India’s Middle East Policy : Relation with Egypt , Saudi Arabia and the 1965 War
I’m reading this paper Modi looks West? Assessing change and continuity in India’s Middle East policy since 2014 and decided to summarise bits of the history for easing reading and discussion with the community and especially those users who love geopol!
If you look at the for instance the last five years, India has managed to closely cooperate with the Gulf states on issues of transnational terrorism. This brought India closer to many gulf countries on economical levels and thereby forcing a shift of their earlier Islamic Brotherhood relations with esp Pakistan to a more rational approach in terms of economical value.
Bilateral Agreements of Modi Govt
Lot of visits to the Gulf countries and the bilateral agreements with Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, Modi signalled his willingness to break with India’s traditional cautious and quiet diplomacy in the region, which had long been considered as necessary to preserve India’s diverse economic, energy, and societal interests in the Middle East.
From its independence in 1947 to the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, India initially pursued a policy of open engagement of all actors in the region, including Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
U.S.-sponsored Baghdad pact
In the 1950s, Nehru and India were perceived as an important extra-regional actor involved in the settlement of regional issues like the Suez crisis and the Lebanon crisis of 1958 (Nayudu 2018). However, India’s approach changed after the Suez crisis when it opted for a less interventionist strategy towards the region (Blarel 2015, 124–132). Because of its limited power projection capabilities, India decided to defer to allies, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, to have an influence on regional events.
This alignment strategy was also a reaction to the emergence of the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad pact, an alliance system that directly favoured India’s rival, Pakistan, and alienated India from other Middle Eastern states such as Iran and Jordan. Egypt was also instrumental in limiting efforts from Pakistan to isolate India either through Pan-Islamic solidarity or through the Baghdad Pact.
India changed its pro Egypt approach due to dependence on oil and energy with the other Gulf states
India’s Cairo-centred policy also came under fire when it became clear that diplomatic support for Egypt directly alienated it from Saudi Arabia and Jordan which, in the meantime, furthered its relations with Pakistan.
India’s pro-Egypt bias also led the Indira Gandhi government to unconditionally support Nasser’s military adventurism against Israel in 1967
We supported Egypt despite it’s lukewarm support in the 1965 war with Pakistan which escalated to a military confrontation with Israel.
India’s uncritical pro-Nasser policy led to the alienation of other Arab leaders like King Hussein of Jordan and King Saud of Saudi Arabia who did not agree with Nasser’s initiatives. Egypt’s military defeat accelerated the decline of Cairo’s prominent status in the Pan-Arab world.
During the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, most Arab states again sided with Islamabad, notably judging that the Bengali struggle in East Pakistan was an internal Pakistani matter. Consequently, to attempt to dilute Arab support of Pakistan, but also to meet its growing energy needs, India increasingly developed political links with Iraq and the Gulf States.
1965 Indo-Pak War
During the IndiaPakistan conflict of April 1965, Pakistan was for instance able to mobilize through this alliance network an overwhelming majority of Arab states on its side.
Barring Egypt, no Arab state in the Middle East seemed prepared to support India’s position.
During the conflict, Jordan and Saudi Arabia even gave direct monetary assistance to Pakistan . While not directly supportive of India, Nasser’s Egypt stayed neutral and helped tone down a pro-Pakistan resolution voted at the Arab Summit of September 1965 in Casablanca
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, believed that India should be direct party to the resolution of regional disputes to preserve its influence and interests. As a consequence, India was directly involved in the international negotiations leading to the settlement of crises in Palestine, Lebanon, and Suez in the late 1940s and 1950s (Mudiam 1994).
Today Saudi Arabia is India’s fourth largest trade partner
After China, the USA and UAE and a major source of energy as India imports around 18% of its crude oil requirement and 30 % of its LPG requirement from the Kingdom. In FY 2019–20, bilateral trade was valued at US $33.09 billion.
And if you compare their trade with Pakistan its at a mere US$ 3.5 billion
India is Jordan’s 4th largest trade partner after Iraq, Saudi Arabia and China. Trade between India and Jordan is governed by a 1976 bilateral agreement. Bilateral trade between the two countries totaled US$2.228 billion in 2014–15. And if you compare that with Pakistan it was at $53.837 million as of 2006. Still a very very low number.
So you could see from what the economic ties were in the 60s to now, how India has leaped ahead in making sure that economically the gulf countries have a far more dependence on us and we are a large customer to them as well.
1970 — India’s relation United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran
To have a steady supply of oil needs for its development India warmed up to Iran and UAE.
The migration of Indian workers moved to the Gulf states which needed manpower following the oil boom, and sent back hard currency remittances to India
The oil embargo of 1973 further cemented relations with the Gulf states as New Delhi negotiated bilateral agreements with Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, to have guaranteed stable prices over a fixed time period and to ensure a steady flow of oil.
Initially, successive India governments relied on Egypt to indirectly influence regional politics to preserve India’s trade and economic interests. However, this policy of alignment with one regional player showed its limits in the late 1960s when the distribution of power and influence in the region moved towards to the oil-rich states. Accordingly, India no longer exclusively deferred to Cairo’s judgment on Middle Eastern affairs but realigned itself by developing ties with other regional players like Iraq until the late 1980s.
Today UAE is India’s second largest export destination after US with an amount of over US$ 30 billion for the year 2018–19. For UAE, India was the second largest trading partner during 2018 with US$ 36 billion (non-oil trade). While Pakistan maintains a good relation with UAE and has a trade of US$8.19 billion in the year 2019.
To summarize, we could see how India economical grew to pull in the pro Islamic muslim brotherhood countries towards itself via trade.
India today is large trading partner and influencer in the middle east region
In the next post , I will discuss how India fared in 1990s, hope you enjoyed this read
References:
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/20671369
- Modi looks West? Assessing change and continuity in India’s Middle East policy since 2014
Orginal Post : https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/o1nxby/indias_middle_east_policy_relation_with_egypt/
