To:

The Chairman,

Standing Committee of Parliament on External Affairs,

New Delhi

Dear Mr. Chairman,

I was shocked to the core by your answers to anchor Rajdeep Sardesai’s questions on India Today TV last night (Friday, March 6, 2026) on the ongoing illegal and sinful war on Iran by Israel in cahoots with the US and the West in general. I have been so disturbed that I could not sleep and have woken at 3 in the morning to write you this open letter.

I put my political career on the line by not only voting for you in the party election of the president of the Indian National Congress, even when I knew you would be badly defeated, but also by writing in The Indian Express next day that the victor, Mallikarjun Kharge, should magnanimously respect your democratic right to stand against him despite his being backed to the hilt by both the Gandhi family and the scattered remnants of the G-23.

I argued fiercely that he should grant you an honourable place in the Congress hierarchy, as befits a mature political party, to fully use your many talents. In consequence, the Gandhis and Kharge have refused to meet me ever since. Nevertheless, I felt vindicated on moral grounds.

I now find I should have championed a worthier cause. Your shameful espousal last night of “might is right” has horrified me. You say you fully understand the reason why Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar is extremely wary of taking on the Americans: fear of the “consequences” that may result for India, particularly its economy. As Chairman of the Standing Committee, you surrender decision-making on foreign policy to the government because only they have all the required information. Then what are you doing in your high office?

You argue for “realism” to recognise American clout. You seem never to have heard of, let alone heeded, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s call to never “bend your knees before insolent might”. You say very few developing countries have the guts to speak out openly against the Americans. But more than a hundred UN member-states roundly condemned the genocide in Gaza, and by implication, those like the US who are complicit in the genocide. Also, you seem ignorant of Gurudev’s call of “Ekla chalo re”, which underlay Nehru’s non-alignment policy.

You seem not to have heard of two truly great powers, Russia and China, speaking their mind, as Nehru’s India did and would have, on the brutality of the attack being carried out on the people of Iran, and their sovereignty and territorial integrity as a founding member-State of the UN, in total violation of the UN Charter, and the sheer barbarity of assassinating the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. You want India to be silent on this crime just because the Americans have a stronger military than us? Shame on you!

I have searched my mind to find a basic reason for your unprincipled, amoral, and transactional approach to public policy, most particularly in your area of specialisation: foreign policy. And the only reason I have been able to find is that you were born in 1956, 15 years after me, and, therefore, fell outside the ambit of the direct influence of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru.

They were just names to you. For me, they were a living memory. When I was just six, I was actually picked up, along with my younger brother, then five, by Mahatma Gandhi who held us in his arms, a couple of weeks before his martyrdom, and I heard him murmur: “Yeh mere aankhon ke chand aur suraj hain” (“These children are the sun and moon of my eyes”). My moral universe has always been drawn from what the Mahatma stood for. Out of clay, he made us men.

But perhaps even more has been the direct influence of Jawaharlal Nehru. I was six when he became India’s first Prime Minister at Independence. And I was 23, a probationer in the Indian Foreign Service, when he died. All through my growing years I was sheltered under the ethical shadow Panditji cast over our new nation.

I should have recognised—but did not—the generational difference between us when I read your searing critique of Nehru’s foreign policy. I thought you were nit-picking. You were actually presenting an alternative and thoroughly amoral and transactional perspective on foreign policy. What a great difference 15 years in age can make!

There were many of your ilk when the nation was fighting for freedom. They were what V.S. Naipaul bitingly called “Jamshed into Jimmy”—collaborators of the regime. Of course, now that the imperialists are gone, you have emerged as an extremely knowledgeable critic of the excesses of Empire. Your performance at the Oxford Union was utterly brilliant, a polemic without peer. But the point is the Brits were gone before you went to Oxford, and so you found your voice. The Americans are not gone, so you cringe before them. This is what happens when “pragmatism” of the Jaishankar kind overtakes the moral spirit. And you twin with him.

Are you really currying favour with Narendra Modi because he can give you the pelf that the opposition cannot bestow on you? I do not subscribe to that view, strong though the evidence is that this is why you exult in the pomp and show of your visits abroad as Chairman of the Standing Committee.

The reason why I do not subscribe to this view is that you always have a high patriotic reason to present for your speech and actions. Thus, for example, you decreed it your patriotic duty to become the spokesman for the nation after the terrorist attack at the meadow outside Pahalgam. The entire world, including Pakistan, condemned that act. But they did not condemn Pakistan. Your national duty was to get the international community to indict Pakistan as the “perpetrator, financier, arms supplier and sponsor of terrorism who should be brought to book and punished”, as the UN Security Council’s unanimous press statement said.

You and your colleagues went everywhere trailing a blaze of glory. But is it not true that only two countries—the terrorist Taliban Afghanistan and the genocidal Israel led by a declared war criminal—have backed your argument? 191 out of 193 member-States of the UN have refused to condemn Pakistan by name, and the Pakistan Field Marshal is the openly declared “favourite Field Marshal” of the US President before whom you want our country to kowtow. Have you ever admitted this publicly, or even to yourself? Rather, like Hacker in “Yes, Minister”, you seem “to believe in your own existence only if you read about it in the newspapers”.

Mahatma Gandhi too made mistakes and pleaded that he was, after all, an “ordinary man”. Indeed, he went so far as to castigate himself for his “Himalayan blunder”. Are you ready to do the same? If not, then fie on thee. All you seek is the limelight. That is an unworthy cause.

When it comes to secularism, I started having my doubts during a luncheon conversation with you several years ago. Then, I pored over your massive tome on patriotism and nationalism and critiqued it in an 8,000-word review in Open magazine. I then believed we could rationally agree to disagree.

The scales fell from my eyes over your rejection of the Supreme Court decision on allowing menstruating women to enter the temple at Sabarimala. I could barely believe my ears that an intelligent, scholarly, modern-minded St. Stephen’s graduate, and postgraduate from an Ivy League college, could be so backward as to endorse a thoroughly sexist, gender-discriminatory practice that punishes women only because of their natural bodily functions. But those were the early signals that you weren’t quite “one of us”. Now, your profound empathy with a regime that stinks of communal malice has put the lid on it. This is the parting of ways.

Yours etc.,

Mani Shankar Aiyar

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Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009.