♤ The region is significant for India’s energy security, people to people ties, trade and

investment and security relations.

♤ Key actors from India’s perspective in this region are the regional organizations such as

the Gulf Cooperation Council, States such as: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, and Israel.

♤ India has a historic and abiding interest in the Palestinian issue.

♤ In this diverse region India’s policy is to seek regional stability which is threatened by regional rivalries (Iran-Saudi Arabia; Israel-Iran etc) and emergence of non state extremist groups such as the ISIS.

1.3. India And West Asia: A Background1

♤ Until the end of the Cold War India’s relations with West Asia were primarily shaped by India’s policy responses to evolving geopolitical ground realities internationally and in the region.

♤ When India became independent, the West exercised almost unchallengeable influence and control over West Asia. All independent West Asian countries then had strongly anti- Communist, pro-West regimes and had become a part of the American-led bloc in the context of the newly emerged Cold War. However, to the West’s great disappointment, even anger, India adopted a unique approach - not being aligned with either camp.

♤ India’s consistent support for the Palestinian cause and pan-Arab nationalism with strong denunciations of Israeli and Western policies further angered Western powers.

♤ India had consistently provided a welcoming haven to Jewish people going back 2000 years. But having strongly denounced the Balfour Declaration (1917) during India’s freedom struggle, it was inevitable for India to oppose the creation of Israel and its admission to the United Nations as a matter of principle.

1 This section is based on Ambassador Ranjit Gupta’s article available at: http://www.mei.edu/content/map/india-s-relations-west-asia India and West Asia

♤ Britain had deliberately created Pakistan as an independent Muslim State. Pakistan’s belligerent hostility to India from day one was also manifested in its malevolent use of the Islamic card against India. There was automatic Western and Arab/Iranian/Turkish support for the emergence of Pakistan and in the many disputes that Pakistan created with India and in the wars that it initiated against India starting from its brazen invasion of Kashmir on October 22, 1947.

♤ Britain sponsored the Baghdad Pact (1955), a military alliance with the region’s heavyweights — the Shah’s Iran and Iraq (until 1958 a pro-Western monarchy) as well as Pakistan and Turkey — in order to ensure its continued strategic control over the region and particularly to prevent the ingress of any Soviet influence. However, Pakistan’s sole motivation to join the alliance was the “India factor.” Unsurprisingly, India strongly denounced the formation of this military alliance.

♤ In the context of non alignment India had viewed the advent of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt very positively and had great empathy with the Nasserite ideology of pan-Arab nationalism, socialism, secular and republican governance. India supported Egypt strongly during the Suez crisis (1956) and against the consequent Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt and later in the 1967 war with Israel.

♤ In 1969 after the Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco invited India to the summit of Muslim countries in Rabat, which led to the formation of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (O.I.C.), India was not allowed to participate after the inaugural session due to Pakistan’s threat to walk out.

♤ To India’s great annoyance, the O.I.C. and its Contact Group (established at the O.I.C. summit in Tehran in 1994) adopted, at Pakistani instigation, strongly worded anti-India recommendations, resolutions and statements regularly on Kashmir and on the supposed plight of Indian Muslims. Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been proactively involved throughout.

♤ India's relationship with Iraq under Saddam Hussein was close, multidimensional and fruitful. Indeed, it was probably India’s most valuable and productive bilateral relationship in West Asia during the Cold War period. India implemented dozens of projects in Iraq and provided military training, particularly for the Iraqi air force. Iraq was India’s leading oil supplier. And Saddam Hussein extended explicit political support in the context of India’s problems with Pakistan. Both countries were close to the Soviet Union. However, this was viewed negatively by almost all West Asian countries.

♤ The 1979 Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the consequent mounting of the modern jihad by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to evict Soviet forces became a particularly strong cementing factor between them while becoming yet another source of severe dissonance between India on the one hand, and West Asian countries and the West on the other.

♤ As the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan intensified, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) also became a particularly strong Pakistan supporter. These same two Arab countries became the staunchest supporters of the Taliban regime.

♤ Iran was also conspicuously pro-Pakistan during both the Shah and Khomenei eras — in the former as part of the alliance with the West, and in the latter due to Iran’s ambition to become the leader of the Islamic world and hence its strong support to all ‘Muslim’ causes.

♤ When the Cold War ended, India’s only friends in West Asia were Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) Chairman Yasir ‘Arafat, who was gravely compromised due to his support for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; a greatly weakened and strategically besieged Saddam; and Oman and Syria.

♤ India’s lone pillar of strategic support in the world, the Soviet Union, disintegrated. So dire was the state of the economy that India’s gold reserves were physically airlifted to Europe in 1990 in order to enable an International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) loan.

♤ Post Cold War India ceased viewing West Asia through the prism of its issues with Pakistan, discontinued the use of strong rhetoric denouncing other countries’ policies, and abandoned defensive, reactive policy approaches.

♤ India also started consciously courting the United States, now the lone global superpower. Importantly, India began to reach out to all West Asian countries without picking and choosing between them, and on the basis of mutual benefit.

♤ In particularly audacious moves in December 1991, India reversed its earlier vote in the United Nations that had equated Zionism with racism. After personally obtaining P.L.O. Chairman Arafat’s full concurrence, Narasimha Rao established full diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992, disregarding extremely strong domestic criticism. The relationship has flourished since then.

♤ In December 1992, Rao, courageously risking a potential rebuff, reached out to Iran; his visit the next year turned out to be exceedingly satisfying. A great rapport was established between him and President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

♤ The Indian economy began to grow impressively, even as Pakistan became increasingly enmeshed in Afghanistan and mired in internal political instability. The spreading Islamist extremist militancy and terrorism in Pakistan and West Asia — while the world’s third largest Muslim community in India remained immune to this danger — presented a particularly strong and impressive contrast internationally.

♤ Taken together, these developments constituted public recognition that the world welcomed India’s rise, in contrast with growing anxieties about China’s rise. These same circumstances also persuaded Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to look at India very differently.

♤ In response to Pakistan’s adventurism in Kargil in 1999, West Asian countries and the West declined to support Pakistan — the first time such response in the long history of the India-Pakistan conflict.

♤ With the advent of the new millennium, there has been an extraordinary turnaround in the relationship between the Gulf Cooperation Council (G.C.C.) countries and India.

♤ The Indo-Iranian economic relationship is also poised for a dramatic upsurge. On May 24, 2016, Prime Minister Modi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani signed a historic deal to develop the strategic port of Chabahar and thereby open transport-and-trade corridor to and through Afghanistan to Central Asia and Europe.

♤ First ever visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Israel in 2017 and reciprocal visit of Israel’s

prime minister in 2018 have moved relations with Israel in to the fore.

♤ Prime Minster Modi’s stand alone visit to Palestine in 2018 again reiterated India’s support for a Palestinian state and completed what is known as de-hyphenation of relations between India on the one hand and Israel and Palestine on the other.

♤ Wars in Syria and Yemen, emergence of ISIS, difference between Iran and Arab States as well as political transition, mark different aspects of current conflicts in West Asia. However, by a large India and leadership in these countries have consciously not allowed this to adversely affect their bilateral relations.