This Ceasefire Should Be a Moment of Introspection for India |
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As Iran negotiates from strength and Pakistan claims a peacemaker’s laurels, the Narendra Modi government’s silence and strategic drift have left India watching from the margins of a reordering world.
The entire world will cautiously welcome the two-week ceasefire in the West Asia conflict between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other. It is a pause, not a peace. But even a pause, in a conflict that threatened to engulf civilisation itself, is cause for measured relief. What the ceasefire has revealed, however, is as consequential as the conflict it has temporarily silenced: a new map of global influence is being drawn, and India is not among the cartographers.
The conflict began on 28 February with the targeted assassinations of the topmost echelons of the Iranian regime. These strikes commenced just two days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed his much-trumpeted visit to Israel. A visit that said nothing about Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza, nothing about its aggressively expansionist policies in the occupied West Bank, and everything about where India’s moral compass now points. That silence, at such a moment, diminished India’s global stature in ways that will take years to recover.
The role played by Pakistan in brokering the ceasefire is a severe setback to both the substance and the style of Modi’s highly personalised diplomacy. For a decade, the policy has been to isolate Pakistan internationally, to convince the world that it is a failed state, a terror sponsor, unworthy of the global high table. That policy has now collapsed spectacularly in full public view. As recently as 2018, Pakistan was on infamous FATF list for supporting terror networks. Now it is the peace maker.
A bankrupt, broken Pakistan could play peacemaker. A resurgent India could only watch. The question is not what happened, but why.
A bankrupt economy, wholly dependent on the largesse of the IMF, the Gulf states, and China; a country broken in so many institutional ways, Pakistan was able to play the role of indispensable mediator in the most consequential conflict of recent times.
This is not merely a diplomatic embarrassment. It is a strategic failure of the first order. One recalls what Manmohan Singh’s government........