The salience of the two readouts of the phone call on Saturday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian is that the bilateral relationship between the two ‘civilisation states’ has become fraught lately. The divergence of opinion is all too apparent. 

The call appeared to be a dialogue between a deaf and a blind person. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can congratulate himself for creating this unthinkable situation  —  a tiny country of 8 or 9 million people bending a Leviathan of 1400 million to dance to its tune. But there is no question that the buck stops at Delhi in its failure to allow Israel to enter the Indian policymakers’ tent and eventually take it over — a catastrophe that could have been foretold.   

Second, India’s transformation as a co-habitant of the US-Israeli orbit is evident from the Indian readout. PM just couldn’t bring himself to call a spade a spade even when the plain truth stares at him — that Trump at Netanyahu’s urging ordered a naked aggression against Iran that threatens international security. What more empirical evidence would Delhi require one doesn’t know. 

Third, the government decision to practise the maxim of the three wise monkeys — ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ — ie., dealing with impropriety by turning a blind eye won’t fly. It only tarnishes India’s reputation.  

Pezeshkian tried hard to draw out Modi by underscoring “Iran did not begin the war and the aggressor enemy conducted a military aggression against Iran without any reason, logic and legal basis in the midst of nuclear negotiations.” He pointed out that the US and Israel assassinated the Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, top military commanders and defenceless civilians, including innocent school children (over 200 in one primary school........

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