By BarathVector Editorial — 2026-03-04
India and Iran: When an Ancient Civilisation Watches Another Burn
By BarathVector Editorial
There is a particular quality to the silence that follows when you watch a house you once lived in catch fire. It is not the silence of indifference. It is the silence of someone who knows the floor plan, who remembers the smell of the kitchen, who can name the books on the shelf -- and who understands, with a clarity that outsiders cannot possess, that running in would change nothing except to add another body to the wreckage.
India's silence on the US-Israeli strikes that killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026, is that kind of silence.
The Deepest of Old Friendships
To understand why India's relationship with Iran cannot be read through the narrow lens of contemporary geopolitics, one must reach back -- not years or decades, but millennia.
When Zoroastrian refugees fled the Arab-Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh and eighth centuries, they did not sail to Europe. They did not petition the courts of Constantinople. They crossed the Arabian Sea and landed in Gujarat, at Sanjan, where a local Hindu king granted them asylum. The story, preserved in the Qissa-i Sanjan, is among the oldest refugee narratives in human history -- and it ended not in a camp, but in a civilisation absorbing another civilisation's exiles into its own bloodstream.
The Parsis, as they came to be known, did not merely survive in India. They flourished. They built Bombay's first docks. They founded Tata Steel. They gave India its nuclear programme through Homi Bhabha, its legal architecture through Nani Palkhivala, its military leadership through Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. The Zoroastrian thread wove itself so deeply into the Indian fabric that the community -- numbering barely 57,000 today -- punches wildly above its weight in every domain of Indian public life.
This is not a transactional relationship. It is civilisational memory, encoded in surnames, fire temples, and the Navroz celebrations that still mark the Persian new year in Mumbai's Parsi colonies.
The Persian Language and the Mughal Courts
The civilisational exchange runs deeper still. For roughly five centuries, Persian -- not Hindi, not Urdu, not Sanskrit -- served as the court language of the Indian subcontinent. From the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughal Empire, Persian was the language of law, literature, diplomacy, and administration. The great Mughal courts of Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb conducted their affairs in the language of Hafiz and Rumi.
India's literary and philosophical traditions drank deeply from the Persian well. The Sufi traditions that shaped the spiritual landscape of northern India -- from Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi to Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer -- drew their theological vocabulary from Persian mysticism. The architectural glories that define India's tourist economy -- the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb -- are Persian in aesthetic DNA.
When Indians speak of their bond with Iran, they are not speaking of oil contracts signed in the last decade. They are speaking of a cultural inheritance that predates the very concept of the nation-state.
The Strategic Bridge That Was Meant to Be
In May 2024, India signed a landmark 10-year agreement with Iran to develop and operate the Chabahar port on Iran's southeastern coast. India committed a $250 million development loan through India Ports Global Limited, with a broader package worth $370 million in strategic equipment and transportation infrastructure. Chabahar was to be India's gateway to Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the International North-South Transport Corridor -- a strategic counterweight to China's Belt and Road Initiative and Pakistan's Gwadar port.
The port had already seen a 43 per cent increase in vessel traffic and a 34 per cent rise in container throughput by 2024. It was working. It was growing. It was, by any measure, one of India's most consequential strategic investments of the 21st century.
That investment now sits in a war zone.
The Arithmetic of Silence
When Iran retaliated against the US-Israeli strikes by launching missile and drone barrages at the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait -- countries that host American military assets -- India's response was immediate. Prime Minister Modi called UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and condemned the strikes. The Ministry of External Affairs issued statements expressing deep concern about attacks on India's Gulf partners.
When the US and Israel killed Khamenei and dozens of senior Iranian officials in strikes across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, and Kermanshah -- using approximately 200 fighter jets in the largest Israeli combat sortie in history -- India said nothing.
Or rather, India said everything by saying nothing.
The CCS -- the Cabinet Committee on Security, India's apex national security body -- convened on the night of March 1. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Home Minister Amit Shah, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman sat with the Prime Minister to review the situation. The focus, as reported, was overwhelmingly domestic: the safety of nearly 9 million Indians living in the Gulf states, the security of $135.46 billion in annual remittances that constitute the economic lifeline of millions of Indian families, and the operational reality that roughly 50 per cent of India's crude oil imports transit through the Strait of Hormuz -- now under de facto shutdown.
Modi called Netanyahu. He urged an early cessation of hostilities. He flagged civilian safety. He did not condemn the strikes on Iran.
The opposition Congress party accused the government of betraying India's values. Newslaundry published a sharp critique arguing that India's silence was not strategic autonomy but strategic dependence. The criticism is understandable. But it mistakes prudence for cowardice, and silence for agreement.
The Honest Answer Nobody Wants to Hear
Does India sympathise with Iran? Yes, profoundly. The civilisational ties are not rhetoric. They are lived reality -- in the Parsi fire temples of Mumbai, in the Persian calligraphy of Mughal monuments, in the scholarly traditions that still connect Iranian and Indian universities.
Does India support the current Iranian regime? The honest answer is no -- and India has maintained this careful ambiguity for decades, for the sake of commerce, energy security, and the quiet hope that things might change from within.
The theocratic government in Tehran has never aligned with India's democratic values. The suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 -- the arrest of over 20,000 protesters, the killing of more than 500 young Iranians, the brutalisation that followed the death of Mahsa Amini -- laid bare a regime at war with its own people long before the first American bomb fell. The crackdown on minorities, the economic mismanagement that left Iran's young population frustrated and disillusioned, the suffocating religious authoritarianism that drove Iran's best minds into exile -- these are not Western talking points. They are Iranian realities, acknowledged by Iranians themselves.
The regime's own failures created the fissures that external force is now exploiting. That does not justify the US-Israeli strikes. It does not make the killing of Khamenei and dozens of officials lawful or moral. But it does mean that the narrative of an innocent theocracy victimised by imperialism is incomplete at best and dishonest at worst.
India knows this. India has always known this. And India has remained silent on this distinction for the same reason it remains silent now: because there is nothing productive to say when you cannot stop a war and have no leverage over those waging it.
The Numbers That Keep Delhi Awake at Night
The CCS meeting was not an exercise in philosophical hand-wringing. It was a hard-nosed assessment of existential economic exposure.
India's crude oil import dependence stands at approximately 88 per cent. Of those imports, roughly 50 per cent transit through the Strait of Hormuz -- a figure that has actually risen in recent months as Indian refiners reduced Russian crude purchases, increasing Hormuz exposure from 41 per cent in 2025. India's strategic petroleum reserves cover barely 9.5 days of net oil imports.
Nearly 9 million Indians live and work in the Gulf Cooperation Council states. Their remittances -- $135.46 billion in FY2025, a record high -- represent not abstract economic data but the school fees, medical bills, and housing loans of families in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
When Iran struck the UAE -- including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where hundreds of thousands of Indians live -- it was not a geopolitical abstraction. It was an attack on cities where Indian nurses treat patients, Indian engineers build skyscrapers, and Indian teachers educate children.
India condemned those strikes because Indian citizens and Indian economic interests were directly in the line of fire. India said nothing about the strikes on Iran because India cannot control, did not cause, and should not be drawn into a war between powers whose combined military expenditure dwarfs India's entire defence budget.
What Silence Must Not Mean
But silence must not mean indifference. And this is where India's moral clarity -- which exists, despite what critics suggest -- must find its voice.
When this war ends -- and it will end, as all wars do -- Iran will face a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. The strikes have already killed at least 787 people, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, including 18 girls in a sports hall in Lamerd. Infrastructure across Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah has been destroyed. A three-member leadership council -- President Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Mohseni-Ejei, and Guardian Council member Ayatollah Arafi -- is attempting to hold the state together. But the medical systems, the power grids, the water infrastructure, the civilian housing -- these do not rebuild themselves.
India should be preparing, urgently and visibly, for the humanitarian aftermath. Not in support of the regime -- whatever remains of it -- but in support of the Iranian people. Medical aid. Reconstruction expertise. The kind of civilisational solidarity that transcends geopolitical alignment.
India has done this before. After the 2004 tsunami, India was among the first responders in Sri Lanka. After the Nepal earthquake of 2015, Indian military aircraft were on the ground within hours. India's humanitarian muscle is real. It should be flexed now -- not in the middle of the war, but in loud, public preparation for the day after.
The Hope That Dare Not Speak Its Name
India's deepest hope -- and it is a hope shared by millions of Iranians themselves -- is that a democratic and progressive Iran emerges from this war. An Iran at peace with its own people. An Iran that does not execute women for showing their hair. An Iran that does not need a Supreme Leader to interpret the will of God for a population of 88 million. An Iran whose scientists and artists and entrepreneurs do not have to choose between their country and their freedom.
The Persian civilisation deserves better than theocratic isolation. And India, as a fellow ancient civilisation that chose democracy -- imperfect, noisy, exasperating democracy -- has a moral standing to say so. Not now, not while the bombs fall. But when the dust settles and Iran begins the long, painful work of rebuilding, India should be there. Not as a geopolitical opportunist. Not as a Western proxy. But as an old friend who remembers what Persia was, and believes in what Iran can become.
The Parsis who landed in Sanjan a millennium ago carried fire in their temples and hope in their exile. India sheltered both. The least India can do now is carry that fire forward -- not to the regime that failed its people, but to the people who deserve what every ancient civilisation deserves: the right to choose their own future.
The views expressed are those of the BarathVector editorial board. Data sources include India's Ministry of External Affairs, Reserve Bank of India, Iranian Red Crescent, S&P Global, Al Jazeera, CNN, CNBC, Business Standard, and The Week.