Cpt. Rishwat
ODI Captain
- Joined
- May 8, 2010
- Runs
- 45,427
A great post by Gurdeep Singh Sappal,
One of India's finest analysts.
Why did India so badly misread Iran? A civilisational answer — not just a strategic one. I write for
@thewire_in
• India didn’t just make an intelligence failure on Iran. It made a philosophical one. The Modi-Shah worldview is transactional. Iran is civilisational, built on sacrifice, endurance, and three thousand years of Persian memory.
• Iran survived four decades of sanctions and assassinations, but did not collapse. This was never irrational stubbornness. It was istiqamat, principled steadfastness.
• Nehru understood Iran not as a problem to be managed but as a civilisation to be engaged. He saw in Iran’s anti-colonial instincts a mirror of India’s own, a proud people refusing permanent subordination to great power dictates. It gave India the credibility to speak to Tehran, Cairo, and Belgrade simultaneously. It’s a credibility that was built over decades and squandered in recent years.
• Gandhi came from the same Western Indian transactional tradition, yet transcended it entirely. His method was tapasya, voluntary suffering as moral weapon.
• Modi’s foreign policy is the precise opposite. It needs the world’s most powerful military alliance behind it before venturing any independent position.
• India once knew better. A thousand years of Persian-Indian civilisational exchange gave India the tools to read Iran, in poetry, architecture, philosophy and statecraft. Nehru’s non-alignment gave India credibility with Tehran that no other major power enjoyed. That inheritance was discarded with contempt.
• The BJP, and more fundamentally the RSS, holds the institutional wisdom of the Congress era in deep contempt. Not because it has been examined and found wanting, but because it flows from a tradition the Sangh never accepted as its own.
• The BJP adopted an Israel mirror trap, seeing Iran through Israeli intelligence and American assessments. The same sources that fabricated WMDs in Iraq and misread Afghanistan completely. Ideological alignment had fully displaced independent strategic thinking in New Delhi.
• The cost: Chabahar hangs in uncertainty. Hormuz energy chains face disruption India wasn’t prepared for. And India’s most precious asset, credibility as an independent voice in a multipolar world, has been gravely diminished. The transactional mind finally met its opportunity cost.
This is something that most Indian patriots of today have lost. India used to have a much larger world view than the RSS defensive posture which the world is currently witnessing.
