The Ground India Lost
India once spoke for the voiceless. Not anymore.
On the morning of February 28, as the United States and Israel launched their air campaign against Iran, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, a small town in southern Iran. The school was located near a base belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The roof collapsed on the children inside, killing more than 170 people — most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve, along with their teachers and the parents who had rushed to bring them home to safety.
Wreckage identified at the scene included a satellite antenna and an actuator motor, identified by CNN and munitions experts, including those from Bellingcat, as components of a US-made Tomahawk missile. Preliminary findings from the US military’s own investigation confirm American responsibility. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for accountability and described the attack as a potential war crime.
New Delhi said nothing. And its silence was loud.
India felt like a nation that has sacrificed itself on the altar of pragmatism — a nation that has lost its conscience. Not a word of regret. Not a word of condemnation. Not even the careful diplomatic formulation of “concern for civilian lives” that countries use when they want to register disapproval without naming anyone.
Several nations stayed quiet for their own convenient reasons. But India was never supposed to be one of several nations. India had a position. For decades since independence, nations have looked to India to see what it would say and how it would behave. Big powers tried to bring India along precisely because of the weight India’s voice carried.
India’s silence wasn’t just about staying quiet when someone unknown killed children. India stayed silent when its own strategic partner — the United States, the country New Delhi has been tilting toward — killed over a hundred schoolgirls on the first day of an illegal war. New Delhi’s silence wasn’t diplomatic caution. It was a choice — a choice not to say a word when the most powerful nation it has aligned itself with killed children in a school, with precision weapons, and then initially tried to blame Iran for it.
For a country that suffered centuries under colonialism and fought its way to independence while supporting others doing the same, India has been the conscience of the Global South. This was the nation that stood for non-alignment at the height of the Cold War, when the world was rigidly divided into two blocs and smaller nations were expected to choose sides. India refused. It maintained relations with Washington and Moscow alike, guided not by convenience but by principle. To watch that moral inheritance being quietly surrendered — not under pressure, not under threat, but by choice — is sad in the way that only the loss of something genuinely great can be sad.
Which makes what followed all the more painful. When Pakistan struck Kabul and killed hundreds, New Delhi condemned the attack as unconscionable and barbaric. The condemnation was right. But coming after the silence over Iranian schoolgirls, it did not sound principled. It sounded selective. And selective condemnation is not a moral position — it is a political one. It tells the world not what you believe, but who you are protecting.
Making it worse is the fact that the Taliban — an oppressive regime that seized power by force — has become India’s new partner in the region. Having made that accommodation, New Delhi had already surrendered the human rights argument in Afghanistan. Increasingly, it looks as though India’s domestic politics is now being projected onto the world stage.
India’s greatness, historically, was not military power or economic size. It was moral heft — the ability to speak independently, to condemn wrong regardless of who committed it, to represent the voiceless because it had once been voiceless itself. That moral position was Nehru’s greatest foreign policy achievement. It gave India a seat at every table disproportionate to its material power.
New Delhi is stuck. Having lost its moral heft, India is no longer part of the global power conversation. Its condemnations now sound more problematic than principled. Soon enough, India may be seen not as an independent voice but as a satellite of the US-Israel axis.
There was a time when the world’s conscience, in a crisis, had an Indian accent. Not anymore.