 28. Every other major power is disqualified by its role in the strikes, its sectarian positioning, its adversarial history, or its transactional relationship with Tehran. India is the only major power with the civilisational depth, the historical ties, the linguistic and cultural intimacy, and the strategic flexibility to serve as a bridge.
Fourth: India’s commitment to Iran — to its people, its civilisation, its place in the Asian order — is not contingent on any regime in Tehran. It is rooted in a twenty-five-century civilisational connection that has survived every prior upheaval. The ayatollahs were an interruption — a devastating, consequential, four-decade interruption — but an interruption nonetheless. What runs beneath is older and deeper.
Fifth: India’s current silence is not abandonment. It is the preservation of strategic position for a future that is already taking shape. By maintaining its alliances, managing its energy exposure, and avoiding gestures that would foreclose future options, India is doing the most difficult thing in crisis diplomacy: nothing visible, while everything is in motion beneath the surface.
The serious question is not whether India has “chosen sides.” It is whether, when the smoke clears in Tehran, when the 40 days of mourning end, when a new leadership — chastened, pragmatic, shorn of the theological absolutism that defined Khamenei’s four-decade rule — looks for a hand to reach across, there will be anyone standing there who is not compromised, not hostile, not transactional.
On February 17, India welcomed an Iranian frigate with the hashtag #BridgesOfFriendship. On March 4, that frigate was at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The bridge the hashtag invoked is not made of steel. It is made of civilisation. It does not sink.
India will be standing there. Not because it chose the right side. But because it understood that being the last bridge is more valuable than being the loudest voice.
(VK Shashikumar is a former roving foreign affairs correspondent who covered West Asia, and later set up the investigations team at CNN-IBN, now News18. He writes on geopolitics, conflict, and strategic affairs. The opinions expressed by the author and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Canary Trap or any employee thereof)
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