-Ramphal Kataria
When Silence Becomes Policy: India, Gaza and the Abdication of Moral Power
For much of its post-independence history, India’s foreign policy was animated by a rare ambition: to exercise power without domination, and influence without coercion. It spoke the language of law when others spoke the language of force; it invoked solidarity when great powers invoked inevitability. This was not naïveté. It was strategy.
Today, that inheritance lies in visible disrepair.
India’s abstentions on Gaza, its diplomatic proximity to Israel amid mass civilian death, its silence as war redraws West Asia, and its compliance with American economic and strategic pressure together mark a rupture—quiet, calibrated, but profound. What is unfolding is not a series of tactical adjustments, but a structural drift away from strategic autonomy towards something closer to strategic subordination.
This is not merely a story about Israel or Palestine. It is a story about what India has chosen to become.
The Architecture of Moral Power
India did not stumble into non-alignment; it built it. Under Jawaharlal Nehru, foreign policy was conceived as an extension of anti-colonial ethics. The newly independent Indian state rejected the Cold War’s forced binaries not because it feared choosing sides, but because it refused the premise that domination was the natural order of international politics.
The Non-Aligned Movement—crafted alongside Yugoslavia, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia—was never about neutrality. It was about autonomy: the right of post-colonial states to make decisions unencumbered by imperial vetoes. India’s support for Palestine flowed directly from this worldview. New Delhi opposed the 1947 UN Partition Plan, recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization early, and later recognized the State of Palestine without hesitation. For decades, India voted with mechanical consistency in favour of Palestinian self-determination—even while maintaining discreet, low-profile ties with Israel.
This balance—engagement without endorsement—was the signature of Indian diplomacy. It allowed India to deal with power without surrendering principle.
The Breaking of a Consensus
That consensus began to fracture in the mid-2010s.
India had normalized relations with Israel in 1992, but for over two decades, no Indian prime minister set foot in Tel Aviv. That changed under Narendra Modi, whose 2017 visit to Israel was framed as “de-hyphenation”—the claim that India’s relations with Israel would no longer be tethered to Palestine.
In practice, de-hyphenation did not produce balance; it produced hierarchy.
Israel was elevated to spectacle—hugged, photographed, celebrated. Palestine was reduced to abstraction—invoked rhetorically, sidelined diplomatically. When Gaza descended into humanitarian catastrophe—mass civilian death, starvation, the collapse of hospitals—India chose abstention. Not opposition. Not even condemnation. Abstention.
Gaza, once central to India’s moral vocabulary, had become diplomatically inconvenient.
This silence was rendered starker by India’s proximity to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, even as Israel faced unprecedented legal scrutiny at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. India is not a party to the ICC, but it remains bound by customary international law and by the ICJ’s authority. Abstention, under these conditions, is not neutrality. It is evasion.
War Without Law
The broader international context only sharpens the indictment.
West Asia today is defined by the collapse of legal restraint. The escalating confrontation between Israel and Iran—punctuated by direct strikes and US involvement—has normalized a doctrine long familiar to imperial history: preventive war dressed as self-defence.
The United States, particularly under Donald Trump, has played a decisive role in this erosion—walking away from multilateral agreements, imposing extraterritorial sanctions, and reviving regime-change rhetoric with alarming ease. Even allegations of extraordinary actions against foreign leaders—hotly debated in diplomatic and legal circles—point to a deeper reality: international law now bends openly before power.
India’s response to this moment has not been resistance, or even principled dissent. It has been silence—carefully worded, studiously non-committal, diplomatically safe.
This is a striking reversal for a country that once insisted on UN primacy and non-intervention as foundational norms.
Iran and the Price of Compliance
Nowhere is this reversal clearer than in India’s retreat from Iran.
For years, Iran anchored India’s regional strategy. Energy imports, connectivity projects, and the Chabahar port offered India strategic depth—access to Afghanistan and Central Asia without passing through Pakistan. Under sustained American pressure, India dramatically reduced Iranian oil imports and slowed its engagement with Chabahar, despite earlier waivers.
The message was unambiguous: India’s strategic choices were now subject to American approval.
This compliance has been justified as pragmatism. But pragmatism without leverage is submission.
The Economics of Unequal Partnership
The asymmetry extends beyond geopolitics into trade.
Despite rhetoric of partnership, the United States has repeatedly subjected India to unilateral tariffs, market-access demands, and coercive trade negotiations. Even when US courts or political shifts softened tariff regimes for other countries, India often remained an exception—expected to open its markets without reciprocal concessions.
This is not the behaviour of an equal partner. It is the logic of hierarchy.
Foreign policy, once anchored in autonomy, now appears filtered through Washington’s preferences—on oil, on trade, on war.
What Replaced Strategic Autonomy?
Three forces have driven this transformation.
First, an ideological reorientation that privileges civilisational alignment over universal ethics has narrowed India’s diplomatic imagination. Second, the over-personalisation of foreign policy—summitry, symbolism, spectacle—has displaced institutional consistency. Third, security anxiety, particularly vis-à-vis China, has nudged India towards a single-patron model, despite history’s warnings.
The Non-Aligned Movement was born precisely from the recognition that great powers do not act as benevolent guarantors. India appears to have forgotten why it once knew this.
How the World—and Indians—See It
Internationally, India’s credibility as a moral voice of the Global South has eroded. Comparisons with Brazil and South Africa are instructive. All face US pressure. None have India’s demographic or economic weight. Yet both have maintained clearer positions on Palestine, international law, and Gaza.
Domestically, the response is fractured. Official narratives celebrate “strategic realism.” But among academics, civil society, and large sections of the diaspora, India’s Gaza silence and Israel alignment register as a moral rupture. The dissonance between India’s anti-colonial self-image and its present conduct grows harder to ignore.
Foreign policy, once a source of pride, has become a site of ethical discomfort.
From Voice to Echo
India stands at a crossroads. The question is no longer whether it can balance values and interests. The question is whether it still believes values are interests.
In trading principled autonomy for calibrated silence, India risks becoming what it once resisted: a secondary power echoing the priorities of larger states. Strategic autonomy—India’s greatest diplomatic asset—cannot survive selective lawfulness, moral ambiguity, and coerced alignment.
The cost of this shift will not only be measured abroad, in lost credibility. It will be felt at home, in the quiet erosion of the principles that once allowed India to speak to the world with confidence, dignity, and authority.
Endnotes
1. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Oxford University Press, 1946).
2. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), 1947.
3. Government of India, MEA archives on recognition of the PLO (1974) and the State of Palestine (1988).
4. International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, 2004.
5. Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians (2022).
6. Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed (2021).
7. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza Situation Reports (2023–2025).
8. MEA statements on Iran oil imports and Chabahar port (2021–2024).
9. US Trade Representative, tariff and trade policy statements concerning India (2018–2025).
10. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New Press, 2007).
11. Frédéric Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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