India remembers it has a spine

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.

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 too often sounded like a sedated press release: restraint, dialogue, de-escalation — the vocabulary of states hoping not to be noticed while someone else’s sovereignty is being incinerated.

Bishkek interrupted the performance.

The SCO matters precisely because its members are not ideological comrades. India and Pakistan remain adversaries. India and China remain competitors. Russia brings its own distinct strategic priorities and worldview. This is not an anti-imperial monastery populated by saints in tailored suits.

And yet these states converged on propositions the Western-led order increasingly treats as optional: sovereignty matters; treaty rights cannot be cancelled by geopolitical dislike; sanctions are not international law merely because Washington writes them; and Palestine is not a humanitarian inconvenience to be managed while the Zionist settler colony remains untouched.

The deeper significance is obvious. The Global South is not becoming unified; it is becoming intolerant of tutelage. The old arrangement — Washington defines legality, Europe launders it into elegant prose, Israel receives exemptions, and everyone else is instructed to respect the “rules-based order” — is losing legitimacy and theatrical appeal.

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States do not need to adore one another to recognize a rigged table.

For India, this should be instinctive territory. Its stature was once built not merely on size, weapons or markets, but on its ability to speak to Asia, Africa, the Arab world and Latin America without sounding like empire’s local distributor. Colonialism, partition, dispossession and sovereignty were not seminar topics. They were lived memory.

That inheritance was never pure. Nehru’s India was often sanctimonious, inconsistent and self-interested. But it understood something the present establishment frequently forgets: independence is not proven by repeatedly declaring oneself autonomous. It is proven by occasionally telling powerful friends to go to hell.

Bishkek contained the faint sound of India remembering how. And then comes the almost obscene contradiction.

The India rediscovering sovereignty abroad remains busily degrading pluralism at home. The same state that signs declarations about justice and sovereign equality presides over a political culture saturated with Hindutva fascism, violent Islamophobia, repression in Kashmir, oligarchic rule, and the systematic treatment of dissent as disloyalty.

Apparently sovereignty is sacred until exercised by an Indian citizen with the wrong religion or opinion.

This is not merely hypocrisy. It is strategic stupidity. India cannot credibly pose as a leader of the Global South while reproducing at home the political grammar historically associated with colonial power: state terror, graded citizenship, civilizational hierarchy, collective suspicion and the conversion of minorities into permanent security problems.

Nor can India support Palestine abroad while allowing rabid anti-Muslim racism to become electoral currency at home. A communiqué does not make a state anti-colonial. Resisting supremacy does — including the supremacy manufactured inside one’s own borders.

This is where Israel should frighten India more than inspire it.

Israel demonstrates the corrosive end-state of permanent siege politics: every disagreement becomes existential, every opponent becomes a terrorist, every use of force justifies the next, and militarized – and genocidal – nationalism slowly eats the society it claims to defend. India has admired Israeli “toughness” for years without examining the bill.

The 2025 clash with Pakistan should already have exposed the emptiness of television muscularity. Nationalism looks invincible on a studio set. It becomes less impressive when aircraft, air defence and escalation ladders begin asking factual questions. Swagger is excellent content. It is not a strategy.

Bishkek therefore offers India something larger than diplomatic symbolism: a route back toward an independent foreign policy proportionate to its weight. Not anti-American hysteria, not Chinese subordination, not sentimental Russophilia, not Israeli deference — but actual autonomy.

There is only one problem. India cannot recover the dignity of its international tradition while violently annihilating the pluralism that gave that tradition meaning.

Bandung abroad and fascism at home cannot coexist indefinitely.

At Bishkek, India did not become enlightened. It merely behaved, internationally, like India again. For a nation of 1.4 billion people, that should be a very low bar. The real test is whether the spine it rediscovered abroad extends all the way home.

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