I am delighted to bring you the April issue of India’s World, dedicated to examining what the Iran war means for India and the world.
I belong to the school of thought that believes that the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026 were not just another Middle Eastern conflict, but a strategic mistake with long-term implications. The war has exposed, with uncomfortable clarity, the miscalculations of almost every actor in the conflict, and even some not directly involved. Israel and the United States believed this would be a clean, quick, decisive win; they were wrong. Gulf states assumed that missiles would fly past them, not at them; they were wrong. Asian energy consumers treated Hormuz as an uncrossable red line; they were wrong. Even Delhi, which had convinced itself it could manage its relationships with all sides simultaneously, war or not, now finds that diplomatic balancing act fraying.
We planned this issue just days after the strikes began. So we do not pretend to have clear answers that simply aren’t there as we go to print. The war is ongoing, the challenges remain unresolved, and anyone who claims otherwise is offering something they don’t really have. What we do in this issue is offer rigorous, India-centred analysis of a conflict that has forced every assumption about the Middle East—and India’s place in it—back to the drawing board.
Syed Akbaruddin argues that the Gulf is where India is most exposed and where its diplomacy has the least room for error. Anil Kumar Chawla and Nicolas Blarel examine what India’s real Middle East pivot looks like when tested against a live crisis rather than a strategic aspiration. Sarabjeet Parmar asks a question that has been surprisingly underexamined: what does sustained conflict do to India’s military logistics agreements with the United States? Srikanth Kondapalli takes on China’s studied ambivalence, and Deepika Saraswat asks whether the Islamic regime will survive at all. Diptendu Choudhury reminds us that the war has raised more questions than it has answered.
My personal favourite is Gaddam Dharmendra’s deep dive into why Iran’s revolutionary regime has endured since 1979, which is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is actually at stake from a historical point of view. The pieces on Persian poetry, Lucknow’s Persian inheritance, and the four Iranian films we recommend together make the argument that a civilisation cannot be reduced to its regime in power, its policies, or what its adversaries say about the country.
My other personal favourite is Raja Karthikeya’s simple but powerful portrait of what ordinary Iranians think of a war being fought in their name. He would know, after having spent several years in the country.
I will end by noting that India’s challenge in this moment is not to pick a side but to preserve the space it needs to remain consequential in a region it can no longer afford to treat as merely a source of remittances and cheap oil. Strategic autonomy will be judged not by how often India invokes the phrase, but by whether it makes it through this war with its options still open.
I hope you enjoy the rich fare of geopolitics, diplomacy, history, art and culture, and book and film reviews. I look forward to hearing from you. Write to me at editor@indiasworld.in.
Happymon Jacob