The controversy on India's silence on West Asia has been revived and, incidentally, sparked by Benjamin Netanyahu himself. In a speech at a conference in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli prime minister said he is facing “delegitimisation” in most parts of the world, but not in India where he argues that support for Israel is so extensive that he has more supporters there than any other country. He spoke of an “absolutely crazy love for Israel” in India, and said it's a “genuine strange and singular phenomenon.” It's a compliment. It was deposited in New Delhi as an allegation.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh was quick off the mark and he did not mince his words. He emphatically denied the assertion made by Netanyahu, stating that the prime minister's stance shouldn't be equated with that of "the Indian people at large. But he was very specific in his response: Netanyahu was “just wrong.” He claimed Netanyahu had the support of what he termed as the "Modani empire" and said that Narendra Modi was that "Modani's servant" while crores of Indians condemned Israel's treatment of Gaza, the West Bank, Iran and Lebanon. Then the line that has gone the farthest: the prime minister's silence on Israel's actions is a "betrayal of the civilisational ethos of India" and "unconscionable" in his words.

This is no one-off outburst. It is the latest salvo in a series of buildup by Congress which has been continuing since Modi's visit to Israel in February. He's been there every time Israel has extended its reach into Lebanon, into Iran, into the West Bank each time with a new twist on the same accusation that the government has no voice on this. Ramesh, who had earlier in May tried out the Modi rebuttal that it would be more honest to say Netanyahu's government is supported by the prime minister's ecosystem and that Modi's posture is extreme moral cowardice, was heeding the call from the prime minister's office. In March it was about the West Bank; Ramesh, who was still pushing for "Greater Israel" and closing the door on real Palestinian statehood, insisted that Israel was merely hiding behind a larger war, and Modi was silent. In the months preceding the visit, the party's foreign affairs minister, Salman Khurshid, went so far as to say that India is interested in civilisational, economic, energy, geopolitical and diasporic issues not only with Israel but with Iran, Palestine and the entire region, and it cannot claim sovereignty and non-interference for itself and turn a blind eye to others' sovereignty being violated. The stitched together Congress case isn't about one Netanyahu comment. It's about a studied neutrality that its critics claim has turned sour.

The government's response, never actually stated as a denial but implicit in each and every joint statement made this year, is that's what a serious middle power looks like when it won't go along with other people's wars. Foreign policy officials and analysts in favor of that line say that is one of the few workable policies India has in the region that it has good relations with Israel, the Gulf Arab states and Iran because Delhi has stopped making declarations that force it into a corner. That, there, isn't cowardice, it's discipline. The economic system that sits atop that subject has grown to the point that it has real costs to unwind. Once an indial trickle of about two hundred million dollars in the early 1990s, bilateral trade with Israel has risen to about 3.75 billion dollars in the past financial year, making India the second largest among the Asian countries for which Israel is the partners. The two governments during the February visit, upgraded the relationship to a ‘special strategic partnership' and agreed to expedite a long-delayed free trade agreement, a UPI payments linkage, an AI cooperation memorandum and a joint cyber centre of excellence. Industry sources estimate the total deals being discussed or the new ones signed, ranging from missile defence systems to tanker-aircraft conversion and radar upgrading, at 8-10 billion dollars, which is more than any signed deals by both countries so far. By some estimates, Israel has become India's biggest arms importer, taking up a large percentage of its defence exports, and Israeli avionics and electronic-warfare systems are already part of India's homegrown Tejas fighter programme.

That puts three point seven five billion dollars in two-way trade in perspective; and that's exactly the contrast defenders of the government's position continue to make. India's trade with the Gulf Cooperation Council states alone is at around one hundred and seventy-eight billion dollars annually, which is more than its trade volume with the European Union and ASEAN bloc and continues to grow. Close to 9 million Indian workers are living and working across the Gulf and their remittances are indeed a significant component of the current account. Iran, on its part, is not a trading afterthought either: the Chabahar port project, stalled in its latest stages by American sanctions pressure, was designed around India obtaining itself an overland route into Afghanistan and Central Asia, which avoids Pakistan altogether. So any government in India, of which colour, would hesitate to take a side in a battle between all three. That, in broad outline, is the pragmatist's argument, and it's worth making the point, despite the spin, because it's true that this is what the silence Congress keeps referring to actually means.

The real bite of Ramesh's latest line of attack is that the picture gets complicated with oil, as it takes the argument from morality to economics. He has time and again pointed to Washington-Tehran discussions to terminate the broader conflict, noting that such an agreement would have a significant impact on India, as it would reopen the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz and relieve the tension that has kept crude prices high. India's crude imports come virtually all from outside and a significant portion of it still passes through waters that can be cut off in days during a wider Gulf conflict. Ramesh's point is that Israel's ongoing activity in Lebanon and elsewhere has been what prevents such talks from coming to a close, and that a government with real leverage over Israel leverage that it has ironically created thanks to the defence and trade partnership outlined above has decided not to exercise it, even when this would be in India's own energy security interests. How much leverage this is, of course, is questionable: India purchases Israeli weapons, but is not Israel's patron, and Washington has far more influence over Netanyahu's schedule than Delhi does. But the criticism still sticks because it injects a dose of reality into debates about solidarity and sentiment and focuses them instead on what's hard to dismiss: barrels and freight lanes.

There has been international coverage of the same controversy which, at times, domestic reporting is glancing over. Indian commentators have responded stridently to the claims, saying that the amount of alloy steel shipped through the Mediterranean ports to Israeli ordnance makers is 'a rounding error' compared with the total volume of Indian arms exports and that it is more a message than anything else. Left parties within India have been much tougher than Congress, and CPI leaders allege that the ties between the two are akin to the “domestic policing methods” practised in India, something that the BJP has firmly denied. The more structural argument made by analysts in foreign media is that New Delhi's rhetoric has moved from non-alignment to ‘strategic autonomy' today, which enables India to have ‘both' friends, aspects that were once considered antithetical.

Connecting all this, whichever side of the argument is more persuasive, is that the West Asia policy of India is no longer a footnote in the ministry of external affairs. It entails a trade worth the hundreds of billions, a defence partnership valued in the billions, an energy dependence that can be hampered in one night by a single strait and a diaspora and labour force throughout all the countries concerned. But Congress will continue to use the word unconscionable, and the government will continue to refuse to use any word whatsoever and in both instances it is deliberate. The real test that voters and policymakers now have to ask themselves is whetherModi's silence is acceptable it obviously is not, or Congress would have stopped attacking it months ago but whether it is an acceptable option when war, the most dangerous of all wars, refuses to take place according to Modi's schedule.