In a recent column, historian Anirudh Kanisetti argued that India has “lost the language for what Iran actually means to it.” It is a striking phrase, and an accurate one. India today speaks of Iran in the vocabulary of diplomacy and energy corridors, but avoids the harder historical and strategic truths that should shape its policy.

That selective memory is not accidental. For years, the Iranian embassy and its interlocutors have tried to foreground civilisational links, shared culture, and the deep imprint of Persian on the subcontinent. There is truth in that story. Persian was once the language of administration and high culture in India for centuries, shaping literature, governance, and elite life.  In fact, modern Hindi and Urdu descend from Hindustani, a forced marriage of evolutions of local dialects of the north with Persian.

But that is only half the history.

The other half is far less comfortable. The rise of Islamic polities linked to Persia and Central Asia in the subcontinent was accompanied by violence, displacement, and religious upheaval. Kanisetti selectively ignores that Persian was imposed by the sword and from Mahmoud of Ghazni to Nadirshah of Iran, Islamic Iranian rulers have attacked, raped, pillaged and plundered India.

Among its most enduring consequences was the flight of Zoroastrians from Iran to India, where they became the Parsi community that survives to this day. Most of the Parsi eternal flames now find themselves in India, with the Zorastrians, like the Jews, reduced to a token minority in Iran. Their presence in India is not simply a story of cultural exchange. It is also a memory of persecution and refuge.

To invoke shared civilisation without acknowledging this duality is to flatten history into diplomacy, try to appeal to a contorted view of history.

That flattening continues in the present.

Modern Iran is not Safavid Persia, nor the cosmopolitan world of poets and traders that Kanisetti rightly evokes. It is a revolutionary state that has institutionalised the use of proxy networks as an instrument of power. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its external arms have, over decades, cultivated militant organisations across regions, embedding influence through deniable violence rather than direct confrontation. While on one end the Iranian regime brands itself India’s friend, on another, it finances terrorism, encourages its proxies like Hamas to support terrorist groups that attack India, and uses India to attack Israeli diplomats.

This architecture has been treated in India as distant, even irrelevant. That assumption is no longer tenable.

Iranian-linked networks have demonstrated reach far beyond the Middle East. Their activities have targeted diplomatic, commercial, and civilian interests across continents. In a world of interconnected trade routes and diasporas, the idea that such networks remain geographically contained is an illusion.

India, of all countries, should recognise this first. It has lived through decades of terrorism. It has built a doctrine of zero tolerance. It has invested heavily in intelligence cooperation, particularly with countries that face similar threats. Yet when it comes to Iran, India hesitates. It retreats into the language of balance.

That hesitation is becoming a liability.

The contradiction is stark. India condemns terrorism in principle, but is reluctant to confront state structures that enable it. It speaks of strategic autonomy, but often practices strategic ambiguity. It invokes civilisational ties, but avoids historical complexity.

Kanisetti is right that India has lost a language. But the problem is not simply that India has forgotten how to speak about Iran. It is that it has chosen not to.

A serious policy requires clarity on three fronts.

First, history must be seen in full. The Indo-Persian world was real, rich, and transformative. But it was also shaped by pillage, conquest and displacement. Both truths must coexist.

Second, the present must be named for what it is. Iran today operates through a networked model of influence that relies on armed proxies and Islamic ideological alignment. This is not a neutral feature of the international system. It is a deliberate strategy.

Third, India must align its principles with its actions. A consistent position on terrorism cannot exclude state sponsorship simply because it is inconvenient.

None of this requires India to abandon its autonomy or mirror the positions of others. It does require India to stop pretending that all partners operate by the same rules.

The language that India has lost is not Persian. It is the language of strategic clarity.

And until it is recovered, policy will continue to lag behind reality.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)