Opinion C Raja Mohan writes: What Indian PM’s first visit to Kuwait in four decades means for diplomacy in Middle East

Then, as now, there was little internal criticism of the government’s refusal to condemn Saddam Hussein’s unacceptable aggression by India’s political class or the foreign policy elite. Many arguments were offered to suggest that Saddam Hussein was “provoked” or “trapped” into invading Kuwait — somewhat similar to the argument that Brezhnev had no option but to send troops to Afghanistan and Putin was provoked to attack Ukraine.

To be sure, as a post-colonial nation, India is deeply committed to the inviolability of territorial sovereignty as the core principle of international relations. Delhi was reluctant to condemn these invasions because Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union were, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a close partner of India. Many countries don’t like criticising their partners. India is not alone in finessing the tension between principles and interests. All countries do it. India’s problem in 1990 was not about hypocrisy that is endemic in international relations.

Part of the problem was in assessing and dealing with the geopolitical implications and consequences of Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait. The Gulf Arabs as well as Egypt and Syria got together to support a massive American expeditionary army to force Saddam Hussein to vacate the occupied territories and restore the sovereignty of Kuwait within a year.

Another element of India’s problem was its well-established affinity with Ba’athist leaders like Saddam Hussein in the Middle East. Hafez al Assad and his son Bashar are part of that Arab tradition as well. In the second half of the 20th century, Delhi was comfortable with the radical nationalist Arab Republics that espoused pan-Arabism, socialism, secularism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Zionism. But the Ba’athists tragically turned out to be extremely authoritarian as well.

Despite much goodwill for India in the conservative Gulf monarchies and the growing energy imports and labour exports, Delhi tended to view them through the prism of Pakistan and struggled to develop a positive engagement strategy. The relationship with Kuwait, unsurprisingly, was a casualty from India’s Iraq policy during 1990-91. It was well into the 2000s, when high level visits between Kuwait and India resumed. After Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s visit to Kuwait in 1981, Vice President Hamid Ansari’s visit to Kuwait in 2009 was the highest visit.

Even as the Gulf’s energy, economic, and security salience grew in the 21st century, the region remained low on India’s diplomatic priorities. During the UPA’s decade-long rule, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited three Gulf countries one time each — Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The Modi years have seen a definitive change. The PM has visited the region frequently — seven times to the UAE, two times each to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and once to Bahrain and Oman. His travels to Kuwait this weekend closes the circle on this comprehensive engagement. The past few months have seen preparations for Modi’s visit with the exchange of visits by the two foreign ministers setting the stage for the PM’s travel. High-level visits are only one metric of the engagement between any two nations.

What we have seen in the last decade is the qualitative transformation in ties between India and the Gulf monarchies — from strong personal rapport between the PM and the Gulf rulers to the intensity of commercial engagement and from security partnerships to connectivity projects. The Arab Gulf today has emerged as one of the highest strategic priorities for Delhi. Few other relations of India have transformed as dramatically as Delhi’s ties with the Arab Gulf nations over the last decade.

It is entirely accidental that the PM’s visit to Kuwait comes days after the swift collapse of the last Ba’athist ruler in Syria. If India’s ties with Kuwait were troubled by Delhi’s dalliance with the Ba’athists, the fall of the Assad dynasty marks the long overdue political booster shot for India’s relations with Kuwait. The downfall of Assad also underlines the tragedy of Ba’athist republics that turned into horrible dictatorships in which the security services brutalised the populations. The monarchies, which were once reviled by progressives around the world, have turned out to be less repressive than the Republics in the Middle East.

Some of them, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are now undertaking significant reform that seeks to promote religious moderation, social modernisation, and economic transition away from oil revenues. On all these counts, the Arab Gulf is a natural partner for India. Meanwhile, Pakistan has ceased to be a complicating factor in Delhi’s relations with the Arab monarchies that now attach higher weight to ties with India. India’s partnership with the moderate Arab states — including Egypt, the Gulf, Jordan, and Morocco — acquires a new importance amidst the scramble for post-Assad Syria and the inevitable reordering of the Middle East.

Deeper engagement with the moderate Arab states demands better appreciation of their core concerns in Delhi. This in turn will involve discarding many of the old Indian premises about the region. Delhi also needs a clear assessment of the hierarchy of contradictions between the moderate Arab states and the non-Arab powers of the region – Iran, Israel, and Turkey. The moderate Arab states have no desire to restore the Ottoman imperial hegemony over their lands or acquiesce in Persian claims for regional primacy. Nor do they want radical Islamist republicans to replace the Ba’athist Republics and sow regional chaos. They deeply resent Israel’s refusal to accommodate the Palestinian concerns. A more flexible Israel could make it easier for the moderate Arab states to build cooperation with the Jewish state in stabilising the Middle East. Having bet on hopes for positive ties between Israel and moderate Arab states in the form of the Abraham Accords, India ought to nudge Tel Aviv in the direction of accommodation. Modi’s visit to Kuwait, then, must be seen as an important first step in upping India’s game in a Middle East poised for deep structural change.

The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express