Nations do not usually recover their dignity with trumpets. More often, they rediscover it after humiliation has become so routine that even the bureaucracy begins to feel embarrassed.

At Bishkek, India appears to have suffered such an outbreak of geopolitical self-respect.

Not a revolution. Not a resurrection of Nehru. Narendra Modi has not suddenly begun communing with Bandung or keeping Fanon under his pillow.

But something consequential happened at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit: India joined a declaration condemning military attacks on Iran, defending Iranian sovereignty, affirming Tehran’s nuclear rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, rejecting unilateral coercive measures and insisting that Palestine cannot be permanently buried beneath the rubble of Israeli supremacy.

But something consequential happened at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit: India joined a declaration condemning military attacks on Iran, defending Iranian sovereignty, affirming Tehran’s nuclear rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, rejecting unilateral coercive measures and insisting that Palestine cannot be permanently buried beneath the rubble of Israeli supremacy.

For today’s India, that is almost radicalism.

For years, New Delhi has performed “strategic autonomy” with the nervous choreography of a client state desperate to appear independent. It buys Russian oil, speaks reverently of multipolarity, invokes civilisational grandeur — then spends extraordinary diplomatic energy ensuring Washington and Tel Aviv are not offended by the grandeur. A civilization-state, apparently, with the emotional needs of a junior partner.

That posture has always been absurd. India has enormous interests in Iran, deep exposure to Gulf instability, historic ties across West Asia and every reason to oppose the principle that powerful states may bomb inconvenient countries into obedience. Yet when Washington and Israel escalated militarily against Iran, India........

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