A national daily commented editorially yesterday that apropos of the United States’ war on Iran, the Modi government should “take a more emphatic stand against the war and work with other powers to de-escalate the conflict. India should also strongly oppose U.S. attempts to bring the war to its  backyard.” 

Such counselling is overdue. Signs are multiplying that New Delhi is a captive of the narrative of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby who control US President Donald Trump. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s untimely visit to Israel ten days ago has brought about a manifestly pro-Israeli tilt in India’s regional policy in West Asia. This is hugely consequential.

Trump and Netanyahu are aiming at a total destruction of Iran to make it a submissive vassal state. Trump insists that he will have a say about choosing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s successor, implying that the decapitation strategy will continue until a pliable figure appears in Tehran. Such a strategy fits into Netanyahu’s longstanding agenda to remove Iran from the geopolitical chessboard as the main obstacle to his Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. Trump is vulnerable to Israeli blackmail over the Epstein file. But how are these to be conflated with India”s interests? 

Alas, Delhi has a tunnel vision. Shashi Tharoor, the chairman of the parliament’s standing committee of on foreign affairs, tailors his vision to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The BJP president of the state unit in Kerala Rajeev Chandrasekhar is indignant about the opposition parties’ “shameless politics” of pandering to political Islam by “condemning only US-Israel for attacking Iran…” 

However, the ground beneath the feet of the ruling elites in Delhi is shaky. Bloomberg reported on February 27 (before the war began) that Indonesian lawmakers, provoked by Modi’s patently pro-Israeli remarks while in Israel, sought to put on hold an order for 105,000 trucks with two of India’s top manufacturers — per a disclosure by Minister Ferry Juliantono in an interview with a local TV station. 

The spectre of........

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