The Tides have Turned

THE US-ISRAEL WAR ON Iran has exposed, across the board, the limits of state capacity and the hollowness of carefully crafted images. Amid this escalating global crisis, India finds itself navigating choppy waters, with the captain quite literally at sea. For over a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political project has rested on a narrative of muscular nationalism that brooks no dissent. Once again, when India most needs quiet competence and strategic clarity, we have a leader obsessed with optics, confused about priorities and unmoored from institutional constraints. The current moment, exposed by the crisis in West Asia, marks the end of that long summer of the Modi era.

The war poses a direct assault on Indian interests. Crude and gas prices jumped sharply the moment traffic was threatened along the Strait of Hormuz, pushing up fuel, fertiliser and transport costs for hundreds of millions of Indians already living on the edge, and shredding the Modi government’s claims of stability. Shipping insurance premiums for Indian carriers spiked and key Gulf trade routes have become more volatile, choking a lifeline for exporters and importers alike. With no credible evacuation or income-protection plan from New Delhi beyond verbose press releases, families in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who depend on remittances, have watched in fear as Gulf labour markets wobble.

Diplomatically, India has painted itself into a corner. New Delhi’s visible alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv has enraged public opinion from Tehran to Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the Modi government has taken this position without any serious leverage over US or Israeli decision‑making, nor has it shown the courage to defend Iranian sovereignty. Modi has reduced this grave crisis in West Asia to another episode of telephone calls and photo opportunities. He has offered no parliamentary debate, no honest assessment of the risks to energy security and diaspora safety, and no explanation for why—as the leader of a country that depends on the Gulf for oil, jobs and remittances—he has tied India so tightly to a reckless US–Israeli war whose costs will be paid by Indians and not by those whose favour he craves.

Over the course of twelve years, Modi has enjoyed advantages that eluded most of his predecessors. He benefitted from a long period of low global inflation, a record decrease in energy prices, abundant global liquidity searching for emerging markets and a media that was fully under his thumb. He had time, the mandate and international goodwill. But the outcomes on growth, jobs, social cohesion and strategic autonomy are unambiguously poor. Data on employment, manufacturing and inequality point to a dual reality: dubious claims of GDP expansion coupled with stagnation in productive jobs and a widening gulf between a thin urban elite and a precarious majority. India’s external profile looks louder, not necessarily stronger, pulled closer to the US–Israel axis, while its links with its South Asian neighbours and countries of the Global South are fraying.