India’s Isolationism…Why New Delhi Refuses to Engage the Middle East

Spread the love

Loading

Shashank Joshi:

Shortly after Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in May 2014, his government faced its first foreign policy crisis. Just weeks after his inauguration, members of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) captured 41 Indian construction workers in Mosul and 46 Indian nurses in Tikrit, producing one of India’s worst-ever hostage crises.

This was not the first time that New Delhi had been rocked by events 2,000 miles away. In 1990, for example, India had to evacuate over 110,000 citizens from the Middle East during the first Gulf War — an operation that required just under 500 flights over a period of two months. Faced with turbulence it could neither prevent nor influence, but which threatened the lives of Indian citizens and the country’s economy, New Delhi carried out similar airlifts from Libya in 2011 and Iraq in 2014.

The fate of the Middle East, home to roughly seven million Indians, has long been tied to that of India. As Salman Khurshid, then India’s foreign minister, noted in 2013, the Persian Gulf, which supplies two-thirds of India’s oil and gas, is the country’s largest trading partner — more important than the 28 countries of the European Union combined. Despite its stake in the region, however, India has remained passive in the face of crises. It appears wary of taking on a more assertive diplomatic or military role — more likely to evacuate citizens than send more in to grapple with the Middle East’s problems.

AT ARMS LENGTH

Over the past decade, New Delhi has reacted to turmoil in the Middle East with interest but little else. In 2003, for example, according to the historian Rudra Chaudhuri, New Delhi briefly considered deploying its 6th Infantry Division to northern Iraq — a contingent that would have been the second largest in the country, behind only that of the United States. New Delhi ultimately dismissed this possibility, however, in the absence of a supportive resolution from the United Nations. Although New Delhi appeared eager to advance the U.S.-Indian relationship by committing troops, it would not do so at the cost of its historical commitment to multilateralism and to what Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s prime minister at the time, called an “honest nonaligned policy.”

New Delhi remained committed to nonalignment in 2011, when it opposed NATO’s intervention in Libya against Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime. India abstained from voting on UN Resolution 1973, which authorized the use of force in Libya, calling the situation there an “internal affair,” and hewing closely to the Russian and Chinese position. India’s permanent representative to the United Nations complained that “the pro-interventionist powers did not ever try to bring about a peaceful end to the crisis.”

New Delhi has viewed subsequent uprisings in Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere similarly. Like China and Russia, India voted against UN resolutions in February and July 2012 that called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. It also abstained from voting on a harsher resolution in July 2013, arguing that it could not support “effecting regime change by sleight of hand,” and opposed the United States’ proposed punitive missile strikes. Indeed, India’s foreign ministry continues to assert on its website that “India and Syria enjoy friendly political relations based on historic and civilizational ties.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE

What explains India’s reluctance to involve itself in the Middle East? In part, New Delhi is wary of supporting popular uprisings that it views as causing regional instability and disruptions in the global energy market. The Indian government heavily subsidizes public sector domestic oil companies and products — New Delhi has spent 1.4 percent of India’s GDP on fuel subsidies since 2008 — and is therefore particularly vulnerable to market volatility, especially if the Indian rupee falls relative to the U.S. dollar.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Frankly I think that India is wise in staying out of the Middle East’s inter-Iislamic factions conflicts. They will of course have to be very wary to try to keep the fanatics from spilling over into India, and eventually the terrorist warriors will turn their eyes towards India.

All Islamic-based countries are failed states.
One proof of that is their need to import workers who are non-Muslims.
India knows the high proportion of doctors, nurses, engineers and others each of these countries would lose if it extracts all of its workers.
And those countries could not survive without foreign workers, so they would need to line up other replacements from elsewhere.
But the threat of kidnapping and either rape-forced conversion-marriage OR beheading just aren’t good for recruitment.

India also needs to be able to employ a higher percentage of their own well-educated people.
I bet they can do it.

@Ditto #1:

“Frankly I think that India is wise in staying out of the Middle East’s inter-Islamic factions conflicts.”

I agree.
As I read this piece, I found myself wishing that the United States had taken such a nuanced approach right from the start. Of course we could not. Our history in the region (recent and otherwise) prevented us from sitting out this dance. Pity…