Best of Both Sides | Four reasons India should say no to Trump’s Board of Peace |
There are moments in a nation’s life when the question is not what we gain, but who we become. The reported invitation for India to join a US-backed “Gaza Board of Peace”, accompanied by a promised $1 billion in assistance, is one such moment. India, out of deep respect and solidarity with the Palestinian people and its own history, moral standing, and Global South leadership, should decline — clearly, publicly, and without equivocation.
This is not a question of money for Gaza, nor even of geopolitics in the narrow sense. It is a question of India’s constitutional morality, our Independence struggle’s memory, strategic autonomy, and moral credibility. India’s refusal must be rooted not in anti-Americanism as we are not anti-American per se, nor in reflexive ideology, but in four hard, defensible reasons that go to the core of what India claims to stand for in the world.
First, any governance or “peace” mechanism for Gaza that is designed without the explicit, sovereign consent of the Palestinian people is not a mechanism for peace. It is an externally imposed trusteeship. History has a name for such arrangements: Colonial administration in humanitarian clothing. India knows this........