Sanjaya Baru | India Has Crucial Stake in West Asia Peace, Stability

Another conflict and another operation to evacuate stranded Indians. Operation Sindhu has been launched to bring home over a thousand Indian students studying in Iran. There are today over eight million persons of Indian origin across an increasingly troubled West Asian region.

India’s stake in the region’s peace and stability go far beyond the safety of Indians in the region. The Indian economy is critically dependent on assured and uninterrupted access to oil and gas from the region, with close to 50 per cent of India’s energy needs coming through the Straits of Hormuz.

More than half of the $129 billion that has come in last year as foreign exchange remittances comes from the eight million Indians living and working in the Gulf states. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have become extended branches of the Indian economy.

Beyond all such important economic and social concerns lies the fact that India has a strategic stake in geopolitical stability in her larger neighbourhood from the Mediterranean to the Malacca Straits.

Given these bare facts, the Narendra Modi government’s equivocation on the rapidly deteriorating situation in the region is not in the national interest. Merely because Israel supported India on Operation Sindoor, we cannot lose sight of longer-term and larger strategic and national considerations that have shaped India’s approach towards West Asia, in general, and Iran in particular. India’s Pakistan policy alone cannot dictate the approach towards West Asia as a whole, indeed towards Eurasia.

Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party, has done well to articulate what ought to be the Indian view in a well-crafted statement published in a national daily last week. Successive Prime Ministers, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, have often referred to the Republic of India as a “civilisational state”, drawing attention to her ancient roots spread across Asia.

The Indian civilisation, as we know it, has been around for thousands of years, as have the Chinese and Persian civilisations. Modern Iran, with all its religious blinkers, is the inheritor of an ancient civilisation. Israel was created barely eighty years ago by the Western powers to atone for their civilisational blemish of anti-Semitism that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust.

Interpreting narratives from the Old Testament as historical fact, Britain and the United States conspired at the end of the Second World War to acquire a Western foothold in the oil-rich West Asian region. They not only created Israel but also the various Arab potentates around it. Nation states were created on paper and installed with the force of Western arms. Of course, all that is history and one must live with the present realities.

What is the present reality? Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has been transformed from a modern Jewish-majority democratic nation into a Zionist authoritarian state that has created a killing machine, devouring thousands of innocent lives.

There is little point in searching for the “original sinner” in this ongoing conflict. Sure, Islamic radicalism created a fertile ground for Zionism to acquire legitimacy. The dastardly and savage attack by Hamas provided the opportunity for an even more inhuman response by Israel. One can go step by step into the past to find out who was responsible for the situation. One can leave that for historians.

What is needed at this juncture is sanity and a commitment to peace here and now. A state of mind found wanting in many national capitals around the world, starting from Washington, DC. Caught between a blood-thirsty Mr Netanyahu, a capricious Donald Trump, pusillanimous European leaders and insecure feudal potentates, our western neighbourhood is heading towards catastrophe. Into this vacuum of political leadership, China and Russia have entered to test their own influence over various actors. What of India?

Sonia Gandhi was right to demand the articulation of India’s voice. India has influence in Tel Aviv/Jerusalem as well as in many Arab capitals. It has a long history of good relations with Iran that has only recently been marred by the Narendra Modi government’s prevarications on Israeli actions.

If India continues to sit on the fence, China may well consolidate its influence in the region. There is no point ruing later the loss of Indian influence when India refused to stand up to be counted when it mattered.

Observe the speed with which China is summoning a trilateral of Asian countries. First, there was the China-Pakistan-Afghan trilateral; then came a China-Pakistan-Bangladesh trilateral. Do not put it beyond Chinese diplomatic capability to attempt a China-Iran-Israel trilateral. That is one that India ought to try. To do so would require mending fences with Iran and talking straight to Israel. All that done with legitimate Indian interests in mind.

The point has often been made that India was equivocal in the Russia-Ukraine conflict due to its strategic dependence on Russian arms. That it is now prevaricating on the Israel-Iran conflict because of a similar dependence on Israeli arms. How then can the Indian leadership talk of strategic autonomy and an independent foreign policy if access to the arms bazar defines our relations with the world? These defence deals, be it with Russia, Israel or the US, cannot be made to define India’s relations with other important countries. In any case, India has defence cooperation relations with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain and the UAE, and Egypt is an important market for Indian defence exports.

Even if Indian foreign policy has to be defended in terms of its external dependencies, the fact is that both the national interest and values demand the articulation of an Indian voice in the region.

Domestic political and communal considerations should not be allowed to cloud sound diplomatic and strategic thinking in New Delhi.

Prime Minister Modi took a bold and sensible decision not to fly to Washington DC in response to a cavalier invitation from President Donald Trump. In conveying his regrets, Mr Modi elevated India’s stature. This bold diplomatic act must be followed up by a clear articulation of the Indian view on the West Asian conflict. India has always been committed to what is called the “two-state” solution.

That the State of Palestine will be created and regions occupied by Israel restored to it. India may not be able to shape the course of events, but it would have at least upheld a principle and stood tall in its neighbourhood.

Sanjaya Baru is a writer and an economist. His most recent book is Secession of the Successful: The Flight Out of New India