This essay argues that India’s analytical under-engagement with the ideological dimensions of Iranian statecraft is not a policy failure but a theoretical one: a structural consequence of what I term the “postcolonial materialism trap”: the tendency of postcolonial states to systematically bracket ideology in international analysis as a defense against perceived Western epistemic imperialism. Drawing on constructivist and classical realist insights, I argue that this trap produces a distinctive form of strategic partial vision that is neither purely realist nor adequately constructivist, and that correcting it requires not merely incorporating ideology into existing frameworks but reconceiving the relationship between strategic autonomy and ideational analysis in non-Western IR theory.

Introduction: The Problem Is Not Empirical, It Is Theoretical

India’s relationship with Iran is, by conventional metrics, a success story of managed complexity. New Delhi has sustained energy imports through sanctions regimes, negotiated transit rights through Chabahar while Washington pressed for isolation, and maintained diplomatic channels through the turbulence of Ahmadinejad, Rouhani, Raisi and Pezeshkian with a consistency that has eluded most Western capitals. The strategic community in Delhi rightly regards this as a demonstration of principled pragmatism: interests identified, relationships cultivated, red lines held.

Yet something is systematically missing from this picture, and its absence has consequences that compound quietly over time.

The missing element is not intelligence on Iranian capabilities or even awareness of revolutionary rhetoric; Indian analysts are neither naive nor uninformed. The gap is analytical: a persistent under-theorization of how ideology functions as an instrument of statecraft, how revolutionary states operate across registers that material analysis cannot capture, and why this matters not as a moral or civilizational concern but as a hard strategic one. India sees Iran clearly as a state. It sees it only dimly as an ideological actor.

This essay’s central claim is that this blind spot is not accidental. It is structurally produced by a distinctive feature of postcolonial international relations (IR) thinking, one that deserves examination on its own terms, not as mere derivative failure to absorb Western constructivism but as a theoretically significant phenomenon with its own internal logic and unintended consequences.

What Ideology Does in International Politics: Beyond the Constructivist Consensus

Before diagnosing the blind spot, it is worth being precise about what ideology actually does in international politics, because the mainstream constructivist account, which has rightly moved the field beyond crude materialism, is itself insufficient for the task at hand.

The constructivist contribution, from Wendt’s (1992) “Anarchy is what states make of it” onward (see also, Wendt, 1999), established that identities and ideas constitute interests rather than merely expressing them. This was theoretically decisive. But constructivism, particularly in its American academic form, has tended to focus on the ideational constitution of systemic structures, including elements such as norms, regimes and identities at the level of the international order, rather than on how particular states instrumentalize ideology as a tool of power projection (On Iran, see Fürtig and Gratius, 2010).

The Iranian case requires a different analytical lens, closer to what might be called operational ideological analysis: the study of how a state deploys its ideological commitments not as noise around material interests but as infrastructure for influence. The Islamic Republic’s Velayat-e Faqih doctrine, its cultivation of Shia political networks from Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, its media ecosystems (Press TV, Al-Alam, Al-Mayadeen’s orbit extending beyond its Beirut headquarters), its financing of ideological entrepreneurs, these are not epiphenomenal expressions of identity. They are instruments of statecraft, as deliberate as any conventional alliance portfolio, and they produce measurable effects in political systems far beyond Iran’s borders.

The crucial point is that these instruments operate on a different bandwidth than conventional power. Military capabilities deter; economic leverage coerces; but ideological infrastructure shapes the terrain on which interests are formed, mobilized, and expressed. States with strong ideological projection capacity can influence what domestic audiences in other countries want, what they regard as legitimate grievances, and which frames they use to interpret events. This is not “soft power” in Nye’s (1990) sense, which remains fundamentally state-centric and presupposes passive receivers. The classical Persian civilizational heritage, for example, would serve as “soft power” in the case of Iran, which the present regime actively denounces as an “Age of Ignorance”. Instead, it (the ideology-driven foreign policy in the non-Western IR thinking) is better understood as ideational statecraft: the deliberate cultivation of affective and normative dispositions in foreign societies to expand the range of possible actions available to the projecting state.

India’s analytical frameworks have not adequately theorized this phenomenon. The result is not that India ignores Iranian influence. It is that India lacks the conceptual vocabulary to measure it, track it, or incorporate it into strategic planning.

The Postcolonial Materialism........

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