The Dictator That Sonia Gandhi Wants You To Mourn Was No Friend Of India

Sonia Gandhi, writing in The Indian Express on 3 March, wants India to mourn Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Her argument, stripped of its constitutional ornamentation, is this: India's silence on the assassination amounts to "abdication," a betrayal of non-alignment, a retreat from vasudhaiva kutumbakam.

She invokes the 1994 UNHRC episode, Vajpayee's 2001 Tehran visit, Article 51 of the Indian Constitution, and Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. She frames Iran as a civilisational partner, a strategic ally, and a friend whose killing India has a moral obligation to condemn.

However, every significant claim by Gandhi is either misleading, incomplete, or wrong.

Begin with the most glaring omission. Gandhi's 1,400-word piece on the killing of Khamenei does not contain a single reference to the killing by Khamenei. Not one word about the January 2026 massacre, when this "friend" ordered security forces to "crush the protests by any means necessary," resulting in credible reports of over 30,000 dead. Not one mention of the over 2,200 executions in 2025, the highest in the regime's history. Not the Mahsa Amini crackdown that killed 551. Not the morality police. Not the women imprisoned for removing their hijabs. Gandhi mourns the dictator. His victims find no mention.

On the day Khamenei's death was confirmed, those victims' families danced in the streets. In Tehran's Pardis neighbourhood, residents shouted from rooftops. In Galleh Dar, crowds toppled a monument to Khomeini, the regime's founder, as a man shouted, "Am I dreaming? Hello to the new world!" In Mashhad, one of Iran's most religious cities, people brought flowers and sweets to the homes of January massacre victims. A Portland State professor offered the most devastating epitaph of all: "I hope you never know the sheer desperation of a people praying to be bombed only to be free."

Britain's Defence Secretary was blunt: "No one will mourn." France called Khamenei "a bloodthirsty dictator." A 2024 survey of 77,216 respondents inside Iran found roughly 70 per cent opposed the Islamic regime's continuation. This is not to say that the West is the jury here. But one needs only honesty to recognise that indeed no one will mourn.

A necessary distinction must be made between the Islamic regime and Iranian people. If India has any friends in Iran, they are Iranian people. They are the women who removed their hijabs knowing they would be jailed, the students who marched in January knowing they could be shot, the families who danced on rooftops when the news broke.

This distinction between a people who have suffered and a regime that made them suffer is crucial. Congress has inverted this completely. It mourns the brutal regime but does not spare a thought for the people.

The question is why. Why is Gandhi mourning a man whose own people celebrated his death?

The answer has nothing to do with foreign policy or morality and everything to do with the Congress party's domestic politics.

The Kashmir File That Gandhi Doesn't Want You to Read

Gandhi's essay describes India's ties with Iran as "civilisational as well as strategic." She mentions the 1994 UNHRC episode, the Zahedan diplomatic presence, and Vajpayee's 2001 visit. She does not mention what Khamenei did for the remaining 35 years of his tenure.

That gap needs filling.

Khamenei attacked India on Kashmir at least eight times between 1990 and 2024. Far from being an outcome of occasional diplomatic friction, these attacks were a pattern of sustained ideological interference.

This is an inherited template. In 1965, Ayatollah Khomeini declared from Najaf that "if the Islamic world could unite… then Hindus would not covet Kashmir." Khamenei made this operational.

By September 1991, he was stating that "the Muslim people of this region are clearly subject to oppression and tyranny, and we have always expressed to the government of India our abhorrence to what is being done." He had visited Kashmir in 1980, just a year after the revolution, addressing a gathering at Srinagar's historic Jamia Masjid and establishing direct ties with Kashmiri separatist sentiment early in his career.

The most consequential intervention came on 21 August 2019, sixteen days after India abrogated Article 370. Khamenei pinned a tweet on his official account calling on India to "adopt a just policy towards the noble people of Kashmir and prevent the oppression & bullying of Muslims in this region." Tehran's Friday prayers leader called the abrogation "an ugly act." The Iranian parliament presented a resolution in defence of Kashmir.

It escalated further.

On 5 March 2020, Khamenei tweeted in English, Urdu, Persian, and Arabic with the hashtag #IndianMuslimsInDanger: "The govt of India should confront extremist Hindus & their parties & stop the massacre of Muslims in order to prevent India's isolation from the world of Islam." Pakistan's PM Imran Khan publicly thanked him. India had to summon Iran's ambassador.

As recently as September 2024, Khamenei clubbed India with Myanmar and Gaza in a post about Muslim suffering. India's MEA responded with unprecedented sharpness, using the word "deplore" regarding Khamenei for the first time.

Plus, Iran brought violence to Indian soil.

In February 2012, a motorcyclist attached a magnetic bomb to the car of an Israeli diplomat's wife in New Delhi, a few hundred metres from the Prime Minister's residence, injuring four people, including Indians. Delhi Police identified five IRGC operatives behind the attack and issued arrest warrants. Even Trump cited the Delhi plot in his 2020 address after killing Qasem Soleimani.

In January 2021, a second IED exploded near the Israeli Embassy, with Indian counterterrorism agencies tracing it to the IRGC's Quds Force. A third blast followed in December 2023, again near the Israeli Embassy, with a letter referencing "Iranian martyrs." Three attacks in a decade, all on Indian soil, all traced or linked to Iran's security apparatus.

And in 2024, India's Research and Analysis Wing raised an alarm about Iran-linked covert recruitment operations targeting Shia Muslims in Mumbai and Maharashtra. An IRGC-affiliated NGO, the Ahl-ul-Bayt World Assembly, was identified "talent hunting" among Indian Shias, indoctrinating them with Khomeini's ideology and pressuring them to advocate for Iran's interests.

This is the "friend" whose killing Gandhi says India must condemn.

The 1994 Myth and the OIC Reality

Gandhi's strongest card is the 1994 UNHRC episode, and she plays it prominently. But that too needs examination.

PM Narasimha Rao dispatched an ailing External Affairs Minister Dinesh Singh on a military flight to Tehran, where President Rafsanjani agreed to break OIC consensus on a Pakistan-sponsored Kashmir resolution. This was significant. But attributing it to Iranian friendship requires ignoring everything about the context.

By 1994, Iran and Pakistan were drifting apart sharply. Pakistan was backing the Taliban, a Sunni, anti-Shia force anathema to Tehran. Sectarian killings of Shias in Pakistan were escalating. Iran saw Pakistan as captured by Saudi influence.

Iran's own restive Kurdish, Baloch, and Arab minorities made a precedent for international intervention on minority issues dangerous. The decision was Rafsanjani's as President, not Khamenei's. Iran's presidents and foreign ministers have at times taken a pragmatic approach to India, while Khamenei operated on theological lines.

What Gandhi does not mention, and what no Congress politician ever mentions, is what happened at the same forum. In 1994, Iran hosted the OIC conference where Pakistan successfully created the OIC Contact Group on Kashmir, a permanent institutional mechanism for internationalising the dispute. Gandhi's "friend" Iran went along with OIC consensus resolutions calling for Kashmir's "self-determination."

The Contact Group met repeatedly after Article 370's abrogation: August 2019, September 2019, June 2020, September 2021. Each time it rejected India's "illegal and unilateral actions." Iran participated in all of these.

The so-called "favour" in 1994 was an aberration, not a pattern. Khamenei criticised India on Kashmir in 2010, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2024, each time using language indistinguishable from Pakistan's.

After India's 2005 vote against Iran at the IAEA, when Gandhi's UPA was in power, Iranian politician Ali Larijani said, with bitter irony, that "India was our friend." The 1994 episode was a convergence of interests. Iran cashed it when convenient and withdrew it when it suited.

The Constitutional Problem Gandhi Will Not Name

Khamenei's Kashmir interventions were not personal quirks. They flowed from Iran's constitutional DNA, a fact that Gandhi's essay, with all its constitutional citations, studiously avoids.

Article 152 of Iran's constitution mandates that foreign policy be based on "the defence of the rights of all Muslims." Article 154 commits Iran to supporting "the just struggles of the mustad'afin against the mustakbirin in every corner of the globe." The preamble explicitly states Iran will "strive with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the formation of a single world community."

This is the structural problem no amount of Chabahar diplomacy can override. The same ideological framework that compelled Iran to fund Hezbollah, arm Hamas, and sustain the Houthis also compelled it to frame Kashmir as an Islamic cause.

A theocratic state constitutionally committed to defending Muslim causes worldwide will always side against a Hindu-majority country on disputes framed in religious terms. Gandhi cites Article 51 of the Indian Constitution. She should have also examined Article 152 of Iran's.

The Hollow Relationship

Gandhi writes that India's ties with Iran are "deep" and "civilisational and contemporary." The numbers tell a different story, and they tell it brutally.

India-Iran bilateral trade stands at roughly $2.3 billion. India-Saudi Arabia trade: $41.87 billion. India-UAE trade: over $100 billion. Iran does not feature in India's top 25 trading partners. The relationship Gandhi calls "deep" amounts to one-forty-third of India-UAE trade.

Nearly 10 million Indians live and work in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Fewer than 10,000 live in Iran. The strategic weight of these relationships is not even comparable.

At its peak in FY2018-19, India-Iran trade touched approximately $17 billion, driven almost entirely by oil. When the US reimposed sanctions in 2019, India cut Iranian oil imports to zero. Last month, India seized three US-sanctioned Iranian oil tankers in its own waters. That is the depth of this "deep" relationship.

The Chabahar port saga epitomises Iranian unreliability. First proposed in 1973 under the Shah, formally agreed in 2003 under Vajpayee, signed with fanfare during Modi's 2016 Tehran visit, and by 2019, only 10 per cent of capacity was utilised. In 2026, India zeroed out its budget allocation, IPGL directors resigned en masse, and the project website was taken down.

The Farzad-B gas field betrayal was even more brazen. India's ONGC Videsh discovered this giant field in 2008 and spent a decade negotiating. Iran repeatedly changed terms, shifted contract frameworks, and introduced new negotiating partners. In February 2020, Iran notified India it was being excluded; the contract went to Petropars Group in May 2021.

The Chabahar-Zahedan railway followed the same script: India shipped $150 million worth of rail tracks in 2016, only for Iran to unilaterally announce in July 2020 it would proceed independently, just as the $400 billion Iran-China strategic partnership was being finalised.

That 25-year deal with China, signed in March 2021, brought Iran into the Belt and Road Initiative and created a Pakistan-China-Iran axis that directly threatens India.

Gandhi mentions the "Zahedan diplomatic presence near the Pakistan border, a strategic counter-balance to the development of Gwadar port and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor." She does not mention that Iran dropped India from the Chabahar-Zahedan railway and signed a $400 billion deal with the country building Gwadar.

The counter-balance she invokes was dismantled by the very regime she wants India to mourn.

The Non-Alignment Dodge

Gandhi's essay leans heavily on non-alignment and vasudhaiva kutumbakam. This is a framework worth interrogating.

India's non-aligned tradition, at its best, was a conscious assertion of strategic autonomy, not a moral obligation to condemn every use of force by every power. Gandhi frames India's silence as abandonment of principle. But consider what the principle would require if applied consistently.

Did Congress condemn the American drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani in January 2020? Did it invoke Article 2(4) of the UN Charter then? Did it demand a parliamentary debate on the violation of Iraqi sovereignty? For that matter, did Congress invoke vasudhaiva kutumbakam in the face of the massacres, the executions, the morality police?

The principle is selectively deployed. And the selection reveals the motive.

Gandhi writes that "nearly 10 million Indians live and work across the Gulf" and that India's ability to safeguard them "rests on its credibility as an independent actor, not as a proxy." This is a reasonable point in isolation. It is also a point that answers itself, in the opposite direction from what Gandhi intends.

Iranian missiles have struck the very same Gulf nations that host the Indian diaspora. Also, not a single Gulf state issued condolences for Khamenei. Not one. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar: all silent on the assassination.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately lobbied Trump over multiple phone calls to carry out the strikes, even as he publicly backed diplomacy. Bahrain arrested citizens who expressed support for Iran's retaliation, calling it "treason." The GCC's extraordinary ministerial meeting condemned only Iran's retaliatory strikes; it did not even acknowledge the US-Israel strikes that preceded them. The Gulf states that host 10 million Indians are not mourning Khamenei.

So whom does Congress want India to align with? China, Pakistan, and Turkey. Is that the company Gandhi would have India keep? Against the Gulf states that host our workers, buy our goods, invest in our infrastructure, and are building strategic partnerships with us worth hundreds of billions of dollars?

The Modi government did what governments are supposed to do.

External Affairs Minister Jaishankar called both Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi and Israel's Foreign Minister Sa'ar, engaging both sides simultaneously. And then came the calibrated sequence.

Modi spoke to UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed, strongly condemning the Iranian retaliatory strikes that had hit Dubai and thanking him for the safety of the Indian community. He called Netanyahu, emphasising civilian safety. He called MBS and the King of Bahrain, condemning the strikes on their territory. Jaishankar spoke to every Gulf counterpart.

How is this silence? Condemn what needed condemning: Iran's strikes on states hosting 10 million Indians. Refuse to perform grief for a theocrat who spent 35 years undermining India. This is exactly what a country with serious interests in the region should do. And Congress knows it.

What This Is About

Strip away the constitutional language and the geopolitical framing, and the pattern is legible. The opposition's mourning has nothing to do with India-Iran relations, strategic interests, international morality, or genuine sympathy for Iranians.

Kharge's "deepest condolences" were addressed not to Tehran but to Lucknow. Owaisi's "respected leader" formulation was aimed not at Iran's interim council but at his Hyderabad constituency. Mirwaiz's strike call in Kashmir and Mehbooba Mufti's "Muslim Ummah" framing were assertions of communal solidarity intended for domestic consumption.

Gandhi's essay, addressed to an English-speaking elite audience, provides a virtuous scaffolding for a position that the party's ground-level messaging articulates far more bluntly. Congress MP Imran Masood visited Khamenei's India-based representative and called him "very learned," claiming the Ayatollah had read Nehru's Discovery of India "four times." Pawan Khera called him "India's friend" and "the spiritual guide of millions of Shia Muslims."

The real tell is what was left unsaid. Not one of these leaders asked whether Khamenei was good for India. Not one examined the regime's lectures to India on Kashmir, IRGC operations on Indian soil, sidelining of India on infrastructure, handing of strategic assets to China, and presiding over one of the most repressive states in modern history.

Their grief was selective by design, calibrated for a specific domestic audience, indifferent to both Indian strategic interests and the moral reality of what this regime was.

What specific domestic audience? The one Congress has cultivated, lost, and is now desperate to reclaim. The party that was wiped out of its traditional Muslim vote banks, first by Mandal politics, then by Muslim parties and its own irrelevance, sees in Khamenei's death an opportunity to signal sectarian loyalty.

The calculus is transparent: Shia Muslim sentiment runs deep for the office of the Supreme Leader; the broader Muslim street, Sunni and Shia, can be mobilised around anti-American, anti-Israel sentiment. Gandhi's moral and constitutional language is just the packaging.

When Congress demands that India condemn the assassination, it is asking India to undermine its interests for the sake of votes. Not that this is recklessness born of ignorance. Congress knows the stakes. It simply considers its electoral arithmetic more important.

But it is not just votes. There is a second calculus at work, more cynical still. If the Modi government condemns the assassination, India damages its relationships with the US, Israel, and the Gulf states in the middle of an active conflict where Indian lives are at stake. If it does not, Congress gets to play the betrayal-of-values card for domestic consumption.

Either way, Congress wins while India loses. This is toolkit politics at its most dangerous — engineer situations where every government response becomes a losing move, then hold the country hostage to petty politicking regardless of the real damage it causes. Congress has perfected this over a decade in opposition. The willingness to wound India if it wounds Modi is not a side effect. It is the strategy. The country is simply collateral.

At this juncture, Congress' and India's interests are not merely different; they are antithetical. And it needs to be said plainly: Sonia Gandhi's essay reads less like a foreign policy argument and more like an old European instinct in Indian constitutional language, the civilising burden of explaining to Indians what their values should be, whom they should mourn, and how they should conduct their affairs.

This patronising certitude, as though the republic would lose its moral compass without her guidance, has done enough damage in the decades she steered this country's politics from behind a curtain. Indians, with the sole exception of her party's courtiers, can read a map and a balance sheet. Both point in the same direction.

A note on civilisation, since Gandhi invokes it.

India and Persia share bonds that are among the oldest in human history. Old Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit are near-dialects. The Parsi community, refugees from Islamic conquest, became among India's most distinguished citizens. These are real. But they are also irrelevant to the present question.

The civilisational connection was effectively severed when Persia was Islamised, and what remained was severed again after 1979 when Khomeini replaced Persian nationalism with pan-Islamic ideology. Khamenei himself dismissed Persepolis as monuments of godlessness. It is ironic that Congress claims civilisational connect with a regime that itself despises its civilisational past.

Whatever emerges from the current chaos in Tehran, India's response should be guided by hard-headed assessment of interests, not by projecting civilisational romance onto a country whose regime spent 47 years treating India as a pawn in its Islamic solidarity games. It must be clear that, at best, India and Iran have been convenient partners when interests aligned—never allies, never friends, and certainly never the civilisational bond Gandhi pretends to defend.

The facts are not complicated. Khamenei's Iran was never India's friend. The Congress and leftists mourning him never mourned his victims. The Iranian people who suffered under him are celebrating his death. The Gulf states that host our 10 million workers are not shedding a tear. And Sonia Gandhi's essay, with its careful omissions, selective history, and constitutional posturing, is a domestic political manoeuvre masquerading as statesmanship. India's strategic and moral interests both demand the same response: see through it.