India remembers it has a spine

Nations do not usually recover their dignity with trumpets. More often, they rediscover it after humiliation has become so routine that even the bureaucracy begins to feel embarrassed. At Bishkek, India appears to have suffered such an outbreak of geopolitical self-respect. Not a revolution. Not a resurrection of Nehru. Narendra Modi has not suddenly begun communing with Bandung or keeping Fanon under his pillow. But something consequential happened at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit: India joined a declaration condemning military attacks on Iran, defending Iranian sovereignty, affirming Tehran’s nuclear rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, rejecting unilateral coercive measures and insisting that Palestine cannot be permanently buried beneath the rubble of Israeli supremacy. For today’s India, that is almost radicalism. […]