India’s silence on Iran is not strategic autonomy. It looks more like strategic dependence

The war on Iran by US President Donald Trump has so far elicited two responses from India. The first was an expression of “deep concern”, along with a call for dialogue and restraint and for respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states. The second was a phone call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the ruler of the United Arab Emirates to “strongly condemn” the attacks on the UAE and express India’s solidarity with the country.

The Prime Minister made the call after hotels and other buildings in the emirates came under attack from Iran, which was retaliating against the combined Israeli-US strikes on its soil. In those strikes, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the country’s defence minister, and hundreds of civilians are believed to have been killed. Iran also reportedly fired missiles at Qatar and Bahrain. All three countries host US military bases.

Between the two responses – one by the Ministry of External Affairs on Iran and the other by the Prime Minister to the UAE – and Modi’s visit to Israel just two days before the Israeli bombing of Iran, lie silences that signal India’s unravelling balancing act.

India has not explicitly condemned the attacks on Iran, nor has it expressed solidarity with the country over the breach of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead, it has asked “all sides” to pursue “dialogue and diplomacy”. However, the MEA has remained silent about the manner in which the US abruptly broke off two months of negotiations with Iran, reportedly when a deal was within reach. The attacks began hours after Omani foreign minister and mediator Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi told CNN that an agreement was close, with Iran having agreed “never to stockpile material that will create a bomb”.

Delhi’s silences are consistent with how its relations with Tehran have been hostage to its ties with Washington for more than two decades. Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera spoke of India’s “betrayal” of Iran, and Jairam Ramesh accused the government of “moral cowardice”. But the Modi government is not the only one that can be accused of letting Iran down. Congress memory is selective. If Iranians are asked, they might point to September 2005 as the first major betrayal.

At the time, the UPA was in power and India and the US were drawing closer as two democracies — one the world’s largest, the other the world’s oldest. On September 24, 2005, India broke with its traditional foreign policy position by voting for a US-backed EU-3 (UK, Germany, France) resolution against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The resolution marked a turning point in a long-running US campaign against Iran’s nuclear programme. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran was entitled to develop nuclear energy for peaceful civilian use. The resolution stated that Iran was not in compliance with NPT safeguard agreements and that this had given rise to questions “within the competence of the Security Council”. IAEA resolutions are typically adopted by consensus; this was a rare one that required a vote.

India was among 22 countries on the 35-member Board of Governors that voted in favour. Twelve countries, including China, Russia and South Africa, abstained. Venezuela opposed the resolution. Ahead of the vote, Iran made frantic diplomatic efforts to persuade India not to support it, appealing to its stature as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement and, like itself, a developing country with an independent foreign policy.

Simultaneously, the US launched its own effort to get India to break ranks with the “Third World”. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the US in July 2005 saw the two countries announce a civil nuclear cooperation agreement, a de facto recognition of India’s status as a nuclear power. If this was the velvet glove, the iron fist revealed itself on Capitol Hill. Days before the IAEA vote, at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee, Representative Tom Lantos made clear that India would have to choose between Iran and the US.

“I expect India to recognize that there is reciprocity involved in this new relationship, and without reciprocity India will get very little help from the Congress. If we are turning ourselves into pretzels to accommodate India, I want to be damn sure that India is mindful of US policies in critical areas, such as US policy toward Iran.”

By then, the US had already expressed disapproval of the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, which eventually fizzled out. India also dithered on a 2003 agreement to develop two terminals at the Shahid Beheshti port in Chabahar. The project was intended to bypass Pakistan, which had refused to open its land route for Indian trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Iran was angry at India’s vote at the IAEA and remained unconvinced by the MEA’s justification that the EU-3 had taken on board India’s concerns that the matter should not be referred to the Security Council, and that India’s vote had prevented confrontation while buying time for negotiations.

India’s shift would have come as a surprise to Iran, particularly since Tehran had bailed out Delhi from a similar situation just over a decade earlier. In 1994, India faced the prospect of being hauled up at the UN Commission on Human Rights (now the UN Human Rights Council) over alleged human rights violations in Kashmir. Pakistan was mobilising support within the OIC for a resolution. It was a time of peak militancy in the Valley, with security forces cracking down heavily. Delhi was still finding its diplomatic footing in the post-Cold War world. There was concern that if the resolution passed, the issue could escalate to the Security Council.

The Narasimha Rao government pressed every diplomatic lever to avert the setback. A seriously ailing Dinesh Singh, then external affairs minister, travelled to Iran days before the Geneva session. He met President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, and Majlis Speaker Nateq-Nouri, returning the same day with assurances that Iran would help.

In former diplomat M K Bhadrakumar’s account of Singh’s mission, Tehran exceeded expectations. “It took 72 anxious hours more for Delhi to realise that instead of a halfway solution, Iran went ahead with surgical skill and literally killed the OIC move to table the resolution at a UN forum… As the Pakistani ambassador sought to move the OIC resolution, his Iranian counterpart in Geneva intervened on directives from Tehran. He said that for Iran, both Pakistan and India were close friends, and Iran would be loath to the idea that problems between friends could not be sorted out between the two of them and instead needed to be raised at an international forum.”

India-Iran ties flourished for the next decade, marked by high-level visits, but narrowed as India’s ties with Washington deepened. Chabahar was early collateral. Political relations never fully recovered from what Tehran regarded as a betrayal in 2005, though trade increased and continued through parts of the Obama administration’s sanctions regime between 2010 and 2013, aided by waivers. In 2012, Manmohan Singh visited Tehran for the NAM summit – the first visit by an Indian prime minister in over a decade.

After Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the P5+1, sanctions were lifted and Narendra Modi visited in 2016. The Chabahar project briefly regained momentum before Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA and the reimposition of sanctions pushed it back to the backburner, despite a limited carve-out. India halted its purchases of Iranian oil due to the sanctions. New Delhi insists it remains committed to the 10-year Chabahar contract signed in 2024, though Iran described the absence of allocations in India’s 2026 budget as “disappointing for both New Delhi and Tehran”.

The Modi government’s alleged betrayal of Iran thus has a long backstory. The difference now is that the Modi-Netanyahu bromance adds another layer of strain, as does scrutiny of India’s treatment of minorities. In 2020, Khamenei described the Delhi riots as a “massacre of Muslims” and condemned the revocation of Kashmir’s special status. In September 2024, he included India in a list of countries that persecute Muslims.

Differences over Israel’s war in Gaza have also surfaced publicly. When External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar visited Iran in January 2024, as the Houthis began targeting ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, his articulation of India’s position – support for dialogue, diplomacy, a two-state solution, and avoidance of civilian casualties – was met with a demand that India help “end the bombings, lift the blockade of this region and realise the rights of the Palestinian people”.

India’s silence on Iran may be presented as strategic autonomy, but it increasingly resembles strategic dependence. In the middle are India's 10 million strong diaspora in the entire region, caught in a war that Delhi cannot call out for what it is – a bully double act by Trump and Netanyahu.

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