Rohantha De Silva, Keith Jones18 March 2026
India’s far-right, Hindu supremacist BJP government and the Indian ruling class as a whole are fully complicit in the criminal war of aggression that US imperialism and its Israeli attack-dog are waging on Iran since February 28.
New Delhi has managed to muster not a single word of protest, as the US and Israel have piled war crime upon war crime—killing Iranian political leaders and some 2,000 ordinary civilians; bombing schools, hospitals, desalination plants and other public infrastructure; and sinking the defenceless IRNS Dena in the Indian Ocean shortly after it concluded its participation in an Indian-led naval exercise.
The only “solidarity” New Delhi has voiced is with the monarchical-absolutist Gulf States that host US military bases that are being used to surveil and attack Iran.
The only country New Delhi has condemned is Iran, for daring to defend itself.
India co-sponsored last week’s pro-US, pro-war UN Security Council resolution. Resolution 2817 blithely ignored the illegal, unprovoked mass bombardment that the US and Israel have unleashed against Iran and the “decapitation” strikes mounted against its leaders, so as to paint Tehran as the aggressor and lend a veneer of international legitimacy to what has become a war of annihilation against the Iranian state and its 93 million people. Citing Tehran’s retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Washington’s Gulf State allies, the Indian-sponsored resolution indicted the victim, Iran, for breaching international law and threatening “international peace and security.”
India’s callous abandonment of its ostensible Iranian ally is, to say the least, unsurprising. It similarly refused to condemn the attack the US and Israel mounted on Iran last June—which, like the current one, was launched under the cover of diplomatic negotiations.
For the past quarter-century, New Delhi, under BJP and Congress Party-led governments alike, has made its alliance with US imperialism, codified under the Indo-US Global Strategic Partnership, the cornerstone of its foreign policy and geopolitical strategy. By serving as a counterweight and increasingly a frontline state for Washington in its military-strategic offensive against China, the Indian bourgeoisie has sought to advance its own predatory great-power ambitions.
In keeping with this reactionary alignment, India, especially under the would-be Hindu strongman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also developed increasingly close economic and military-security ties with Israel. Indeed, Modi chose to strengthen India’s “strategic partnership” with Israel and demonstrate his government’s affinity with the Zionist regime, as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were preparing their war on Iran in plain sight for all the world to see. Modi visited Israel on February 25-26, leaving less than 48 hours before missiles and bombs began raining on Iran.
Nevertheless, there is some value in documenting the Indian government and bourgeoisie’s complicity in the war on Iran.
First, because the Modi government is anxious to cover up its own role and the barbarities it and the Indian ruling class are ready to countenance and participate in as a junior partner of American imperialism.
They are aware that there is latent mass anti-imperialist sentiment among the Indian people, who suffered two centuries of British colonial rule, especially the working class.
They also fear the war’s impact on the Indian and world economy, under conditions where Trump’s global tariff war has already sharply decelerated India’s growth rate, and there is mounting social anger over mass joblessness and endemic poverty and hunger.
India is massively dependent on imports of oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf region. The Modi government has invoked emergency powers to redirect supplies of LPG from industrial and commercial users to households, who use it for cooking. Many of the commercial establishments are small mom-and-pop operations that have had to either curtail their hours of operation or close their establishment, at least partially.
A prolonged shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and disruption of the region’s economies will lead not only to a huge spike in energy costs in India that will impact the price of food and other essentials. It will also drive up the price of urea, a key Gulf State import and agricultural input, and likely result in a sharp drop in the $50 billion in remittances that the millions of Indian workers employed in the Gulf send home annually.
To deflect popular anger, the government, aided and abetted by a pliant corporate media, is promoting the lie that India is a neutral, third party, working for peace and to uphold the principles of international law, including state sovereignty.
Exposing India’s criminal role as an imperialist ally is also important in shattering the malevolent political influence of India’s Stalinist “left,” led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM, and the Communist Party of India (CPI).
Doing so is pivotal to the development of a genuine anti-war movement based on the working class and a socialist-internationalist program to put an end to imperialism and the crisis-ridden capitalist system. Available from Mehring BooksThe struggle against imperialism and for workers’ power in IranA pamphlet by Keith Jones
The Stalinists claim that the Indian bourgeoisie and its state can play a “progressive” role in world politics, if not under Modi, then under an alternative right-wing, Congress Party-led capitalist government.
Their immediate response to the war was to call on the Modi government to condemn it as a breach of international law—as if it would, given its role in vastly expanding India’s military-security ties with both the US and Israel—and even if it did, that this would be anything but a hollow gesture.
A more substantive statement of the CPM Politburo, arguing from the standpoint of the Indian bourgeoisie, subsequently warned that the Modi government’s alignment with US imperialism is damaging India’s pursuit of its own “national interests.”
At the war’s outbreak, the BJP government was all but totally silent. Its sole comment was a cynical three-sentence statement that omitted any mention of the United States or Israel, let alone condemned their naked aggression against Iran. It urged all sides to “exercise restraint” and “avoid escalation”—in effect, calling on Tehran to passively endure the US-Israeli assault.
Neither then, nor in the days that followed, did New Delhi ever condemn the decapitation strike that killed Ayatollah Khamenei, who in addition to being Iran’s head of state was a spiritual leader revered by tens of millions of Shia Muslims worldwide. Nor has it ever condemned the US strike that killed 175 schoolgirls and their teachers at an elementary school in Minab.
It took five days before the BJP government dispatched a bureaucrat, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, to the Iranian Embassy in New Delhi to sign a condolence book for Khamenei. As it was only after this that Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar spoke by phone with Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Aragchi, it is likely New Delhi inferred or was told that without this minimal token gesture, high-level contact would be impossible.
All this stands in striking contrast to the BJP government’s reaction to Iran’s retaliatory strikes targeting US bases in the Gulf States. On Sunday, March 1, Modi issued a statement condemning an attack on the United Arab Emirates that same day that reportedly killed four people, after calling the UAE president to personally extend condolences. “Spoke with President of the UAE, my brother Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan,” wrote Modi on X. “Strongly condemned the attacks on the UAE and condoled the loss of lives in these attacks. India stands in solidarity with the UAE in these difficult times. Thanked him for taking care of the Indian community living in the UAE. We support de-escalation, regional peace, security and stability.”
Similarly, New Delhi has never condemned the sneak US attack-submarine torpedoing of the IRIS Dena, which killed 150 Iranian sailors, who morally if not legally should have enjoyed the Indian government’s protection, given that they had just attended an Indian-military naval exercise along with sailors from around the world.
In Indian military and national-security circles there is dismay at the US action. But only from the standpoint that Washington chose to act as a law unto itself off India’s shores, rather than consulting with the Indian navy, which the Pentagon likes to flatter by claiming it is its trusted partner in providing “security” in the Indian Ocean.
(Photo credit: Carlos Barria – Pool/Getty Images)
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