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Iran’s refusal to bend, and its “determination” shown in the face of sustained missile barrages by the United States and Israel – noted by prominent sections of American opinion and in the media – offer lessons for the world.

They also show the mirror to India, whose leader Narendra Modi does not tire of saying that the world “looks to India!” Indeed it does, but how? More pertinently, how will Indians now look at Modi’s India? But first, the world.

From February 28 to March 15, according to US media reports, Iran has taken 15,000 (fifteen thousand) missile hits but refuses to be cowed. It has rejected outright President Donald Trump’s suggestion for a “ceasefire” after some ten days of incessant bombardment. Instead, it has imposed important conditions before fighting can stop (not merely bring about a “ceasefire” which has implications of resumption), and these include “reparations”.

Meanwhile it continues its own pain-inducing attacks on US military assets strewn across the Gulf, and on Israel. It gives no signs of huffing and puffing and panting while the American public are chafing at raised petrol prices. Iran’s top leadership was killed on the first day of the strike but there has been a smooth succession and prosecution of the war, striking at important Israeli and American assumptions about Iran’s government and the clerical state.

If there are doubts, these are about the state of Israeli leadership. Its Knesset or parliament is due to discuss a motion on the dissolution of the present parliament coming Wednesday (March 18). In the US, there are serious worries about the political fallout for Trump with an important political test round the corner.

Although it is impossible to tell where the fighting would lead to, it is hard to resist the inference that Tehran does not regard Washington or Tel Aviv to be on top of things as far as this imperialist war goes though it is nowhere near being a military equal of the US and certainly not of the US-Israel warmongering coalition.

The ongoing Trump-Netanyahu military campaign against Iran has shown, in sum, that the world is not back to being uni-polar as it seemed to many to have become after the emerging post-Soviet multi-polarity looked to be ebbing. What’s more, recent events show that in today’s world the challenge to American power – indeed to the very notion of uni-polarity – need not necessarily come only from China or Russia but also from a determined regional entity like Iran.

Another important lesson is that American military guarantees to the Gulf monarchies have come to mean little in the face of the hits against US targets – military and civilian – inside these states that Iran has carried out.

The question then is: Does it help to be America’s military ally and embrace its security umbrella? Or, might it not be better for a state to seek to work toward a cooperative framework with countries of its region rather than rely on a messiah from across the seven seas even in this era of high-speed precision warfare technologies?

What about India in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of Indians themselves?

What about India in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of Indians themselves? When the war on Iran was jointly launched by America and Israel unilaterally and without provocation, and international energy supplies came to be disrupted, particularly for Asia on account of the emerging crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, prime minister Modi could not summon his voice.

He found himself incapable of saying to Trump what he had once said to president Vladimir Putin of Russia in the context of Ukraine: “This is not an era of war!” His government could come out only with general inanities exactly as it had done when President Maduro of Venezuela was lifted by the Americans in January.

It is truly hard, even in retrospect, to find any real difference between how anxious small and smaller countries like Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan may be feeling and how India has reacted. Unable to find its voice, India’s position, like that of smaller countries, has been to merely wish that the troubles would go away – with one difference.

Modi had to plead with Iran president Masoud Pezeshkian to permit India-bound fuel tankers through Hormuz in the name of past ties. The Iranians have been smart, after initial obduracy. They have announced that all tankers may pass unmolested through the crucial Strait except those of the US and its allies.

Indeed, making Modi and all Indians look servile, and as if a colonial or semi-colonial status has of late come to subsist between India and America, the US officially announced that in light of oil disruptions caused by its own war on Iran, it was now giving India “permission”, strictly as a short-term measure, to resume oil imports from Russia which America had earlier banned, with the Modi government hurriedly complying.

In a social media post of February 2 this year, Trump gave out details of his conversation with Modi which were brought together in the Joint Statement and the president’s Executive Orders issued by Washington on February 6. According to the US president’s Executive Orders, the American leader noted,

“Specifically India has committed to stop directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil, has represented that it will purchase United States energy products from the United States, and has recently committed to a framework with the United States to expand defense cooperation over the next 10 years……”.

“I have determined that India has taken significant steps to address the national emergency described in Executive Order 14066 and to align sufficiently with the United States on national security, foreign policy, and economic matters…” (Emphasis added).

On the letterhead of US Embassy and Consulates in India under the authorship of “US Mission India”, a release of February 10, 2026 says,

“Friday’s (February 6) Joint Statement follows a call between President Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, in which the leaders reached a framework for an Interim Agreement on reciprocal trade…. Given India’s willingness to align with the United States to confront systemic imbalances in the bilateral trade relationship and shared national security challenges…..”.

“India will eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods and a wide range of US food and agricultural products… India intends to buy more American products and purchase over USD 500 billion of US energy, information and communication technology, coal, and other products…..”.

With American patronage under his belt in the early part of February, Modi betook himself to Israel toward the end of the month, on February 25. Addressing the Israel parliament (Knesset) the same day, in an otherwise workmanlike speech the Prime Minister turned uncharacteristically poetic as he declared, “India stands with Israel firmly with full conviction in this moment and beyond…”.

As a token of their appreciation, the Israelis improvised a medal and gave him the Medal of the Knesset, which was not previously known to exist- perhaps just a little something for Tweedledum to savour.

And this cannot but bring up the affairs of the late Jefferey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is said to have taken his life while serving his prison sentence. Was he linked to the Israeli dalliance? We can’t know unless our government presents us the facts.

Three days after Modi had concluded his earlier visit to Israel nine years ago (July 4-6, 2017), Epstein wrote an email on July 9, 2017 wherein he said that Modi “took advice and danced and sang in Israel for the benefit of the US president.” The email also contained the phrase “IT WORKED” in capital letters. This email, sent to one “Jabor Y”, identified as a Qatari intermediary, was a part of the batch of Epstein documents released on January 30, 2026 in the US.  The question is what was “it (that) worked”.

The ministry of external affairs sought to firmly repudiate the contents of the email that has raised lively interest, calling it “baseless” and “trashy ruinations by a convicted criminal”. The “strong rejection” appears bland, though. A fuller, fact-filled, denunciation of the said document would have carried heft in light of the fact that the release of the Epstein emails was ordered by the US Department of Justice.

India’s Foreign Office has taken no lessons from the past

As it stands, the Indian response appears more like the hammering home of a schoolboy taunt, not a substantive riposte that clinches a conversation. It is noteworthy that Epstein was not a “convicted criminal” when he wrote the cited email. On the authenticity question, it should be kept in view that the brother of the British monarch, King Charles, was arrested and has been stripped of his royal titles and appurtenances on account of what’s come to light about his Epstein connection through the tranches of Epstein emails.

Similarly, exalted individuals in the US and elsewhere have been disgraced and have resigned from their high positions or been forced out. In today’s India, such a thing is unthinkable. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak sangh (RSS) too, for all its talk of morality and “sanskaar” (virtuous traditions), has been still as a statue.

Early in February, Modi spoke with Trump telephonically after which India submitted herself to arm-twisting by the US to the extent of agreeing to manipulate her foreign and security policies to align with American interests. In this period the talk of the impending war on Iran by the US and Israel could be heard from Helsinki to Honolulu, but Modi went to Tel Aviv anyway.

India’s Foreign Office had evidently taken no lesson from the infamous affair of the then external affairs minister Atal Behari Vajpayee awkwardly finding himself in Beijing on a day when China attacked Vietnam, a friendly country for India, in February 1979, or had this escaped its institutional memory?

Was the PM’s rushed Israel visit on the eve of D-Day meant to lend the endorsement of India’s brand value – which although fading hasn’t evaporated entirely – to the imperialists? Was it a command performance, a requirement to establish credentials after making certain commitments with Washington less than three weeks prior? Some questions are hard to put away when enemy missiles began to pound Iran barely 36 hours after Modi flew back from Israel.

To put it mildly, people like Dadabhai Noroji, whose treatise on the drain of India’s wealth to colonial Britain shook the consciousness of Indians, or Gandhi or Nehru, might today wonder if their work had been in vain. Hadn’t Ambedkar tellingly warned us that having a democracy was all very well but everything would depend on the men who run it.

Today’s India has found Modi to whom colonial, neo-colonial, imperialist and like words appear to be alien concepts except when it comes to supplanting existing names and military metaphors with those drawn from ancient India. On the inside, however, everything seems disconcertingly hollow.

Anand K. Sahay is a veteran journalist.

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