It is perhaps fitting that one of his last international trips in his second term as Prime Minister takes Narendra Modi to the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. The inauguration of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan (BAPS) temple in Abu Dhabi and the release of eight Indian ex-naval personnel held on espionage charges in Doha this week are two different kinds of events.
Together, they are a high water mark for Modi’s diplomacy and symbolise the transformation of India’s relations with the Gulf during the last 10 years. It was unimaginable that a large Hindu temple would be built in the deeply Islamic and conservative Arabian peninsula with full state support, and the Indian Prime Minister would be there for its inauguration. When the eight former naval personnel were handed a death sentence last October, it was considered near impossible to secure their release.
Much has changed in how India and Arabia deal with each other today. The new terms of endearment with the Arabian Gulf constitute one of the most significant gains for Indian diplomacy in recent decades. Five factors underlie this transformation.
The first is diplomatic. For a long time, the Middle East did not figure in the political priorities of Indian diplomacy. Consider the following: During the 10 years of the UPA rule, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh travelled to the Middle East only four times — and two of those visits were to attend the non-aligned summits in Cairo and Tehran.
Since he took charge in 2014, Modi has travelled 15 times to the Middle East. His visit to the UAE in 2015 was the first by an Indian prime minister since 1981, despite the extraordinary growth in its importance for India. This is Modi’s seventh visit to the UAE and the second to Qatar.
A key change has also been the quality of engagement. Modi recognised that developing a personal connection with the emirs was key to advancing the ties with the region. The Gulf monarchs value personal ties at the leadership level and are ready to calibrate their national policies based on mutual trust and political give and take.
The second is in the political domain. For a long time, there was not much “political” in the Indian engagement with the Gulf beyond Delhi’s public support for “Arab causes”. Although Indian support to the big Arab issues was welcome in the Gulf, there was much disappointment in Delhi’s lack of interest in a broader strategic engagement. While India focused on declaratory positions — anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism — it seemed to have little interest in Arab political and economic life beyond those issues. There is a strong strain of pragmatism in Arabia that India struggled to work with in the past. That has changed.
The setting up of the I2U2 group in 2022 — with India, Israel, the US and the UAE — and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor announced on the margins of the G20 summit underline the radical reorientation of India’s geopolitical engagement with the Middle East. If Delhi had kept its distance from the US and the West, Israel and the conservative Arabian kingdoms in the past, they have become valuable regional partners today.
Third, India’s past impractical approach was reinforced by the tendency to view the region through a religious lens. The country’s partition on religious lines and Pakistan’s outreach to the Middle East seeking Islamic solidarity inevitably complicated independent India’s diplomatic strategy in the Gulf. There was an overestimation of the religious factor binding the Gulf and Pakistan, and an underestimation of the depth of goodwill in Arabia for India and the desire for greater cooperation.
Discarding the Pakistan obsession has been a major factor in boosting India’s ties with the Gulf over the last decade. Delhi and Islamabad have traded places in the Gulf. As Modi celebrates India’s special relationships with the Gulf, Pakistan struggles to build productive engagement with the region.
The Swaminarayan temple in Abu Dhabi reflects an important new trend that is not fully appreciated in India. The outflow of radical Islamic ideas from Arabia in the last quarter of the 20th century had negatively affected the Subcontinent. Today, religious conservatism at home and the export of radicalism abroad in Arabia are yielding place, especially in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, to growing religious tolerance. The unfolding social and religious reform in Arabia would hopefully dampen the rise of religious extremism across the Subcontinent and help restore harmony between different religions and sects.
Fourth, the last decade has seen the relationship move from purely transactional to strategic in the economic domain. The talk in Delhi about the economic rise of India had not been matched by a recognition of the Gulf’s emergence as a major centre of global capitalism. The accumulation of hydrocarbon wealth over the decades has generated “Khaleeji capital”— in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — with growing influence around the world, from sports to real estate and banking to technology. If India’s focus in the past was on oil purchases, labour exports, and hard currency remittances, the potential of the Gulf’s capital to accelerate India’s economic growth has come to the fore today. Modi’s visit to the UAE and Qatar this week will continue to focus on leveraging Gulf cooperation in India’s economic modernisation. As the Gulf looks beyond oil and broadbases its economy, it invests big in green energy, space, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence. This has opened unlimited possibilities for long-term economic partnerships with India.
Finally, the last decade has seen the expansion of counter-terror collaboration between India on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the other. If there is one area that remains well below potential, it is the defence domain. Today, the Gulf countries are trying to diversify their defence partnerships amid the shifting regional geopolitics and are looking to India to redeem its claims to being a regional security provider. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have also emerged, in their own right, as major geopolitical actors in the Western Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
Although the scale and scope of India’s military exchanges with the Gulf have grown, much more can be done, including the joint development of weapons and military technologies. In his recent speeches, Modi has talked about doing bolder things in his third term. That new agenda for the Gulf must include deeper cooperation with the region in promoting prosperity and peace in the Western Indian Ocean.
The writer is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
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