Yves here. Reza Assadi discusses how the current BRICS chair, India, has been conspicuously silent on every consequential moment of the Iran war, from from Modi’s Knesset address right before the first strikes, through India’s co-sponsorship of UN Security Council Resolution 2817 condemning Iran and the unraveling of strategic autonomy under US tariff pressure on Russian oil. India will host Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on May 14, but only because India is chairing a meeting of BRICS foreign ministers then.
By Reza Assadi, who writes on the geopolitics of the post-unipolar world, with particular focus on Iran and the multipolar transition. He also runs an AI company focused on bridging the trust gap, and some of his writing connects: how AI is reshaping the multipolar order, what it means for sovereignty, power, and what remains human. He publishes at his Substack
In the last week of April, Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi flew to Pakistan, Oman and Russia. He arrived in Islamabad on the 24th and met Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, who had taken a call from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hours earlier. He flew to Muscat the same day, met Sultan Haitham, and returned to Islamabad on the 26th for a second round of meetings, this time including Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, before heading to St. Petersburg to meet President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
On May 6th, Araghchi was in Beijing meeting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. As Russia, Iran, China and Pakistan ran a coordinated diplomatic track across four capitals in four days (and onward to Beijing on May 6th), another BRICS member, dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for ninety percent of its liquefied petroleum gas, more than half of its crude oil, the wages of ten million workers in the Gulf, and the fertilizer inputs that feed 1.4 billion people, was in none of those conversations. Since the beginning of the war, there has been little, very little, almost no public position from this giant of giants, India.
The elephant has an opportunity to step back into the room on May 14th, at the BRICS foreign ministers meeting in Delhi. To understand this absence, and what is at stake on the 14th, the chronology of events is important.
What could they say, when thirty-six hours before the first bombs were falling on Tehran, President Narendra Modi addressed the Knesset and told its members that India “stands with Israel firmly, with full conviction, in this moment, and beyond.” He received the Speaker of the Knesset Medal, the first foreign leader to do so. The two governments elevated their existing strategic partnership to a Special Strategic Partnership and announced twenty-seven bilateral outcomes including a Critical and Emerging Technologies partnership led by the two national security advisors, an Indo-Israel Cyber Centre of Excellence, the conclusion of the first round of free trade agreement negotiations, and the reaffirmation of a November 2025 defence MOU on joint production.
Thirty-six hours after Modi landed back in Delhi, Operation Epic Fury began. The Knesset speech was a diplomatic miscalculation, even before the start of the war, let alone after. For several years now, even within the West, leaders seem to have avoided official visits to Israel. This position against a country of the global majority is not new. In September 2005, the Singh government voted against Iran at the IAEA, a vote read at the time as the price of the US-India nuclear deal. Twenty years on, the war merely brought it to the surface.
On the 28th of February the war started. In a double-tap attack on the first day, 156 people were killed, including 120 children. India issued no statement regarding the Minab school. When the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson was asked directly, they gave a generic statement for “the safety of all civilians.” There should be no politics when it comes to the deaths of civilians, let alone a horrible attack on a primary school.
The MEA went even further, on March 3rd, the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran division cabled all Indian missions abroad with instructions not to sign condolence books for Khamenei without prior clearance from Delhi. India was, in that moment, the only major capital not party to the war actively suppressing the standard diplomatic gesture extended to a head of state.
Iran requested safe haven from Sri Lanka on February 26th and from India on February 28th, the day the war began. Sri Lanka, citing the Hague Convention on neutral powers, restricted port access to ships at war. India, per Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s parliamentary record, agreed to open Kochi on March 1st On March 4th, the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena was sunk by torpedo nineteen nautical miles off the coast from Galle, Sri Lanka. The submarine was American, the USS Charlotte. The Dena was returning from MILAN-26, the multilateral exercise India had hosted at Visakhapatnam from February 18th to 25th, in which the US Navy participated through a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft.
Iran’s ambassador to India stated that participating ships were unarmed under exercise protocol. One hundred and four Iranian sailors were killed or remain missing. Sri Lanka, an island one fiftieth the size of India, conducted the rescue, arriving two hours after the distress call. The first Indian aircraft arrived three hours later, and the first Indian vessel, a sail training barque, eleven hours after the call.
What happened between March 1st and March 4th remains unknown. The transit to Kochi at the frigate’s cruising speed would have been under twenty-four hours; instead, the three ships separated and sailed for different ports. The surviving captain, Commander Abuzar Zarri, has testified that two torpedoes were fired ninety minutes apart, the first disabling propulsion without fatalities at 03:35, the crew then assembling on the aft helicopter deck for evacuation, the second striking the aft section under the assembled crew at 05:06, a sequence which, if confirmed, would constitute a war crime under customary naval law, since the attacking submarine could verify that the ship was disarmed and the crew was preparing to abandon ship.
The Wire described the Indian Navy’s release as “carefully worded,” noting that it focused solely on humanitarian search and rescue without addressing the American strike that caused the sinking. The day after the sinking, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri signed the book at the Iranian embassy in Delhi with two perfunctory sentences. The cable was partially reversed: Indian missions abroad were now permitted to sign, but only by replicating Misri’s text verbatim.
Then on March 11th, India co-sponsored UN Security Council Resolution 2817. The resolution condemned Iran by name, demanded Tehran cease its attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan, and demanded Iran halt interference with maritime trade.
The text did not mention the United States. It did not mention Israel. It did not mention the strikes that started the war. It did not mention the IRIS Dena. It did not mention the assassination of Khamenei and the Minab girls. China and Russia abstained on similar grounds. India was a co-sponsor. The MEA’s justification, when pressed, was diaspora protection and energy security; a generic statement, not the language of principle.
President Droupadi Murmu has not made a single public statement on the war in two months. Her highest-profile April communication was a tribute on the Pahalgam terror anniversary. Her predecessors made statements on Iraq 2003, Ukraine 2022, and Gaza 2023. The constitutional head of state has been mute through the largest US-led war since 2003. The country that calls itself the net security provider of the Indian Ocean has a Prime Minister who has spoken on energy security, on Pakistan, on diaspora protection. He has not spoken on the war or on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The South Had a Voice
The voice India usually deploys to defend its strategic autonomy, in every forum it could find from 2022 to 2025, has gone quiet.
In June 2022, four months into the Ukraine war, Foreign Minister Jaishankar told the GLOBSEC Bratislava Forum that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” The line went viral. He has repeated the general argument ever since, and it has been applauded by the global majority, as giving voice to their reality. At the India-US 2+2 in Washington in April 2022, he again observed that Europe bought more Russian oil in an afternoon than India did in a month. The press conference with Lavrov in Moscow in November 2022, where he praised Russia as “exceptionally steady” and “time-tested” while Western capitals were assembling sanctions packages. The ORF Austria interview in January 2023, where he answered the anchor’s question about Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty by promising “a long silence” if the same standard were applied to other historical cases. The Corriere della Sera interview in late 2024, asking why India should pay higher prices to make Europe happy. The GMF Brussels Forum in June 2025, revisiting the original line and reasserting the framework. The Economic Times World Leaders Forum in August 2025, on Trump-era pressure: “if you have a problem buying oil or refined products from India, don’t buy it. Nobody forces you to buy it. But Europe buys, America buys.”
The position was understandable, India was very little exposed to the Ukraine war, with less than one percent of its crude from Russia at the start of 2022, with ten million workers in the Gulf and not in the Donbass, with a southern flank facing Hormuz and not the Black Sea. Strategic autonomy is an honest expression of India’s interests. The Russian crude purchases were tacitly permitted by the Biden administration to stabilise global supply, but India and Russia also built sanctions-resistant infrastructure of their own: rupee-rouble settlement outside the dollar system, sustained energy and defence trade, bilateral channels designed to outlast Western enforcement.
In February 2026, the war moved from a theatre where India had no exposure to a theatre where India has more exposure than any economy: ninety percent of its LPG imports, more than half of its LNG imports and nearly half of its crude imports transit Hormuz, and more than half the fertilizer imports it needs to feed its 1.4 billion people. Adding to that, a diaspora of ten million in the Gulf paying remittances that stabilize the rupee. The situation in the Persian Gulf is not trivial for India’s economy and basic needs. Yet, they are absent from the discussions that will settle the architecture of West Asia for decades to come.
A March 9th statement from the MEA Jaishankar that India’s “key priority is to secure energy needs” did not take position on the war, simply general comments about economic security aimed at its own electorate. Another statement on April 4th IIM Raipur convocation called for “hedging, de-risking and diversifying”, again, no position. On April 5th, a round of telephone conversations with the foreign ministers of Qatar, the UAE, and Iran, with general platitudes, no attempt to take the lead to resolve the conflict India so desperately needs resolved. At a March 25th all-party meeting, he dismissed Pakistan’s mediator role as “dalaal,” a Hindi term whose closest English equivalent in register is “pimp.” It appears the world’s problems are not India’s problems either.
What has changed? Where is the voice defending India’s strategic interest, the global majority’s strategic interest?
In 2022, the cost was negligible and India could afford disparaging comments towards Europe in the US-Europe war against Russia. In 2026, although this time the cost is colossal, the other side is not to be trifled with; the US-Israel war on Iran demonstrates India sees a pecking order in which it is not first. The February 2026 Knesset declaration can now be understood.
Cicero of India dropped the mic in 2022. It appears it doesn’t want to pick it up in 2026.
The New BRI(ran)CS
India holds the BRICS 2026 chair. Iran is a BRICS member. US assets in the UAE, also a BRICS member, were hit by Iranian retaliation. Russia condemned the US-Israeli strikes as “premeditated and unprovoked acts of armed aggression.” China’s Wang Yi told Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar that Beijing “opposes any military strikes launched by Israel and the US against Iran.” Brazil and South Africa condemned within days. India alone among the founding five has not.
On March 21st, Pezeshkian called Modi and asked India “as the current BRICS chair to play an independent role in halting aggressions against Iran.” Modi’s public readout omitted the request entirely. The Iranian embassy in Delhi posted the full readout publicly two days later, which is how the omission became known.
On April 24th, the BRICS-MENA deputy foreign ministers’ meeting was held in Delhi. India failed to forge consensus. The Chair’s Summary, “deep concern,” was the same language the MEA had been using since February 28th. The May 14-15 BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New Delhi will be a litmus test of whether India will own the chair.
Until then, the current chair of the BRICS remains silent, while the global majority stares at the worst fertilizer crisis since 2022, with crop yield reductions of up to 30 percent projected if shipments do not move during the May-June planting window. Brazil, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, much of Africa: every major global majority agricultural economy is vulnerable. Iran’s foreign minister has spent the last week, with Pakistan, assembling the diplomatic response the bloc was built to lead. The Johannesburg criteria require members to support international and regional peace and security and to amplify the voice of the global majority. Iran is doing both. India, the chair, is doing neither. Perhaps we should now speak of the BRI(ran)CS.
Strategic Autonomy to Strategic Vassalage
India’s defense of strategic autonomy in 2022 was clear to everyone. In July and August 2025, the Trump administration imposed two tranches of 25 percent tariff on India, in part due to its purchases of Russian oil. In October, Trump told reporters that Modi had assured him that morning, in a phone call, that India “will not be buying oil from Russia.”
Although India publicly contradicted Trump’s version, Reliance Industries stopped importing Russian crude in November to comply with the October Rosneft and Lukoil US Treasury sanctions. In January, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and other state-owned refiners began reducing or suspending Russian crude orders ahead of the January 21st product-import sanctions deadline. Within days, on February 2nd, Trump announced in a social media post that he had spoken with Modi that morning and that Modi had “agreed to replace the country’s Russian crude imports with oil from Venezuela and the United States.” He simultaneously announced that Indian goods would face an 18 percent tariff, down from 50 percent, effective immediately.
A month later, on March 6th, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued the waiver and said in his X post that the Treasury Department was “issuing a temporary 30-day waiver to allow Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil.” He repeated the framing at a press conference: “We had asked them to stop buying sanctioned Russian oil this fall. They did. They were going to substitute it with US oil. But to ease the temporary gap of oil around the world, we have given them permission to accept the Russian oil.” The next day, India publicly contested the comments and released a statement saying “India has never depended on permission from any country to buy Russian oil. India is still importing Russian oil even in February 2026, and Russia is still India’s largest crude oil supplier.”
Nevertheless, Indian Russian oil imports fell from roughly 1.5 million barrels per day in mid-2025 to 1 million barrels per day in February 2026, a 33 percent drop, then doubled to nearly 2 million barrels per day in March following Bessent’s waiver. This alignment did not go unnoticed in Moscow. In mid-2025, India was purchasing Urals at a $7 discount to Brent. Then following the additional sanctions in October, the Urals-Brent discount widened to $23.51. However, once the waiver was issued, the discount did not return to the pre-sanction $7 level but narrowed to $4.80. Brent was selling north of $100.
If only it was just a question of a barrel of Urals-Brent. It isn’t.
On April 26th, the Chabahar sanctions waiver expired. India had committed more than $370 million to the port and fulfilled $120 million in direct investment by August 2025. The strategic counterweight to Chinese-built Gwadar, the gateway to Central Asia bypassing Pakistan, is being divested to an Iranian entity under US pressure. They’re walking away from an asset that took two decades to build just as the Pakistani-mediated talks are bringing Beijing and Russia into Iran’s reconstruction architecture. The argument for autonomy becomes difficult to maintain. India is paying a smaller discount on Russian oil, divesting from Iran on Washington’s order, and most importantly, letting others resolve its problems.
The world is now organizing around three poles. Reconstruction financing, transit fees, security guarantees, and currency arrangements are being negotiated in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran. India is in none of those conversations, and the BRICS chairmanship is being used to ensure no alternative architecture emerges either. Chabahar has been surrendered. The chair seat has been left vacant. The voice of moderation and justice is left to Pakistan, the adversary. Strategic autonomy has been abandoned. The queues outside LPG depots from Kolkata to Chennai are the bill being passed to the population.
The May 14-15 BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting in New Delhi is an opportunity for the chair to act as the chair. So far, India is no longer on the fence of strategic autonomy: it has picked a side.
