Official Delhi rarely acknowledges big changes in foreign policy. The discourse on Indian foreign policy that celebrates continuity and enduring principles such as strategic autonomy is even more reluctant to reflect on India’s changing foreign policy orientation. Yet, change has been the dominant feature of India’s engagement with the world over the last three decades. Some of that change has accelerated under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For example, Modi himself has claimed that India has shed its ‘historic hesitations’ in building a partnership with the United States.
Shedding India’s Cold War ideological skin is equally evident in India’s engagement with the Middle East over the last decade. The under-appreciated change in India’s Middle East policy under Modi has unfolded along three axes. During the Cold War, India saw three main contradictions in the Middle East—-between Western imperialism and nationalism, Israel and the Arabs, and between secular republics and conservative monarchies in the region. India stood with post-colonial nationalism against the West, with the Arabs against Israel, and preferred the secular republics against the conservative monarchies. India was reflexive in its opposition to the West, denounced Western policies for fomenting instability in the region, and kept more than a reasonable distance from the US and Europe.
If the inversion of this paradigm began to unfold, if imperceptibly, in the post-Cold War years, it has matured under Modi. Today, India barely criticises the Western policies in the region. It actively partners with the US and Europe in the Middle East.
Delhi has cooperated with the US in setting up the I2U2 (India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States). It is working with the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to develop the India Middle East Europe Economic Corridor. India partners with the US, EU, and individual European states in promoting maritime security in the waters of the Greater Middle East–the Western Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
On Arab-Israeli issues, Delhi continues to support the two-state solution in Palestine. But the lack of progress towards the Palestinian statehood and the widely criticised Israeli military campaign in Gaza has not stopped India from deepening its economic, technological and security cooperation with Israel. That a growing number of Arab states engage Israel, and do not see Tel Aviv as an existential threat has created a very different environment than the anti-Zionist radicalism in the Middle East during the Cold War.
Finally, India’s anxiety about Pakistan mobilising the conservative monarchies on the Kashmir question reinforced Delhi’s political comfort with the secular republics that espoused anti-imperialism and state socialism. Despite the growing energy and economic interdependence with the oil rich kingdoms since the oil boom of the 1970s, Delhi was reluctant to invest political capital in modernising the engagement with the Gulf. In the post-Cold War era, the salience of the secular republics has steadily declined even as the weight of the Gulf monarchies has risen. It was only in the Modi years that this profound shift had a definitive impact on India’s regional policy. By building personal relationships with the Gulf monarchs, leveraging the commercial convergence with them, and widening security cooperation, Modi has marginalised the Pakistan factor in India’s relationship with the Middle East.
