It is easy to focus on the day-to-day events in the US-Israeli attack on Iran, we should not forget that what is being attacked is much more than material things.

In an essay titled A Bitter Education in the New York Review of Books, the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra writes about the strong legacy of Persian culture that was cherished in India by intellectuals like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore, and that is now being squandered by the current Hindu nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi and the westernized classes of Iran and India as they genuflect to the western capitalist ethos.

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language; I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations, eating food that originated in Persia, and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.

For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China. Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene. Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that, as Richard Eaton writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”

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For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.
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Today this lightness of historical being stultifies the American and European citizens of Iranian origin who hope to be delivered regime change on a plate by an authentic axis of evil: a stalwart member of the Epstein class, an internationally wanted exponent of genocide, and the buffoonish son of Iran’s disgraced former potentate.
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The personal choices of a Hindu supremacist prime minister—Narendra Modi visited Israel just two days before its assault on Iran to express his bonhomie with Bibi, and to receive a medal as illustrious as the FIFA Peace Prize—are only partly to blame. The principled opposition to racism and imperialism that once made India the moral leader of Asia went missing well before Modi and his toadies emerged with their WhatsApp forwards to deride the ideals of Gandhi and Nehru

Mishra says that the Indian response to the sinking of the Iranian ship by a US submarine in the Indian Ocean captures this abandonment.

A few days before the unleashing of Operation Epic Fury, the men on board this ship had been feted on Indian streets. They had visited the Taj Mahal and taken selfies with curious spectators. Yet neither their “silent death,” in Pete Hegseth’s gloating description, death by a 3,700-pound American missile in the Indian Ocean, where the present Indian government claims to provide “net security,” nor the violation of international law that requires belligerents to help sailors wounded in battle merited an official protest at the US embassy in New Delhi. The Indian Navy’s statement failed even to mention the attack—an act of “fun,” as Trump described it to a Republican gathering this Monday, to much laughter—that sank the vessel. Nor did it express regret at the deaths of nearly a hundred unarmed sailors.

I read that civilians in Sri Lanka, whose navy recovered some of the bodies of the drowned sailors, had donated money to a refrigerated storage unit that could keep them until their repatriation to Iran. I kept scanning the Indian and international press in futile search for some thought or emotion that matched this atrocity or, however inadvertently, mourned the silent death of what Tagore hailed as “Indo-Iranian civilization.” Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places. Too much of mainstream journalism today has been debased and coarsened by its incessant lying or equivocating about Israel’s live-streamed abominations in Palestine. Unsurprisingly, reporters, broadcasters, and columnists display an impeccable sangfroid before not only the chemical incineration of Tehran but also the “double tap” execution of nearly two hundred Iranian schoolgirls.

Mishra argues that better-off Indians and Iranians have been seduced by the siren song of the west.

“Rising” Indians and well-heeled Iranians of an Americanizing global class assumed that American ideals of economic, intellectual, and political freedom would triumph; they convinced themselves that their personal flourishing depended on diligent concord with the global hegemon.
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Marco Rubio’s encomiums to white Western civilization, and Hegseth’s pornographic fantasies of “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” proclaim today a sadistic urge to re-impose the racial hierarchies of the nineteenth century. It is in this old-new world that the once undisputed leader of the non-Western world is reduced to a bit player; exposed now to routine bullying by Trump, it is unable to mourn, let alone protest, the murder of its Iranian guests.

Barbarians like Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, and Netanyahu, like the barbarians of old, may laugh about the destruction they are causing. They are only good at destroying things. While they may well create rubble where buildings once stood, and while they may murder many people with their missiles and bombs, the rich culture of Persia that underlies Iran will outlast them, and will persist long after history has placed them in the dustbin where they belong.