Israel’s sky-strike did more than scratch Iran’s silos; it splashed ultraviolet across a 25-year RAW–Mossad scaffolding that rides the Indian labour bloodstream into every Gulf datacentre, flight manifest cache, and port-clearance queue. Kargil 1999 welded the bond, ELTA pods and Python seekers on IAF pylons within 48 hours, while Mumbai 2008 matured it into doctrine: Mossad writes the exploits, RAW provides the human root shells hidden inside a 4.3-million-strong UAE diaspora and parallel swathes across Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain.
Corporate veneers keep the grid humming: TCS inside du’s backbone, Wipro nursing Emirates NBD’s switch, L&T bolting EL/M-2084 radars onto GCC towers, Tech Mahindra seeding lawful-intercept boxes in Bahrain. Pegasus servers mapped by Citizen Lab loop through these same networks; an Indian-staffed MDM console in a Dubai hotel is the last finger on the trigger.
Now the façade buckles. Iran’s MOIS parades South Asian detainees, Qatar’s Dahra case brands Indian expertise a Trojan firmware, Turkey’s MIT rolls up 34 assets wired by Indian-coded VoIP relays. Gulf ministries freeze clearances, re-image biometric vaults, and funnel contracts to Egyptian or Serbian vendors while Tehran and Islamabad swap packet captures. New Delhi can’t defend the innocents without confessing the overlay, and every consular protest just re-broadcasts the linkage. The once-invisible clerk empire is radioactive: diaspora asset turned attack surface, bandwidth burned, mask off.