Is India widening the Gulf?

In its adrenalin rush to make amends for the Cold War and thrust itself into a tight embrace with the all-powerful Americans (from which, admittedly, there’s no real rescue), the BJP-led government in New Delhi seems to have ignored a truly friendly neighbourhood right next door. With few exceptions (notably Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani who visited Qatar a few weeks ago, en route to France, but part of that reason was that his IAF plane couldn’t fly for more than four hours at a stretch and needed to refuel somewhere), hardly any minister in New Delhi has bothered to make end-destination stops in the Gulf’s many kingdoms. The big joke in Muscat is that when BJP leader Sikander Bakht came to Oman in the wake of the December 2001 attack on Parliament, bringing with him a letter from Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee for Sultan Qaboos, his delegation spent most of its time quarrelling with each other.

Travelling through Oman, the unadorned truth seems to be that India has precious little time for old friends. That, ironically, New Delhi is hardly using its newfound friendship with the US to expand its own economic and strategic interests in the Gulf. External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha’s big, new idea of cementing old bonds and creating new alliances through the sparkle and glint of money has fallen through a big hole recently discovered on the sea route from Mumbai to Musandam. The latter, incidentally, is an entrepot strategically located right on the tip of the Straits of Hormuz and controlling access into and out of the Persian/ Arabian Gulf.

Maqbool bin Sultan, Oman’s very sophisticated Commerce Minister, whose family is said to have emigrated from Gujarat a couple of centuries ago, says he has been trying to push the idea of an India-Gulf free trade area and has, only a couple of months ago, succeeded in convincing New Delhi to put together a GCC-India economic forum. He pointed out that the Gulf was already ‘‘speaking in one voice’’ after putting together a Customs union and harmonising tariff structures and that a monetary union as well as a single currency (probably called the khaleejo, with khaleej meaning island in Arabic, of course in flattery of the Euro) was well on its way.

On the other hand, he sadly added, Oman had spent as much as $80 million in the last decade since India opened its economy to ‘‘look’’ at projects in India. That the only thing to show for this decade was an India-Oman fertiliser project, which had begun construction only recently. ‘‘It takes years and years in India to do anything. There is a lot of bureaucracy and red tape,’’ he said, adding, ‘‘We hope it will get better. The future of the 21st century is with India and China.’’

Of course, the Chinese have already created a storm in the region by their proposal to build a rail link across the six nations of the region. Analysts point out that even if this were only propaganda, the fact that Beijing sent a 100-member trade delegation to tiny Oman recently, surely made Sultan Qaboos and his countrymen sit up.

In contrast, New Delhi seems content to lazily let its large expatriate population — mostly from Malabar in Kerala — perform, in the name of foreign policy, a largely blue-white collar operation. Small details stand out in the big picture. Like the fact that India and the UK were the only two countries to have a mission in Oman when India became independent in 1947, but Muscat’s gleaming embassy row waterfront still doesn’t fly the tricolour. (We’re getting there, we’re told.)

Tragically, for the average Gulfwallah, India still remains the fount of an inexhaustible supply of cheap labour that New Delhi refuses to protect, but lets crooked recruiting agents (complete with political connections) conduct business. Worse, despite the fact that Indians form the backbone of the working class and have done so for decades, New Delhi has hardly been able to leverage its regional power and potential — especially after its nuclear tests — to provide security comfort for the nervous nations of the Gulf.

Still, India’s information technology boom could offer a second life here. The inevitability of a US-led war in Iraq, significantly, seems to have at last pushed the MEA to take stock of its assets and liabilities. At a recent meeting in Abu Dhabi with Yashwant Sinha, Indian envoys pointed out that the Arab world was quietly lining up with the US in its effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein because of the troubles that he had brought upon his own people as well as in the region. That India, while supporting the people of the Gulf, must take its post-war interests into account. Far away in Washington about ten days ago, Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal is said to have told the press that India would do exactly that.

Time was when Sindbad the Sailor left the Omani port of Sohar on his adventures around the world (Sindbad is also claimed by Iraq, but we won’t go into that). In Muscat these days, people are scanning the horizon to see when New Delhi wakes up to the potential of the Seeb and Salalah.