As Iran buries its supreme leader amid a war that has redrawn the Middle East’s balance of power, India’s official response has remained carefully, almost deliberately, thin. New Delhi has sent a deputy foreign minister and a state governor to the funeral, called for dialogue and de-escalation, and stopped short of condemning the strike that killed Ali Khamenei. Critics call this evasive. It may in fact be the most honest position available to a country with as much at stake as India has in this conflict.
Start with what India risks by picking a side. Iran anchors the Chabahar port, India’s most reliable route into Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan, and a project New Delhi has spent nearly two decades and considerable diplomatic capital building. Iran’s oil, even under sanctions pressure, remains part of the calculus for a country that imports the overwhelming majority of its crude. And India’s ties with the Gulf states, with Israel, and with Washington all pull in different directions depending on how sharply any one of them is asked to take sides. Multialignment, the strategy of staying close to many powers rather than committed to one, was designed precisely for moments like this.
The counter-argument deserves a fair hearing too. Some foreign policy commentators argue that India’s studied ambiguity after the killing of a head of state, however unpopular that leader was, reads less like careful diplomacy and more like quiet alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv, dressed up as neutrality. If India is unwilling to say plainly what it thinks about an assassination of this scale, the argument goes, then the language of strategic autonomy risks becoming a euphemism for avoiding uncomfortable choices altogether, and that ambiguity carries its own cost in how seriously India’s voice is taken across the Global South.
Both readings can be true at once. Restraint can be genuine statecraft, and it can also be a way of avoiding a decision. What is clear is that India’s approach will be judged less by what it says this week and more by what it does when the ceasefire clock now running on US-Iran talks either holds or breaks. Silence is a strategy. Whether it is a wise one will depend on what comes after it.
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