Sonia Gandhi’s Iran Op-Ed Falls Apart.
On March 2, 2026, Sonia Gandhi published an op-ed in The Indian Express arguing that the Modi government’s silence on Ayatollah Khamenei’s assassination was not neutrality but abdication. The article is well written, its arguments internally coherent, and its historical references deployed with some competence. It is also, on close examination, a piece of political positioning that cannot survive scrutiny of its own terms. Her logic fails spectacularly on commonsense as well.
Start with the first paragraph. Sonia describes Khamenei as “a sitting head of state.” He was not. Iran has a President for that office. Khamenei was an Imam or Supreme Leader, a theocratic position with no precise equivalent in conventional international law. This matters because her entire legal argument rests on Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which protects the territorial integrity of states. That provision says nothing about theocratic offices. The load-bearing pillar of her argument is factually wrong, and it appeared in the opening paragraph of a piece published in a national newspaper under her name.
Civilisational Connect
Then comes the “civilisational connect.” She invokes India’s deep historical ties with Iran as a reason for moral solidarity. The history she omits is rather more instructive. Nadir Shah rode out of the Iranian plateau in 1739, sacked Delhi, massacred tens of thousands of its residents, and carried away the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. Babur’s campaigns into India drew on the same Central Asian and Persian military networks. The civilisational relationship between Iran and India has been, for significant stretches, one of predatory incursion. Invoking it as brotherhood requires selective amnesia on a considerable scale.
She credits Iran with blocking an OIC resolution on Kashmir at the UN Human Rights Commission in 1994. This is true and consequential. It is also a single transaction from thirty years ago, conducted under a Congress government, by the same Iran that has since consistently described India’s Muslim population as oppressed and supported groups with no friendly intent toward India. One useful vote does not make a civilisational friendship.
Concern for Diaspora
Another passage in the article, concerns the 10 million Indians living and working across Gulf countries. Sonia uses them as a moral argument: India must speak up because its citizens are at risk. She is correct that they are at risk. What she does not mention is that Iran’s retaliatory strikes landed on the Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and UAE etc., where a large share of those very people live. These are not diplomats with evacuation protocols. They are laborers, nurses, drivers, and small traders on work visas with no protection except India’s credibility as an independent actor. Sonia invokes them to criticize one side and then goes completely silent about the side that was firing at the country where they work. That is not an oversight. It is a choice. It tells you that her concern for those 10 million people is an instrument of argument, not a matter of conscience.
Add to this the 10,000 Indian students of Shia theology studying inside Iran itself, a population uniquely vulnerable to any deterioration in India-Iran relations, and the omission becomes more striking. A serious foreign policy intervention would have demanded restraint from both parties.
Strategic Error
Sonia does not condemn the United States or Israel directly by name in any forceful sense. She describes the strikes as “unprovoked” and references Article 2(4), but stops well short of demanding accountability from Washington or Tel Aviv. Her demand lands entirely on New Delhi, a non-party to the conflict, asking India to condemn the parties she herself will not name.
That is a remarkable evasion. She wants India to take the political cost of confronting the US-Israel axis while she, writing freely as a private citizen with no diplomatic constraints whatsoever, declines to do it herself in the same article.
India’s actual response, cautioning both sides and calling for diplomatic resolution, is entirely consistent with its position on Ukraine, on Gaza, and on every major conflict where Indian citizens and strategic interests require space on both sides. That is not abdication. That is a coherent doctrine applied consistently.
Sonia’s position is the opposite of consistent doctrine. She does not condemn America. She does not condemn Iran for striking the UAE. She condemns only India’s restraint, which means she is not arguing for principle at all. She is arguing for India to align with Iran against the US-Israel axis, which is a specific strategic choice dressed up as moral philosophy.
Alliance with Iran
She insists on an alliance which Iran never sought from India. Iran has its own foreign policy, its own alliances, its own calculations. It maintained working relations with India without requiring India to take sides in its conflicts. The relationship survived decades of Indian neutrality without crisis. Tehran is a sophisticated state actor that understands non-alignment because it has dealt with it for fifty years.
Sonia is more Iranian than Iran on this question. She is demanding an alignment that the aggrieved party never sought, on behalf of a civilisational friendship she never cultivated, from a government she no longer leads, in a newspaper read by people who have no say in the matter.
The kettle is hotter than tea. Iran is the tea, cooling toward pragmatic accommodation with regional realities. Sonia is the kettle, boiling with a righteousness that serves no one, least of all Iran.
This also reveals of her view of India’s agency. Her article implicitly treats India as a moral subordinate that must answer to a higher principle she has appointed herself to define. India’s government, India’s Parliament, India’s foreign policy establishment, all must be corrected by her op-ed. But the country actually affected, Iran, requires nothing from her pen.
She has appointed herself Iran’s advocate without Iran’s brief.
Past Record
Then there is the question of her own record. From 2004 to 2014, Sonia Gandhi was, by most credible accounts, the functional authority behind the UPA government. Manmohan Singh administered; she governed. If Iran’s strategic value was so obvious, if the civilisational connect so precious, if Khamenei’s Iran so deserving of India’s moral solidarity, a decade of actual power was available to her. She did nothing notable on Iran during those years. The argument she makes now required action then and received none.
While she was writing high-minded prose about constitutional principles, her own party member Imran Masood independently visited the Iranian representative to offer condolences. She took the pen. Someone else did the work. She did not travel to Shanti Path from her residence at 10 Janpath Road to the Consulate of Iran to writ an obituary for departed leader. That was least she could do.
Hijab
Khamenei’s Iran enforced mandatory hijab on its own women under penalty of imprisonment and flogging. Women were barred from stadiums, restricted in travel, and treated as legally subordinate to men in virtually every domain. Sonia Gandhi, as a woman seeking an audience with that government, would have been received, if at all, as a ceremonial curiosity, not a political equal. Her solidarity with that regime sits awkwardly against any claim to feminist conviction.
Naivety of Sonia Gandhi
This article reveals the nativity of Sonia Gandhi on foreign policy especially in regard to Gulf region.
Gulf politics operates on a logic of perpetual realignment. Qatar was blockaded by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Egypt from 2017 to 2021, then fully rehabilitated. Saudi Arabia and Iran were sworn enemies for decades, then exchanged ambassadors in 2023 through Chinese mediation. UAE and Iran dispute the Tunb islands but maintain trade relations simultaneously. Houthis backed by Iran were bombing UAE infrastructure while UAE businesses were quietly trading with Iranian counterparts. These are not contradictions in Gulf politics. They are the texture of it.
Any Indian foreign policy that takes a fixed moral position within this kaleidoscope locks itself out of the next realignment, which in Gulf terms is never more than a few years away. India’s studied neutrality is not cowardice. It is the only posture that keeps every door open in a region where today’s adversaries sign agreements next Tuesday.
Sonia’s article treats the Gulf as a static moral tableau with clear villains and victims. It is the opposite. It is the most fluid strategic environment on earth, where relationships are assets managed across generations, not positions declared in newspaper columns.
Her political naivety here is not incidental. It is structural. She does not understand that in the Gulf, the country everyone wants at the table is precisely the one that has not taken sides. India’s value to every Gulf state, including Iran, rests on that neutrality. She was proposing to spend India’s most valuable strategic asset in the region to score a point in Lok Sabha politics. Her argument lacks any semblance of foreign policy insight.
Inconsistent Conduct
A genuine foreign policy conviction leaves traces across time: consistent positions, actions during periods of power, demands placed equally on all parties. Sonia Gandhi’s article on Iran leaves none of these traces. It leaves only a well-drafted brief, written to a predetermined conclusion, published at a politically convenient moment, with its most important omissions doing the heaviest lifting.
She wrote an op-ed mourning the passing of a Supreme Leader she never met, never corresponded with, and whose government would not have granted her meaningful standing. She did not write to his successor. If the concern were genuinely about India-Iran relations, about civilisational connect, about the Gulf diaspora, about strategic continuity, the logical next step is engagement with whoever now holds power in Tehran. She took no such step.
This completes the portrait. She wrote for a domestic audience, in an Indian newspaper, in English, to embarrass an Indian government, on a subject she has no record on, mourning a man who would not have received her, without following up with his replacement.
The article was never about Iran. It was always about the Indian Express reader. Silence, she writes, is abdication. So is selective outrage.
Modi at least had a state policy rationale for his silence, debatable as it is. Sonia had no such constraint. She was free to walk into the Iranian embassy in Chanakyapuri, sign a condolence register, and demonstrate the civilisational warmth she wrote about at such length. She did not. She sent no letter to the embassy. She addressed no condolence to the Iranian people directly. She watched a junior party colleague do the one human thing the moment required, while she wrote elegant prose for English newspaper readers in Delhi.
An op-ed without a subsequent act is not conviction. It is performance. And performance masquerading as moral seriousness is a specific kind of dishonesty, worse in some ways than straightforward silence, because it claims the moral high ground while occupying only the comfortable ground.
Modi’s silence, she argued, normalized the erosion of international norms. Her own silence on basic human courtesy, while simultaneously lecturing the nation on civilisational bonds, normalized something quieter but equally telling: the substitution of rhetoric for responsibility.
She found abdication everywhere except in her own mirror.
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