If Iran, Why Not Pakistan, Mr Trump?

If the Iranian regime needs to be punished for promoting quasi-terrorist outfits like Hezbollah and Hamas, then what about Pakistan which has spent decades exporting terror around the world, killing thousands, particularly in Afghanistan and India? asks M R Narayan Swamy.

It is nobody's case that India should not have friendly relations with Israel. The opinion is also split on whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi should have visited Israel amid the visible war clouds.

But what is without doubt a blunder is India's studied silence once Israel and the US killed Iranian leader Ali Khamenei and bombed a school in Iran killing scores of innocent children.

Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran is an ancient civilisation much like China, India, Greece and Egypt. Ancient civilisations have some deep rooted values.

These values, not shared by modern States like Israel and the US, include not killing a foe without notice, more so when you have invited him for peace talks.

India might feel close to Israel for more reasons than one. India's leadership may still want to cosy up to America despite being humiliated by Donald Trump.

But there is no reason for India to turn a blind eye to the disastrous effects of a horrific conflict for which Israel and the US are to mainly blame.

With its own Mumbai terrorist mayhem of 2008 in mind, Indians have a right to sympathise with what Israelis underwent when the Iran-backed Hamas overran southern Israel in 2023.

Israel has every right to counter Hamas, which is equally responsible for the immeasurable civilian suffering in Gaza.

But all this cannot absolve Israel of the misery it has heaped on the innocent Palestinians who had no role in the Hamas savagery.

Modi's Israeli itinerary may have been decided a while ago and it may be sheer coincidence that the trip was immediately followed by the attack on Iran.

The optics of the ill-time visit was certainly not favourable. However, it was all the more important for the Indian government to have mourned the death of Khamenei, a head of State, after he was killed with his family by an unexpected air attack by Israel and the US.

Take Malaysia, a Muslim country. Malaysia and Iran have always had frosty ties because of deep theological differences. Malaysia is Sunni majority and views Shias as deviants.

But in the aftermath of Khamenei's killing, Malaysian MPs remarkably came together across the political divide and mourned the death of a grandfather-cleric who presided over Iran.

India, on the contrary, is home to a sizeable Shia population, many of whom held Khameini as the supreme religious head. India owed it at least to its Shia population to express sorrow over his demise.

The Silence Of PM Modi

Since Israel has massacred without remorse over 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the vast majority of them civilians, the killing of nearly 150 children in Iran is unlikely to torment Israeli leaders' conscience.

But this was a perfect chance for India to voice sympathy with the victims and use the opportunity to underline that if ordinary Israelis cannot be slaughtered, the same holds true for the innocents in Iran -- or any other country -- too.

Prime Minister Modi's silence on these two issues - Khamenei's death and the killing of school children -- is all the more galling seeing the alacrity with which he has denounced -- without naming Iran -- the attacks on oil-rich countries in the Gulf as the Israel-US-Iran war sucks in the rest of the Middle East and threatens to go beyond.

Is India taking sides in this war? Is India suggesting, even if indirectly, that Israel and the US are right in waging war on Iran?

Is India indicating that there is no sin in killing a head of State -- and gloating over it?

Instead of offering to play a mediator between Israel and fellow BRICS-member Iran, is India dumping neutrality, something which has kept it aloft for decades globally in this very complex and rapidly changing world?

Khamenei may be 'one of the most evil people' in Trump's eyes but the unpredictable US president is neither a historian nor an embodiment of truth.

And if the Iranian regime needs to be punished for promoting quasi-terrorist outfits like the Hezbollah and Hamas, then what about Pakistan which has spent decades exporting terror around the world, killing thousands, particularly in Afghanistan and India?

Has the US forgotten who hid Osama bin Laden for years while claiming to be America's friend?

Whatever is America's intent, its hypocrisy and double standards outshine.

Pakistan, The incubator of global terror

Iran is being accused of trying to make a nuclear weapon.

But Pakistan, an incubator of global terror, already has nukes!

The US turned a blind eye not only when Pakistan built a nuclear weapon in the 1980s (amid the Afghan war when it partnered with Washington) but also when it diverted a part of US-supplied weapons meant for the Afghan mujahideen to militants in Punjab as well as Jammu and Kashmir.

India should actually be calling out the US on this score and asking Washington to bomb Islamabad if it really wants to do away with evil -- instead of seemingly siding with the US over Iran.

Yes, Iran has been brutal whenever ordinary Iranians revolted against government repression and a failed economy.

But surely India is not going to build relations with any country on the basis of its internal political system.

As for the US, it is laughable when it claims that it wants democracy in Iran and, in the process, relies on Arab States where individual freedom is anathema.

A section of the Indian social media alleges that Iran sided with Pakistan during Operation Sindoor? Really?

Did Tehran supply weapons to Islamabad a la Turkiye and China?

If anything, it was the pre-Islamic revolutionary Iran of Reza Pahalvi which openly backed Pakistan during the 1971 war which led to Bangladesh's creation.

Just eight years later, in 1978, Reza Pahalvi was an official guest in India when the Janata Party under then prime minister Morarji Desai was in power.

And a key constituent of the Janata Party was the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party whose star leader now is Prime Minister Modi.

• THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff