The Modi government’s silence on the US-Israeli war against Iran is being projected as “responsible statecraft”, a claim that deserves serious deliberation. The formulation is eloquent, but it is built on selective reasoning, a critical omission and a fundamental confusion between prudence and deference. The central claim is that silence, in the absence of leverage, is a legitimate strategic instrument. It has been claimed in some quarters that India’s muted response to a war reflects the cool calculus of a rising power protecting its interests across multiple fronts. This is theoretically defensible. But there is a categorical difference between a considered posture of principled restraint, communicated with clarity; and an opaque silence born of ideological deference to one side. The former is statecraft. The latter is the abdication of statecraft. India did not merely stay quiet. It failed to offer even a formal condolence on the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader, a basic diplomatic courtesy. This is incomprehensible. Even the states with no leverage and no international heft issue condolences. That India skipped this elementary courtesy suggests the silence is not a strategic calculation. It is a reflexive tilt, calibrated to please Washington and Tel Aviv. The defence of India’s silence is grounded in India’s enormous stakes in the Gulf. It’s true that there are valid concerns around safeguarding $200 billion worth of annual trade, critical energy dependence and the welfare of 9 million Indians living across the region. But this comprises only half the picture. It is the other half that is more strategically consequential and yet, missing.Iran is not merely a trading partner. It is the anchor of the International North-South Transport Corridor and the gateway to Chabahar port. It is India’s own strategic answer to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. India has invested over two decades of diplomatic capital, infrastructure resources and long-term strategic planning into this architecture. It was designed to give India an independent overland and maritime corridor to Central Asia, Afghanistan, EU and Russia, by entirely bypassing India’s perennial adversary Pakistan. It was considered an effective strategic vision to compete directly with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. If that architecture is now abandoned in deference to US-Israel’s whims, India will need another decade and a half to construct an alternative trade corridor. That is not responsible statecraft. That is handing China a generational strategic advantage, voluntarily, without negotiation and without even a public acknowledgement of the cost. The BRICS contradictionAn implicit logic in the Modi government’s position is that proximity to the US is necessitated by China’s strategic challenge. But the Modi government’s own foreign policy record dismantles the argument. Ignoring the vacillations in India’s foreign policy alignments over the last couple of years, which have swayed like a pendulum between the US, Russia and China, the fact remains that India is currently the Chair of BRICS. BRICS is a multilateral coalition constructed precisely to challenge American financial hegemony and advance de-dollarisation as a structural global goal. Iran is a member of BRICS. If India’s foreign policy is so completely subordinated to Washington’s preferences that it cannot issue a measured statement on a war that violates international law and directly harms a BRICS partner, then India’s credibility as a leader of that coalition is finished. One cannot claim to lead a multipolar coalition while conducting oneself as a client state of the unipolar power.The argument that the US trade deal negotiations are evidence of India protecting its sovereign interests makes the problem worse, not better. An unequal trade deal negotiated under tariff threats is not sovereignty. It is a surrender dressed in diplomatic language. A government that stopped trusting its own institutionsThe most damaging dimension of this episode is not the silence itself but what the silence reveals. India possesses a foreign service with deep, generational engagement with Iran. It has intelligence agencies with decades of regional presence. It has an institutional memory of Iran’s strategic weight going back further than anyone’s political career. But the Modi government seems to have little faith in our nation’s own institutional wisdom. Instead, it appears to have been completely misled by the American and Israeli assessment that Iran was fragile, that a regime change would happen fast, that war wouldn’t last long and that India could safely step aside. That reading has been proven wrong on every count. Iran has not collapsed. The regime has not changed. And now India is quietly backtracking, attempting to rebuild the very diplomatic links it allowed to weaken, at greater cost, with diminished credibility, and from a position of reduced leverage. This pattern of overriding institutional and civilisational wisdom with ideological preference carries a lesson that goes beyond this particular episode. Leaders with authoritarian traits, whether in Washington, Tel Aviv, or New Delhi, tend to harbour an inflated faith in personal diplomacy and the capacity of bold decisions to bend complex realities. The West Asia crisis has reminded the world that geopolitics does not cooperate with such expectations. History is more stubborn than any government’s confidence. Nations are not merely defined by current leaders and governments. People and cultures also define a nation. Iran’s recent statement permitting two gas tankers to pass through Strait of Hormuz underlines that reality. Its acknowledgement of India and Iran’s shared history was not merely diplomatic language. It was a signal directed pointedly at India: that nations are not reducible to their governments, and that the deep civilisational, cultural, and commercial ties between the Indian and Iranian peoples run longer and deeper than any cabinet decision in New Delhi. Ironically, the Modi government, which governs in the name of Indian civilisation and culture, has shown strikingly little faith in them. The institutional depth, the civilisational memory, the diplomatic continuity that India actually possesses and could have deployed, have all been ignored. It’s a government led by an ideology that perpetually looks outward for new inspirations, and inward only for electoral messaging. At varying times, it’s enamoured by the Italian fascists, American hegemony, Israeli impunity and at times even Chinese tenacity, but never draws on India’s own philosophical strength and public wisdom. Its grand political design is to rewire India’s thought process to fit its borrowed ideological framework. It is true that foreign policy requires prudence. But it is not what India has practised in this crisis. Prudence would have meant protecting Chabahar and the International North South Transport Corridors, alongside its interests in the Gulf, maintaining equidistance, and using India’s legitimate moral standing and leverage to call for a ceasefire. It was not India’s war. But India’s practice was silence born of deference for one side and complete dereliction of its investments with the other. Gurdeep Singh Sappal is a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee and executive trustee of the Samridh Bharat Foundation.