If you look beyond the procedural and technical explanations of India’s vote over the weekend at the United Nations General Assembly resolution on the war in Gaza, what stands out is an important change in India’s approach to the complex politics of the Middle East. India’s abstention on the Arab resolution calling for a humanitarian truce in Gaza, and support for a failed Canadian amendment condemning the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, mark a definitive shift in the evolution of India’s regional policy over the last three decades. The shift, contrary to the criticism of it, is not about India abandoning the Palestine cause. It has to do with replacing the traditional diplomatic formalism and a defensive political correctness with a policy rooted in a hard-headed assessment of the shifting regional dynamic, and India’s enduring interests, especially in relation to terrorism. In the past, India voted with the Arab resolutions against Israel as a matter of routine; Delhi also ducked the question of terrorism emanating from the Arab world. With its latest vote on the latest UNGA resolution, Delhi has underlined the primacy of its concerns on international terrorism without abandoning its demand for a two-state solution in Palestine.
While the new realism is welcome, the BJP government needs to guard against inviting the charge it used to level against the Congress party’s Middle East policy — of playing “vote bank” politics with a region that is of vital interest to India. India’s challenge is not with the nature of its UNGA vote that is non-binding and, in any case, ineffective. That nearly 140 nations in the UNGA have demanded that Russia end its Ukraine aggression over the last two years have had little impact on Moscow’s policy. In the hyper-realist world of the Middle East, the UN is not where the volatile region’s fate will be decided. Delhi’s real diplomatic task, therefore, lies outside the UN. It has three dimensions.
First is to step up outreach to the Arab world and explain Delhi’s abiding commitment to Palestine’s full statehood, publicly press Israel to respect the laws of war, and shore up humanitarian assistance to Gaza. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent telephone calls to moderate leaders of the Arab world, including Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, King Hussein of Jordan, Sultan of Oman Haitham bin Tarik and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, is a welcome first step. Delhi’s relations with the Arab leaders have never been as good as they are today, but India needs to complement it with a major diplomatic and political outreach to the Arab Street that is outraged by Israel’s brutal repression in Gaza and its current military operations. Second, the government needs to invite Opposition leaders for a full briefing and explain the considerations shaping its regional policy. By all accounts, the Opposition’s thinking on the Middle East is frozen in the past and an update is long overdue. And the serial blasts in Kerala on Sunday have underlined that both sides have a stake in insulating domestic politics from the Middle East crisis. Finally, Delhi can ill-afford to send out the impression that it is preventing pro-Palestine protests while encouraging demonstrations in support of Israel by groups on the other side of the ideological fence. Delhi needs to crack down on the extremist groups that are reportedly spreading disinformation in favour of Tel Aviv and participating in cyber attacks against Hamas sites. The BJP government cannot let fringe groups undermine its carefully crafted strategy of interest-based realism in the Middle East.
