Iran and the Indian art of strategic silence

In the grand theatre of geopolitics, few nations have mastered the art of strategic ambiguity as deftly as India. As the war involving Iran reshapes the Middle East’s volatile landscape, New Delhi has chosen neither to condemn nor to cheer, maintaining instead a calibrated silence punctuated by carefully worded diplomatic statements.

India’s response to the Iran war is not an act of drift or indecision; it is a deliberate practice of balance shaped by geography, energy needs, diaspora security, and long-term great‑power partnerships. This balancing art reflects both the depth of Indo-Iranian ties and the hard limits of what Tehran can offer a rising India compared to the United States and Israel.

More from Opinion

India and Iran share a civilisational relationship that stretches back millennia. Persian culture, language, and poetry are woven into the very fabric of the Indian subcontinent. In modern times, this bond translated into pragmatic cooperation: India helped construct the Chabahar port on Iran’s southeastern coast, envisioning it as a vital corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia that would bypass Pakistan entirely. The port was a strategic masterstroke on paper, offering India an alternative trade route and a foothold near Pakistan’s Gwadar port, which China was developing with great fanfare as the crown jewel of its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Yet the promise of Chabahar has been substantially dimmed by American sanctions on Iran. Trade through the port has remained a fraction of its potential, with international shipping companies and banks reluctant to engage for fear of American penalties. The vision of a thriving Indian gateway to Central Asia has remained frustratingly out of reach. Meanwhile, the great rival project, Gwadar and CPEC, has itself stumbled badly. The Baloch rebellion, simmering for decades, has intensified, making infrastructure projects in Pakistan's restive southwest increasingly untenable. Pakistan's own internal turmoil, compounded by its escalating conflict with Afghanistan, has turned CPEC from a geopolitical gambit into a cautionary tale. The corridor that was meant to reshape Asian trade has become a symbol of overreach.

Neither Chabahar nor Gwadar, then, has delivered the transformative connectivity either side anticipated.

Beyond economics, India's relationship with Iran has long been complicated by the behaviour of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Despite the warmth of diplomatic exchanges, Khamenei has repeatedly needled India on sensitive domestic issues, most notably the status of Kashmir and the treatment of Muslims within India. These interventions, however diplomatically phrased, represent a fundamental disrespect for Indian sovereignty and an attempt to leverage pan-Islamic sentiment for geopolitical purposes. India has noticed. No country that aspires to be treated as a great power can indefinitely overlook a partner that questions its territorial integrity or fans communal fires within its borders. Khamenei's posturing on these issues has steadily eroded the goodwill that history and geography had built.

Set against this is what the United States and Israel can offer India, and the contrast is stark. America is India's largest trading partner, a source of cutting-edge technology, and an indispensable defence partner. The two countries have signed landmark defence agreements that have transformed India's military modernisation. American fighter jets, surveillance aircraft, artillery systems, and intelligence-sharing arrangements have all deepened a partnership that would have been unimaginable during the Cold War. Israel, for its part, has become one of India's most significant defence suppliers, providing missile systems, drones, surveillance technology, and agricultural innovations. Neither Iran nor any of its allies can come close to offering what Washington and Tel Aviv provide to an India that is rapidly ascending the global power ladder. The calculus of capability is not difficult to read.

India’s diaspora calculus further complicates any tilt toward Tehran. Approximately nine million Indians live and work in the Gulf states: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. These nations, historically aligned against Iran's regional ambitions, are home to the remittances that sustain millions of Indian families. India's Gulf diaspora is not merely an economic asset; it is a strategic one. Any foreign policy posture that antagonises the Gulf Arab states carries a real domestic cost, measured in disrupted livelihoods and diplomatic friction with partners who are also major investors in the Indian economy. Tehran's influence in this calculus is negligible by comparison.

Domestically, another factor moderates any Iranian appeal. Iran's regional influence is deeply intertwined with Shia Islam, and its foreign policy often seeks to mobilise Shia communities abroad. Yet India, home to one of the world's largest Muslim populations, does not mirror the sectarian fractures that define the Middle East. The Shia-Sunni divide, while present, is far less politically charged in India than in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, or Pakistan. Indian Muslims, predominantly Sunni, have historically practised a syncretic, pluralistic form of faith shaped by the subcontinent’s unique culture. Iran’s sectarian appeal, therefore, finds limited purchase in India, and Indian policymakers have little reason to adopt a posture that would inflame communal tensions simply to accommodate Tehran's theological foreign policy.

India and Iran have shared civilisational links, energy interdependence and converging interests in Afghanistan and Central Asia for decades. Iran was a major crude supplier to India until US sanctions tightened, and the two cooperated against the Taliban in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet, the relationship has also carried persistent irritants that have eroded the older romance.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeatedly chose to needle India on its internal questions, particularly Kashmir and the status of Muslims in India. He likened Kashmir to battlefronts such as Yemen and Bahrain, framed Indian actions as oppression of Muslims, and publicly urged the ‘Muslim world’ to mobilise for ‘oppressed Muslims of Kashmir’. After the abrogation of Article 370 and during the Delhi riots of 2020, he accused India of conducting a ‘massacre of Muslims’ and warned that New Delhi risked isolation in the Islamic world, prompting formal diplomatic protests from India. These interventions turned a nominally ‘friendly’ Supreme Leader into a political liability for New Delhi, especially when contrasted with Iran’s continued strategic utility but limited economic weight.

India's balanced approach to the Iran war, therefore, is not moral evasion but strategic clarity. It reflects a nation that has learned to hold contradictions simultaneously: to value old friendships without being imprisoned by them, to pursue new partnerships without burning bridges, and to keep every door open in an unpredictable world. India will not join any chorus of condemnation against Iran, but neither will it shield Tehran from the consequences of its choices. It will protect its energy interests, guard its diaspora's welfare, deepen its partnerships with America and Israel, and watch the region's convulsions with the cool eye of a power that has learned, across centuries of turbulence, that survival belongs to the flexible. In the Indian art of balance, every weight on the scale is calculated, and nothing is done by accident.

(Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations and director of the India institute at the O. P. Jindal Global University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)