Episode Details

Indian Updates — 2 March 2026 | India's Diplomatic Crisis, Khamenei's Killing and the Ajit Pawar Probe — Analysis on Radio Haanji 1674 AM

India woke up on Sunday to one of the most consequential moments in its post-independence diplomatic history — and today on Indian Updates, respected India-based journalist Preetam Singh Rupal takes the Punjabi and Indian community through what it all means. Broadcasting every weekday on Radio Haanji 1674 AM, Indian Updates is the programme that goes beyond the headlines, asking the harder questions that news bulletins rarely have time for.

The Weight of Silence — Modi Government's Non-Response to Khamenei's Assassination

There are moments in a nation's history when silence itself becomes a statement of foreign policy. The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israel military strikes on Saturday is one of those moments — and India's studied silence in its aftermath has become as politically significant as anything the government might have actually said.

What makes this silence particularly difficult to defend is the context surrounding it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed a two-day state visit to Israel on February 25 and 26, during which he addressed the Knesset and described India and Israel as "Fatherland" and "Motherland" respectively. Just two days after Modi's departure from Tel Aviv, Operation Epic Fury began. That timing — so precise, so impossible to ignore — has handed the opposition a narrative that the government is finding it extraordinarily difficult to counter.

India has long maintained what it calls strategic autonomy — a tradition rooted in the Nehruvian foreign policy of non-alignment and calibrated independence from global power blocs. That tradition has allowed India to simultaneously court Israel, maintain working relations with Iran, and preserve deep economic ties across the Gulf. But strategic autonomy, by its very nature, requires the occasional willingness to publicly disagree with allies. When the US and Israel struck Iran — a country that has been a long-standing partner to India on Afghanistan, on the Chabahar Port project, and on the Kashmir question at the OIC — the government's failure to issue any condolence or public statement on Khamenei's death has drawn condemnation from across the political spectrum.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Congress leader Pawan Khera, CPI(M) general secretary MA Baby, and J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah are among the voices who have questioned the government's position. Khera described it as a betrayal of India's foreign policy values and a sign that the country has been reduced to silence on matters that directly affect its interests. Whether one agrees with that characterisation or not, the strategic stakes are real: India's investment in the Chabahar Port — a critical corridor bypassing Pakistan to access Afghanistan and Central Asia — now hangs in an uncertain regional climate. The question is not just moral. It is deeply practical.

A Nation Protests — From Kashmir to Karnataka, Grief Over Khamenei Spills Into the Streets

While New Delhi maintained its careful quiet, ordinary Indians did not. From Lal Chowk in Srinagar to Lucknow's Bara Imambara, from Bihar to Karnataka's Chikkaballapur district — where Khamenei himself once visited in 1986 — India's Shia Muslim community poured into the streets in one of the largest expressions of communal grief seen in years.

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