From Palestine to Israel: India's repositioning in the Middle East
India’s prime minister immediately condemned the terrorist actions by Hamas (which few Indian Muslims like), openly signalling a change in diplomatic relations. According to Prof P.R. Kumaraswamy, of Jawaharlal Nehru University, the premises for change were already there decades ago. India had an important Jewish community but has never experienced anti-Semitism. The two countries have signed deals on weapons and hi-tech, but agriculture dominates the relationship.
New Delhi (AsiaNews) – After war broke out between Gaza and Israel, following Hamas’s attack against the Jewish state last Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi openly expressed his support for Israel.
“Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour,” he wrote on X, (ex-Twitter).
The message is in stark contrast to India’s traditional policy. As a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s, New Delhi supported the Palestinian cause.
“While India supported Palestine during the 1940s and later on, India has a Jewish community dating back to the first century,” said P.R. Kumaraswamy, professor of Contemporary Middle East Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Honorary Director of the Middle East Institute in New Delhi.
“India is perhaps one of the very few countries in the world which never had anti-Semitism,” he explained. Anti-Semitism has been largely seen as a European problem in India. The country is still home to a small but very lively and diverse Jewish community. In the 1950s several Indian Jews left Mumbai (then called Bombay) to live in Israel but later went back to their native land.
“In 1947, during the partition war, India did not support the partition of Palestine and because of larger interests in the Arab world,” he noted. Eventually, it recognised Israel in 1950, two years after Israel was created, taking the view that it “would have normal diplomatic relations.”
There were efforts in that direction, but few things went against it.” In 1956, France, Britain and Israel occupied the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula, sparking an immediate response from the United States and the Soviet Union, despite the ongoing Cold War.
At that point the process of diplomatic rapprochement between India and Israel stalled and Indian leaders decided that relations between the two countries would evolve only in conjunction with systemic change at the global level.
India’s first post-independence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, made that promise at the time, but it took 40 years to be realised. Meanwhile, India backed the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), allowing it to open an office in New Delhi in 1975 and in 1988, it was the first non-Arab country to recognise Palestine’s declaration of independence.
The situation changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In 1992 India opened its embassy in Tel Aviv, and from then on, trade between the two countries began to flow as did cooperation in various fields.
It is useful to note that one of Haifa's two ports was taken over earlier this year for US$ 1.2 billion by a company of the Adani group, owned by a well-known multibillionaire friend of Prime Minister Modi, potentially one of its largest sources of revenue but also, especially if infrastructure links are built in the rest of the Middle East, for the Indian government.
India also aspires to match Israel's high-tech economy. Its cybersecurity market is now worth about US$ 4 billion and is expected to double by 2028. Between 2000 and 2022, Israeli foreign direct investment in India rose to US$ 270.91 million, while bilateral trade reached US$ 7.86 billion.
Israel is now one of India's largest trading partners in defence; for example, between Modi's first election in May 2014 and November of that year, Israel exported US$ 662 million worth of weapons to India, three times more than total Israeli exports to India in the previous three years combined.
Today it is estimated that, with over 1 billion dollars a year, India is the main buyer of Israeli-made defence systems, but agreements in this domain are extensive, varied and have deepened over the last ten years, mainly thanks to the tacit consent of the United States, the Jewish state’s historical ally.
Still, agriculture remains the top area of cooperation between the two countries, Prof Kumaraswamy said. Since 2017, Israeli know-how in water resources management, as well as fruit, vegetable, and flower has been transferred to India.
In India, dozens of excellence centres have been created, in which Israel provides training to Indian farmers. This is crucial since agriculture is the main source of income and employment for more than half of the Indian population and contributes almost 18 per cent to India’s GDP. In this field too, Israel can offer advanced technologies.
In 2017, Prime Minister Modi visited Tel Aviv and for the first time did not stop in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian National Authority (PA) that rules over parts of the West Bank.
Despite this, India officially supports the "two-state solution".
Although Islamophobia has grown in India since Modi’s Hindu ultranationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, Hamas has few sympathisers in a country that has the second-largest Muslim population (200 million) in the world after Indonesia.
Kumaraswamy believes that Indians by and large condemn Hamas’s actions and there should not be any domestic political unrest. Indian Islam is completely different from that of the Middle Eastern Islam. Every year many Indian Muslims go to Israel and the Holy Land.
Shah Faesal, an official with the India Administrative Service (IAS), who became the first Kashmiri Muslim to top the Indian Civil Services Examination, reiterated the government's position on social media.
“Indian Muslims,” he posted on X, “have never supported the escalation of violence in [the] Middle East. The horrifying visuals of innocent Israelis #Israel killed by Hamas today break everyone's heart. Terrorism has not ever helped anyone and it won't help Palestinians also.”
Still, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) issued a statement saying that Israel's occupation of Palestine is the main cause of tensions and urged the Modi government to continue the old policy towards Palestine, calling for an UN-brokered political solution.
For Professor Kumaraswamy, it is unlikely that India can play this role because it has relations with the Palestinian National Authority, not with Hamas, which it has denounced as a terrorist organisation.
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15/01/2024 19:24
