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PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD argues that India’s growing alignment with Israel reflects a profound shift from its anti-colonial heritage towards a foreign policy shaped by militarism, majoritarianism and geopolitical expediency.
Nations do not usually commit suicide in one spectacular act. They do it by acquiring a taste for poison and calling it policy. They rename moral vandalism realism, isolation autonomy, and borrowed brutality strength. Israel has performed this degeneration with almost obscene clarity. Narendra Modi’s India now appears less like a critic than an apprentice.
The tragedy is not that India has interests. Serious states have interests. The tragedy is that India now mistakes interests for genuflection before a collapsing moral order. Once, India spoke in the idiom of Bandung, anti-colonialism, non-alignment, Palestinian freedom, and Global South dignity. It was never immaculate, but it had stature. It understood that power without ethics is only barbarism with a flag.
Today, that inheritance is being pawned for drones, spyware, counter-terror slogans, and the embrace of a state whose regional doctrine is simple: bomb the neighbourhood, then call the smoke security.
Israel’s national suicide is not hidden. It has turned itself from a state seeking recognition into a garrison worshipping permanent war. Gaza has not made Israel safer. It has made Israel morally untouchable. No country can terrorise a region, starve a captive people, pulverise cities, and then act surprised when its diplomatic circle shrinks to arms dealers, zealots, clients, and Washington’s exhausted veto pen. Israel wins battles the way a man wins arguments by burning down the room.
India’s imitation is uglier because India had another destiny. It had size, memory, culture, numbers, glamour, and the postcolonial authority to speak to Asia, Africa, and Latin America without sounding like empire’s regional contractor. Instead, New Delhi has chosen the cheap thrill of being near Tel Aviv and Washington over the harder grandeur of independent leadership. This is not strategic autonomy. It is strategic puberty – the foreign policy equivalent of wearing sunglasses in a dark room.
The Iran crisis tore away the mask. At one of the defining geopolitical moments of the age, India sounded less like a civilisational power than a frightened press note. ‘Restraint’, ‘dialogue’, ‘de-escalation’: diplomatic sedatives served while missiles carve the region. BRICS moved. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization moved. Iran demanded clarity. The West enforced hierarchy. India performed its new specialty: visible enough to be counted, timid enough to be ignored.
Then came the May 2025 clash with Pakistan: a short, noisy theatre where swagger met physics. The details remain contested, as they always do in South Asian military pageantry, but the political result was unmistakable. India’s aura of effortless escalation dominance was punctured. A government that sells muscle discovered that television biceps do not equal strategic mastery. Nationalism fills studios. It is less persuasive when aircraft, air defence, and escalation ladders start asking factual questions.
India’s soft power is also being vandalised from within. Bollywood once entered rooms where diplomats could not. It exported longing, romance, music, mischief, and cosmopolitan ease. Now too much of it has been dragged into ideological servitude, where historical fantasy, majoritarian grievance, and choreographed patriotism pretend to be art. The old India exported songs; the new India exports slogans with a soundtrack. Even yoga, that deep discipline of body, breath, and mind, has been flattened into civilisational merchandise – liberation repackaged as branding.
The deepest rot is at home. A republic cannot preach pluralism abroad while tolerating mobs, demonology, and the reduction of Muslims into permanent suspects. Gandhi’s militant pacifism, Nehru’s flawed internationalism, and India’s plural civilisation are not museum relics. They are strategic capital. To deface them is not merely wicked. It is stupid.
This is where India mirrors Israel most dangerously. Israel thinks violence can erase political reality. Modi’s India increasingly thinks majoritarian domination can replace national cohesion. Both are supremacy fantasies. Both manufacture enemies faster than they manufacture security. Both confuse fear with respect. Fear is not respect. It is deferred hatred.
The irony is vicious. India seeks prestige by embracing a state whose own project has produced isolation, moral corrosion, and dependence on imperial protection. This is not ambition. It is playacting with nuclear weapons.
A great nation does not become great by imitating a bunker. India’s tragedy is that it still has the raw materials of greatness: intellect, culture, scale, diplomacy, moral memory. But greatness requires self-respect. And self-respect requires the courage to stand apart from fashionable barbarism.
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Israel is showing the world how a state can survive materially while dying politically. India should study the lesson carefully – not as a manual, but as a warning.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
