Editorial: A Foreign Policy Without a Constitutional Compass: India’s Silent Acquiescence in US-Israel Aggression
Jul 01, 2025By PUCL Bulletin Editorial Board
June 13, 2025, marked another black day in history as Israel began an unprovoked and illegal attack on Iran, with the US joining this illegal war by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan on June 22, 2025. By brazenly disregarding international law, these attacks have driven a stake through the rules-based international order. The rules-based international order consists of the UN Charter, the UDHR, as well as the Genocide Convention. These are norms which are the outcome of the struggle for a most just world, where might does not make right. It is these norms which are in the balance today.
The heart of the UN Charter is Article 2(4), which mandates that, ‘All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.’ This provision is meant to outlaw the crime of ‘aggression,’ which, according to the Nuremberg tribunal, is the ‘supreme international crime.’ It is only when nation states eschew force as a way of resolving disputes that the Preambular promise of the UN Charter, by the ‘people of the United Nations‘, to themselves, ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ which has ‘twice, brought untold sorrow to mankind,’ can be fulfilled.
There is an exception to Article 2(4), under Article 51’s ‘inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.’ Israel has tried to justify these illegal attacks by arguing that Iran was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that this posed an imminent threat to the security of Israel. There is no justification under international law for a member state to attack another without credible evidence that the actions of the state amounted to an imminent attack. The so-called threat of Iran attacking Israel was not based on any credible evidence, hence the attack could not have amounted to an action undertaken in anticipatory self-defence.
Such is the level of impunity that Israel’s partner in crime, Trump, did not even attempt to demonstrate that the US was acting in self-defence, as former President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair did when they invaded Iraq in 2003 on the false pretext of Iraq’s possession of nuclear and chemical weapons, Trump did not even assert that he was acting to protect the U.S., but rather he was ‘working as a team’ with Israel to remove ‘this horrible threat to Israel.’ Trump even chose to ignore the findings of the National Security Agency of the U.S., which had certified in a Congressional hearing in March 2025 that Iran was far away from making the nuclear bomb. Needless to say, Trump’s rationale for attacking a sovereign country has no basis in international law.
Iran’s nuclear program was within the framework of international law, with Iran being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby committing to not diverting ‘nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.’ Its facilities were subject to international supervision under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA had confirmed that ‘there is no credible evidence of a systemic effort by Iran to develop nuclear weapons.’ While Iran’s nuclear program is subject to international verification by the IAEA, of which it is a member, Israel—which is known to not only have a nuclear program but also nuclear weapons—is not a member of the IAEA and has resolutely refused to allow the IAEA to verify its use of nuclear technology and steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ironically, the United States, which has been vociferous on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, has implicitly backed Israel’s right to exist as a nuclear power completely outside the framework of international law. Thus, the rationale for bombing Iran not only has no basis in any independently verifiable threat but also smacks of the hypocrisy of two nuclear-armed nations taking on the self-assumed obligation of policing nuclear ‘threats’ outside the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Israeli and U.S. attacks on a fellow sovereign member of the United Nations have, in effect, demonstrated that as far as Israel and the U.S. are concerned, they acknowledge no legal limits to their power. In the new international order, the powerful will do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. Israel has been emboldened in its increasingly brazen defiance of international law by the utter failure of the international community to hold it in check. If the prohibition of ‘the use of force against the territorial integrity’ of a fellow member of the United Nations is the very reason for the existence of the United Nations, Israel’s actions indicate that it does not respect the UN Charter. Post the Hamas attack on 7th October 2023, Israel has waged disproportionate and relentless war, reducing Gaza to rubble and killing over 57,000 Palestinians and committing what international law considers the crime of crimes, namely ‘genocide.’ It has also bombed Lebanon, killing over 1,100 people, repeatedly bombed Syria post the collapse of the Assad regime, and now Iran, in which over 950 people have been killed.
The United States has an even longer history of the defiance of the prohibition to wage aggressive war. Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and now Iran are only some of the flashpoints where the U.S. has shown its utter contempt for the rules-based international order. The consequences of this blatant disregard for the rule of law were last seen in Iraq, where over 100,000 people have died as a result of the U.S.-initiated armed warfare.
The point of greatest concern for those of us in the developing world is the impunity with which the United States and its partner Israel continue to violate the UN Charter, even in a period when the era of colonization has receded into the dim past.
The great defenders of a rules-based international order have been stunning in their hypocrisy. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, without acknowledging the U.S.-Israeli breach of the UN Charter, observed without any evidence that ‘Iran’s nuclear program is a grave threat to international security’ and that ‘the U.S. has taken action to alleviate that threat.’ Not a mention of the violation of international law by Starmer!
Interestingly, it was China, Pakistan, and Russia that condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes and argued that the strikes violated the UN Charter. China noted that U.S. attacks on Iran violated the ‘principles of the UN Charter and international law’ as well as ‘Iran’s sovereignty.’ Pakistan observed that the U.S. attacks ‘violate all norms of international law’ and emphasized that ‘Iran has a right to defend itself under the UN Charter.’ Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that ‘unjustified’ U.S. aggression is pushing the world towards great danger.
In this division between the opinions of the global north and the global south, where did India stand? The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, spoke with the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, and issued a banal call for ‘immediate de-escalation.’ In short, India, which claims to embrace the rhetoric of decolonization, has refused to condemn what were blatantly illegal strikes conducted by the United States. The Prime Minister has shown a dangerous lack of vision in not condemning the strikes, thereby paving the way for a world where the powerful have no constraints on their power.
This is a grave betrayal of both India’s history and heritage, as well as its constitutional mandate, that in the face of this tearing down of the rules-based order by the powerful, India has been silent. India, which was a strong supporter of the right of Palestine to exist as a nation-state alongside Israel, has been silent in the face of the genocide of the people of Gaza. In the context of the blatantly illegal Israeli assaults on fellow Asian states—be it Lebanon, Syria, or Iran—India has again chosen to stay silent. This amoral silence exposes India. Pakistan, China, and Russia, by condemning U.S. aggression, have ended up speaking for ‘we the people of the United Nations.’ Protests around the world against Israeli and U.S. aggression indicate that there is an increasingly global public opinion condemning it. India should have stood with this global opinion. By not doing so, India has passed the opportunity to demonstrate global leadership.
The current dispensation can take a lesson from the first Prime Minister, who did not hesitate to criticize the powerful when they acted outside the constraints of the rule of law. For Nehru, American unilateralism was the beginning of the end of the United Nations. As he put it, ‘it would be perverse if any country tried to destroy the United Nations. That country would suffer more than the organization if it left or sought to disrupt it… The UN, with all its failings, is a great world organization with the seeds of hope for peace.’
Going back to another historical parallel, one should remember the Suez Crisis of 1956. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Egypt was attacked by the trio of Israel, the U.K., and France. India’s response to this unprovoked attack was to assure Nasser of India’s full support and to call the actions of Britain and France a ‘reversion to a previous and unfortunate period of history when decisions were imposed by force of arms by Western powers on Asian countries… The whole purpose of the UN is undermined, and the freedom of nations is imperiled if armed might is to decide issues between nations.’ As Nehru put it, this was a ‘reversal of history,’ and ‘no country in Asia or Africa, which has recently achieved freedom, can possibly tolerate this reversal.’
Unfortunately, India under Modi has abandoned a foreign policy with a constitutional compass. Indian troops in the past have served as peacekeepers under the banner of the United Nations in over forty-nine peacekeeping missions, demonstrating a foreign policy with a constitutional vision and a commitment to the UN Charter. Today, there is no such vision in India’s foreign policy, which is governed by a shortsighted, transactional approach. It is ironic that Pakistan and China, in their response to U.S. aggression, better embody the spirit of ‘we the people of the United Nations.’ This loss of a constitutional and moral vision in our foreign policy will have deleterious consequences for India’s standing in the world.
It’s important that ‘We the people of India’ engage our government and demand that our foreign policy take forward the vision of the Constitution, rooted in the Directive Principles of State Policy, which under Article 51(c) oblige India to “foster respect for international law” and under 51(a) require the State to “promote international peace and security.” It is of vital importance that our government, in the conduct of its foreign policy, fulfill India’s constitutional responsibility to defend the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, and the UDHR.