English Article

West Asian Quad

India's participation in I2U2 summit – with Israel, US, UAE – marks a more confident engagement with the region.

The first summit this week of the awkwardly-named forum I2U2 – which brings together India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States – is exploratory in nature. The virtual summit between the leaders of the four countries is expected to take place on Thursday during Joe Biden’s visit to Israel. But it is by no means the main objective of the US President’s visit to the Middle East.

The visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia will see Biden pursue several challenging goals. These include getting Saudi support for reducing the pressure on global oil prices in the wake of the Ukraine war, recalibrating US ties with Saudi Arabia which Biden had promised to make into a “pariah”, deepening the normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab states, persuading Israel to seek reconciliation with the Palestinians, and renewing American engagement with the Palestinian Authority.

Squeezing the I2U2 summit into this already demanding visit underlines the US bet that India can contribute significantly to peace and prosperity in the region. It also underlines a new political will in Delhi to break the old taboos on India’s West Asian engagement. The I2U2 marks the consolidation of a number of new trends in India’s Middle East policy that acquired greater momentum under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The I2U2 was launched last October when the foreign ministers of the four countries met when External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar visited Israel. The summit this week puts the top leadership’s political imprimatur on the forum. What stands out sharply in India’s new thinking in the Middle East is that the summit involves three countries that Delhi had traditionally kept a safe political distance from.

Let us start with Israel. Although India was one of the first countries to extend recognition to Israel in 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru held back from establishing full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. PV Narasimha Rao reversed that policy in 1992 but a defensive Congress was hesitant to “own” the relationship. Rao did not travel to Israel nor did he receive an Israeli prime minister. Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP, which had a more empathetic view of Israel, hosted Israeli PM Ariel Sharon in 2003. In the decade-long rule of the UPA (2004-14), there were no prime ministerial visits in either direction. While the relationship steadily expanded, there was ideological reluctance in Delhi to give the partnership a political profile. Modi, in contrast, came to power with a determination to impart a political character to the Israel ties.

If the Congress feared open engagement with Israel might complicate relations with the Arab partners, Modi recognised that the region was going through sweeping political changes, and shifting away from old shibboleths. His bet paid off, with little negative Arab or Muslim reaction to the more open pursuit of India’s ties with Israel. The problem was never with the Middle East but Delhi’s ideological preconceptions that distorted India’s view of the region. None of them was more consequential than the belief that the contradiction between Israel and the Muslim world is enduring and irreconcilable. But the regional reality was always more complex. Turkey, now a champion of political Islam, had diplomatic ties with Israel since 1949. Egypt normalised ties in 1980. Under the Abrahamic accords promoted by the Trump Administration, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco set up formal ties with Israel in 2020.

Modi’s decisiveness in engaging Israel was matched by his effort to deepen India’s ties with the Arab world. During his first visit to Israel in 2018, he also became the first Indian PM to visit Palestine. Even more important has been the transformation of India’s relations with the Gulf Kingdoms, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

India’s traditional preference in the Arab world was for engaging the republics. India’s ties to the monarchies were more deeply rooted and became rather important since the 1970s as the main source of hydrocarbons, the main destination for Indian labour exports, and a major source of hard currency remittances. Yet, Delhi remained wary of engagement with the monarchies, telling itself that they were pro-Pakistan. No Indian PM visited Saudi Arabia between 1982 and 2010 and UAE between 1981 and 2015. On his part, Modi found a way to build a personal rapport with the rulers of Saudi and UAE and develop strong ties with these governments without a reference to Pakistan.

Despite Delhi’s ideological posturing, the Middle East had long ceased to be a political priority for India. Paying lip service to old causes had overtaken the calculated pursuit of national interests in a complex region. Through his decade-long tenure, Manmohan Singh travelled to the region only four times — two of those journeys were to attend non-aligned summits. The UAE was not part of those trips despite its growing economic significance. PM Modi, in contrast, has travelled four times to the UAE alone, negotiated a free trade agreement with it, and has ambitious plans for the transformation of bilateral relations. The UAE has also backed India’s 2019 constitutional changes in Kashmir and is ready to invest in the union territory.

That brings us to the US. For political Delhi, the US and Western policies in the region were a main part of the problem. The immediate focus of Nehru’s policy after independence was to actively oppose US moves in the region in the name of promoting an “area of peace”. That policy had no lasting impact as many regional countries sought active economic, political, and security cooperation with the US and the West. The I2U2 then marks a big break from the anti-Western tradition in India’s approach to the region.

Even those who supported India’s engagement with the US in the Indo-Pacific through the Quad in recent years had insisted that there was no room for working with Washington in the Middle East. The Modi government has bet otherwise. If Congress governments argued that standing up to the West in the Middle East was a sacred obligation for India, the Modi government is now prepared to confidently negotiate the terms of a joint engagement.

India’s participation in the West Asian Quad brings Delhi in line with other major powers– including Europe, China, and Russia – to try and engage all parties in the region. India’s past ideologically driven exclusion of regional partners was a strange aberration. The I2U2 sets the stage for a new and dynamic phase in India’s relations with the Middle East.

Paper - 2 (International Relations)

Writer - C Raja Mohan (Senior Fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi)