As Iran and Israel threaten to plunge the Middle East into a dangerous regional war, India must stand by its Arab partners that are being squeezed by the conflict between the two countries. Unfortunately, there has been little appreciation of their concerns in the Indian discourse on the current phase of the conflict. The lack of public sensitivity to Arab perceptions of the conflict between Iran and Israel stands in contrast to the elevation of the engagement with the Arab world to the highest levels under the government of Narendra Modi over the last decade. Today, Iran and Israel attract significant and often passionate political support from India. Although they occupy much of India’s mind space, neither country matches the depth of India’s interests in the Arabian Peninsula.
There is no question that Delhi must necessarily pursue good relations with all the key actors in the Middle East. Each of these partners brings a unique set of benefits. But any objective construction of a hierarchy of Indian interests in the Middle East will easily demonstrate the superior salience of Delhi’s ties to the Arabs. Consider the simple metric of population. With nearly 500 million people spread across 23 states, the Arab world stands apart from Israel (about 10 million) and Iran (90 million) as a major commercial, technological, political, and diplomatic market.
Within the Arab world, the Arabian peninsula stands out in its strategic importance for India. With historic civilisational ties to India, a deep religious connection, massive financial clout, growing trade ties, role in energy security, embrace of a large Indian diaspora, Arabia overshadows Iran and Israel. Arabia’s attempts to promote moderate Islam have the potential to contribute positively to the Indian Subcontinent’s domestic and regional politics.
To be sure, India’s ties with Iran are as ancient and civilisational as those of Arabia. In fact, geographically, Iran is a little bit closer to the Subcontinent than Arabia. Its borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan make it a dynamic part of South Asian geopolitics. Iran’s geographic potential to serve as India’s bridge to inner Asian regions and bypass the political barrier that Pakistan has become, has seen Delhi devote significant diplomatic energies in cultivating Tehran. Iran is a hydrocarbon superpower with massive reserves of oil and natural gas. Above all, it has the natural resources and the political will to become a dominant regional power. But Iran’s ambitions have also produced problems of their own.
India’s ability to realise the full potential of cooperation with Iran is constrained by the prolonged confrontation with the West that Tehran is locked in, and the massive number of resulting sanctions. Worse still, Tehran’s regional claims and its revolutionary religious ideology have put it at odds with its Arab neighbours. India too has often been at the receiving end of Iran’s Islamist internationalism.
The overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 has had a lasting impact on the Arabian peninsula. Tehran’s quest to reorder the Middle East in consonance with its ideology makes it an existential challenge in the threat perceptions of the Gulf regimes.
Iran’s pursuit of regional primacy has seen the creation of proxies in the Arab world to promote Tehran’s influence. If India has been trenchant in criticising Pakistan for similar policies, it has remained silent on Iran’s negative role and supra-national claims in the Arab world. The question is not about hypocrisy or double standards in Delhi. Governments have their compulsions in what they say and don’t say. That should not preclude our foreign policy community and the political class from an objective discussion of Iran’s regional role.
Since India normalised relations with Israel at the turn of the 1990s, there has been a steady expansion of engagement between the two nations. Unlike the Congress governments, the NDA government has owned the relationship with Israel and given it greater substance. Israel has emerged as an important partner for India in a variety of fields, especially in the security and technological domains.
As Delhi has grown closer to Tel Aviv, Israel has lost much goodwill around the world, including in the West, thanks to its harsh policies in Gaza and the West Bank and a refusal to yield on the question of Palestinian statehood. Its disproportionate response to the October 7 terror attacks and the demand for absolute security have seen Israel lose more political ground in the region and beyond. Its massive use of military force is not leading to any significant political gains for the Jewish state.
This, in turn, has lent greater legitimacy to Tehran’s confrontation with Israel, its claim to regional leadership and has weakened the Arab states looking for reasonable solutions for the regional crises. Threatened by Iran’s growing regional clout, the prospect of its nuclear weapon capabilities, and the volatility in US policies, some Gulf Arab states have normalised political ties with Israel and expanded economic, technological, and military cooperation with it. The Abraham Accords of 2020 were premised on the hope that in return for deeper engagement with Israel, Tel Aviv would accommodate Palestine’s political aspirations. That has not materialised despite the best efforts of the Biden Administration over the last couple of years.
To ameliorate their precarious security condition, the Gulf Arabs have also sought to find common ground with Iran. That too has not gone too far, despite the recent agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia to resume diplomatic relations. As a senior official of the Gulf Cooperation Council put it recently, “Iran’s open support for designated terrorist groups, sectarian militias and other armed rebels acting outside the law in regional states has posed an impediment for normalising relations with the GCC.”
The differences between Arabia and Persia today are deep, ideological, and structural and unlikely to dissipate any time soon. The divergence between Arabia and Israel on the Palestine question has seemed more amenable to bridging in recent years. But that grand bargain on statehood for Palestine and a final Arab-Israeli reconciliation has remained elusive. On its part, Delhi must extend full political support for the normalisation of Arab ties with both Iran and Israel.
India’s prosperity is tied deeply to a Middle East that is at peace with itself, economically integrated, secure in its religious moderation, and becomes a bridge between the Subcontinent, on the one hand, and Central Asia, Africa and Europe, on the other. If the success of the moderate Arab states is critical for the realisation of this vision, Delhi must join hands with them in preventing the disastrous alternative of a total war between Iran and Israel.
The writer is the contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
