In his latest column in The Indian Express (‘Silence on West Asia is not moral surrender, but responsible statecraft’, March 20), Dr. Shashi Tharoor, MP and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on External Affairs has written that India’s silence on the US-Israel military aggression against Iran is strategic and serves our national interest. If the silence is a strategy, the strategy is flawed politically and on economic grounds.First, it conveys that India is not interested in the maintenance of a rules-based world order. By implication, India is conveying that it does not expect the world to intervene on its behalf if attacked militarily in the future. However, that India actually expects such support was signalled by its delegations fanning out across the world explaining the bombing of military installations in Pakistan following the attack on Indian tourists in Pahalgam. Though the reception in the western capitals was not exactly rousing, the move was at least based on the idea of the inviolability of national sovereignty.If cross-border violence aimed at India is considered unacceptable by the Indian state it must be guided by the same principle when it comes to Iran. Instead, it has remained silent when an Asian country with whom we have a long historical association has been bombarded by the US following decades of crippling sanctions.Independent India’s foreign policy record shows that it subscribes to the UN charter. India was one of the first countries to signal that it believed national sovereignty should not be violated when it took the Kashmir issue to the UN in 1948. Arguably, this was the wrong thing to have done. Military lore has it that Major General K.S. Thimayya had communicated to the government that the raiders could be evicted. Civilian lore has it that Nehru chose to listen to the Mountbattens instead, and the rest is history.The United Nations proved to be ineffective in restoring territory lost to India. Be that as it may, India did at the time signal an awareness of the salience of sovereignty in international relations. In 1962 Nehru went a step further and announced at a press conference that he had instructed the Indian army to evict the Chinese army from NEFA. This was wishful thinking, and the encounter had turned out to be a disaster for India, but again commitment to a principle had once again been conveyed.What about the indisputable fact that India has economic interests in the middle east as a source of oil imports and with approximately ten million workers sending remittances? Here, our national interest was not to stay silent but to actively call for cessation of war, implicitly opposing the aggression against Iran. Strategic thinking would have figured out that war has the potential to destabilise our oil supply causing output loss and inflation, reduce hard-currency remittances by our workers, and to bring on a slowing of the world economy, upon which our exports depend.Politically, had India objected to the bombing of Iran by the US and Israel it may just have had a leg to stand on when later condemning in the United Nations Iran’s bombardment of the countries of the Gulf region. To term the calling out of the United States, the initiator of the war, as “moralising” is not merely to justify pusillanimity, it exposes an inability to have assessed the consequences of the war for India with intelligence.Not speaking up when you need to can become addictive for the quietist. In the assault on Iran, India is only a third party. India’s record of dealing with Trump in bilateral affairs is far more disturbing. By the time of the war with Iran it had already bent its knee. That took place when Trump slapped a penal tariff on India for purchasing Russian oil.In such a situation, a foreign policy guided by national interest would have been not just to flag to the rest of the world that the US was not abiding by the established norms of international trade but to raise the existing duty on US goods. Not only did India refrain from both actions, it reduced very substantially oil purchases from Russia, which had once assisted India by accepting rupees in exchange, even though it did not have much use for them.Contrast this with what China did when Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese goods to 150% in April 2025. China immediately responded by raising its tariffs on American goods to 125 %. For good measure, in his first public appearance afterwards, President Xi Jinping announced that China was “not afraid” of the consequences. Since then, China’s economy has not collapsed, as academic economists would have been quick to predict. On the other hand, Trump quietly climbed down, and resumed trade talks.Not standing up to Trump has not helped India’s economy. Prime Minister Modi has already cautioned Indians to prepare for hardship. As a leading voice speaking for decolonisation in the UN, India was once a true leader of the global south. Now, its prestige has been diminished by its silence and it can escape none of the negative fallout the war.An opportunity to play a positive global role was lost when India did not take advantage of its presidentship of BRICS to prevent the onslaught against Iran. The biggest irony is that Iran has repeatedly come to India’s rescue by allowing India-bound tankers to sail through the Strait of Hormuz.Pulapre Balakrishnan is an honorary visiting Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. He has also held the positions of Professor of Economics at Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana and Senior Fellow-elect at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, Kerala. His research has been in the areas of inflation, growth and productivity in India. Balakrishnan is a recipient of the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contribution to Development Studies.