On the 4th of March 2026, a US submarine torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean, 40 nautical miles off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka. At least 87 sailors were killed. Over a hundred remain missing. Pete Hegseth called it “quiet death” from the Pentagon podium; bragging it was the first torpedo kill since World War II.
MILAN at Vyzag
The IRIS Dena had just left Visakhapatnam. It had been India’s guest. Formally invited to MILAN 2026, the International Fleet Review hosted by the Indian Navy, attended by 86 ships from 74 nations. The Eastern Naval Command had tweeted a welcome photograph two weeks earlier: “reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations.”
Two weeks later, that ship is on the ocean floor. And from New Delhi, silence. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said it plainly: Frigate Dena, a guest of India’s Navy, was struck in international waters without warning. That line will not be forgotten in Tehran. It should not be forgotten in New Delhi either; because it is the most precise summary available of what Modi’s diplomatic positioning has actually cost India.
When guests are murdered
Say what you want about Pakistan’s post-colonial elite; and there is plenty to say. But since Pahalgam they have been reading the room better than New Delhi has. Not because Islamabad became richer or more competent. Neither of those things happened. What happened is simpler: when the bombs fell on Iran, Pakistan said nothing loud, and that silence was itself a signal. Across the Muslim world that signal was heard. Loyalty travels farther than power. Whether that loyalty is strategic or genuine is a separate question. The effect is the same.
Pakistan Post-Pahalgam
Since Pahalgam, Pakistan has been on a quiet diplomatic winning streak. China is an all-weather relationship that was never going anywhere. More surprisingly, Islamabad has cultivated a real working line to Trump; useful, manageable, a partner worth keeping. India, watching this, seems to have concluded that the way to hack into that relationship is through the Israeli back door: be Netanyahu’s most enthusiastic friend, signal civilisational alignment with the US-Israel axis, hope Washington notices. It reads less like strategy and more like a bid for attention. And it has been an expensive one, because the cost was Iran.
Indo-Iranian Allies
India and Iran have been genuine strategic partners for decades. Afghanistan, Central Asian connectivity, energy, Chabahar, the entire Persian-Indic corridor that predates modern geopolitics by centuries. That relationship had depth. Depth is rare in international relations. And it was casually discarded for a press conference; while the ship India had just welcomed home was being hunted by an American submarine in international waters.
If Iran survives this war, and it is showing every sign of doing so, New Delhi will eventually reckon with what that cost them.
What is the point of Wealth?
There is a deeper question underneath all of this that the current moment keeps raising and nobody in power seems to want to answer: what is the prosperity actually for?
BB argued this week that India is getting rich, that the Global South is merely a waiting room, and that once India joins the wealthy world these debates will fade away. The mechanics are probably right. The conclusion deserves harder scrutiny.
Because what the West is currently offering the world is not capitalism in any classical sense. It is a very specific, very late, very degraded version of it; one where markets calmly price in geopolitical catastrophe, where you can assassinate a head of state and live-tweet the memes, where Pete Hegseth brags about “quiet death” at a Pentagon podium while over a hundred sailors are missing in the Indian Ocean. Mammon in its terminal phase. Accumulation without purpose. Power without wisdom.
The Epstein System
India’s temptation, visible in every choice this week, is entry into that system without questioning its premises. Get rich, align with the winners, the values will sort themselves out. Pakistan’s failure runs the other direction: feel everything too intensely, substitute solidarity for strategy, emotion for policy. One risks having no principles. The other risks having nothing but principles and no power to defend them.
The harder position is less glamorous. Prosperity is a precondition, not a destination. You build wealth to build something worth living in; not to join a club where the membership fee is your moral independence.
The Conviction of a Supreme Leader
The missiles keep coming out of Iran because forty-seven years of ideological preparation cannot be decapitated. You can kill a Supreme Leader. You cannot kill what he spent four decades distributing into every cell of a system built precisely for this scenario. The Pahlavists in the room with Netanyahu and Trump believed their own diaspora’s map of Iran more than Iran believed it. An old colonial error; made, this time, by people who look like the colonised.
The Global South doesn’t need a new Global North. It needs a different organising principle, one serious enough to say that the purpose of civilisation is to produce human beings, not billionaires; that independence is worth more than alignment with the powerful; that prosperity without wisdom is just a better-appointed ruin. India used to understand that instinctively. The question now is whether it still does.