India Outside In #4a: What does Modi's 'unprecedented' outreach to the Gulf and Israel mean for India?
Part 1 of a conversation with Nicolas Blarel, author of 'The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922.'
“When I was reading a lot about the nature and history of India’s Israel relationship, there was not a strong public, think tank debate about the cost and benefit of normalising relations with Israel. It was very binary. Academics were largely a pro-Palestine community, and there was barely any discussion of what would happen if India engaged Israel, and very few advocates of relations. PR Kumaraswamy at JNU was a lone advocate at the time.
And now, 10-15 years later, after normalisation in 1992, we have a completely reversed debate. Now you barely have any discussion about what are the costs of India’s relations with Israel, for the relations with other Middle Eastern actors. Or what would India do if the current government in Israel, which is criticised both internally and externally, is increasingly ostracised by the broader international community.”
That’s Nicolas Blarel, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, and author of The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922.
I’ve been meaning to have Nicolas on the newsletter for some time now, in part because his research interests – India’s ties to Israel, the Arab World and the Gulf in particular, as well as broader questions of how India’s foreign policy evolves with inputs from beyond Delhi – tie in so well with many of the topics we discuss on India Inside Out. We ended up having such an interesting, and long, discussion that I’ve had to split it into two parts.
But before we get to part 1 of the interview, quick updates on two big developments in India.
At the Special Session of Parliament this week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced a constitutional amendment that would reserve 33% of seats in the lower house of Parliament as well as state assemblies for women. If it passes both houses - it was approved in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday - the quota will mark a major shift in Indian politics. But the details in the bill make it contingent on the delimitation exercise – an updating of constituencies – which has been kicked down the road for decades due to regional sensitivities, and can only take place following a census, making implementation unlikely before 2029 at the earliest. More on this from Apurva Vishwanath, Harikishan Sharma.
Days after being read the riot act in Delhi over his government’s inaction on Khalistani separatists, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told his Parliament that investigators “have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.” Canada later expelled an Indian diplomat, leading India to carry out a tit-for-tat expulsion, while terming the Canadian allegations as “absurd.”
A Washington Post report suggests that Canada had been trying to get its Five Eyes allies to publicly condemn the killing, but they didn’t want to get dragged in ahead of the G20. Now Canada’s very loud accusation – without making any evidence public – puts New Delhi-Ottawa relations in cold freeze, and might be a speed bump in the broader story of India-West ties. Read this backgrounder, Avinash Paliwal on how it goes beyond the bilateral, earlier speculation about an Indian campaign against the Khalistani movement and Mihir Sharma on the fallout.
India Outside In #3: Nicolas Blarel
Some of India’s most important partnerships at the moment are with countries in West Asia. The United Arab Emirates is one of India’s biggest and most important trading partners, ties with a rapidly transforming Saudi Arabia have the potential to grow massively, and the Israel relationship has exploded in significance over the last two decades. And then there are the nine or so million Indian citizens who live in the region, a huge source of remittances – and influence.
Nicolas Blarel’s work sits across all of these subjects, and much more. His 2015 book on India-Israel ties is a vital account of one of the most unusual foreign policy stories in modern international affairs. In 2022, with Crystal Ennis, he edited a book on The South Asia to Gulf Governance Migration Complex, bringing an International Relations scholar’s eye to a subject and population that is often ignored. He has also written about how regional parties influence foreign policy in India and looked at the broader question of India’s strategic culture.
Given my interest in India-West Asia ties – not just because of their current prominence, but also as a kid who grew up in the Gulf, and as a consequence of my current perch in Egypt – I was very happy to get a chance to speak with Nicolas Blarel about India-China relations in the region, how he sees Modi’s approach to West Asia and what he makes of the level of expertise on the topic in Indian circles.
Don’t forget to check out previous interviews on similar topics, including a conversation with Md. Muddassir Quamar on India-Gulf relations and Guillemmette Crouzet on how British India helped invent the Middle East.
Tell me about your how you came to work on India. Where does that interest come from and where has it taken you?
I spent the first six months of my life in Delhi. Obviously I don’t remember much of it, but my parents did, and for them it was a formative experience. I had for long wanted to go back and travel, based on their very positive recollections. At one point I got interested in studying politics and political science, and started thinking about why don’t I combine these two things – my interest in international affairs, history and political science, and my own growing interest in India.
During my undergraduate studies in France, I did an internship at this think tank called CERI at Sciences Po in Paris and I ended up working with Christophe Jaffrelot, noted researcher on Indian politics. I ended up working with him on a few projects as a research assistant and ended up writing alongside him and that’s when I decided to work on my Master’s thesis on India-Israel relations, which ended up as a book in 2015. That set the path for me to do my PhD on India’s foreign policy, I ended up going to the US and worked with another famous scholar of international relations in South Asia, Sumit Ganguly.
You said the internship shaped your choices, but did you go into university life expecting to study India?
I was a student of public administration and the history of European international affairs, but I also studied a lot of US foreign policy. I spent quite some time in DC.
One of the issues of studying in a French university at the time, there was really limited engagement with regions beyond the West, or the transatlantic. The history of international relations in the 20th century seemed very much limited to a Cold War lens, with not much understanding of the agency or the more complex history of other regions. South Asia was a very fascinating region, and much more interesting and new to me.
You’re currently at Leiden University, and do a whole bunch of things. Could you give us a little capsule of what you’re working on?
I’ve been here for nine years, joined right after my PhD. I’ve been working on India-Israel relations, and have broadened that to India’s relations with the Middle East or West Asia – beyond Israel to Iran and increasingly the Gulf states. Not just because it’s topical right now, but also because there’s a long history of interaction with the region that predates Independence, including British India’s engagement but also people-to-people contacts. I’m working on a longer project on this, India’s diplomatic relations with the GCC from pre-independence all the way to today, because there’s not much that has been written. I also worked on migration patterns and migration governance between South Asia and the Gulf States, with a book that came out last year.
I’m also interested more broadly in the making of India’s foreign policy, how it evolved from a very centralised decision-making circle with a limited number of actors and institutions to a more diffuse type of foreign policy, just because there has been more contestation with more political parties coming to power, having differing perspectives on national interests and foreign policy priorities and the means to attain them, and also the increasing role of regional parties, especially since the early 1990s, though I would argue there were interests even before, in Indian foreign policy. It’s one I want to push because I’ve only focused on the usual suspects so far – the interest of the Tamil parties in Sri Lanka, West Bengal on Bangladesh – but there are other interests in different regional parties in being able to shape foreign policy because they have all these priorities that might be complementary to the what the national interest decided in New Delhi, but sometimes they may contest it.
It’s why I’m very excited to have you on the newsletter not just because a lot of those subjects are interesting – but also for me as a Gulf kid, who now lives in Cairo and used to write a lot about federal issues, your range of subjects is fascinating.
We have to start somewhere, so: You wrote in 2020 about the potential rivalry between India and China in West Asia. At the time you suggested that China’s involvement would be more ad-hoc and transactional, while India was more likely to develop strategic ties with this space. We’ve now seen the Chinese step up their involvement, with the Iran-Saudi rapprochement and also potentially with the military in the UAE. How do you look back at your assessment today?
For context, that chapter was in a book about India-China relations, and other chapters look at the two countries’ ties in other regions as well. You’re right I argued that just by geographical determinism, India would be a much more sustained and strategic partner, because of long historical ties between the region and because geography shapes common security interests, whether it is piracy, maritime awareness and other factors. China was, in a way, late to the region – a lot of its embassies in the GCC only opened in the last 10-15 years. For me this was a recent and more commercial relationship.
Things have changed. Since the chapter, there have been the Abraham Accords, there has been this Chinese mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran. These are interesting new developments of China taking a more active diplomatic role. On the military dimension, it’s less clear if they’re ready to be a security provisioner or play a strong security role in the region. They might have to, to protect some of their investments, just as India might have to. But I still think the main argument stands. China is hyped up and publicised in its role as mediator, because it is in China’s interest. It isn’t purely an honest broker, just as the US in the region was never purely an honest broker. It is in China’s interest to stabilise the region. China has major connectivity and energy interests in Iran and increasingly in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
And that’s another thing I mentioned in the chapter. China and India have a shared interest in the stability of the region – because they need the energy and they also need the money that’s coming from these sovereign wealth funds, for their own infrastructure projects. These common interests may not drive cooperation between China and India in the Middle East but the relationship won’t be as tense or zero-sum as it is in other regions where their interests aren’t directly overlapping.
I do think India has a role because of what came afterwards – the Abraham Accords – which has led to the I2U2 – the Israel-US-India-UAE ‘quad’, or the West Asian Quad as it has been called. Then there is this more recent announcement of a connectivity partnership between Saudi Arabia, India, US and the UAE, with possible rail links coming from these actors, and India playing a strong role in that railway infrastructure.
[Note: I interviewed Nicolas Blarel before the IMEC connectivity announcement was made on the sidelines of the G20. More on that project in a future issue of the newsletter, and we will also get Nicolas’ reaction to it in Part 2 of this interview].
Those are also new developments with a US role helping India balancing these relationships. Because the US is also helping India navigate more smoothly and finding a greater role than if it was directly competing with China, since it doesn’t have the infrastructural experience or perception of effectiveness that China has built through initiatives like the Belt and Road. These minilateral partnerships give India more of an entry to play a bigger role than if it was competing directly with China on some of these projects.
This is also welcomed by the GCC and Israel, which have become a little concerned over the last few years about Chinese investments on sovereign infrastructure and industries. China is welcome, but will that turn into structural dependence vis a vis a rising China in the region? So the fact that India is another player is welcomed by those in the region. They’re also hedging. For them it’s about getting the best out of the competition between India and China, US and China – it’s basically fair game in the current great power competition.
You’ve been looking at India’s ties in this region for a long time. Your book about India-Israel ties is not just about those two countries, but it tells the story of India’s engagement with West Asia in general. In a piece that came out in 2021, you said that the contours of the Modi government policy towards the Middle East are still in flux, and it’s not clear if the government has succeeded in bringing about the transformation promised through the Think West policy. Are those contours concretising a bit now?
The framing of that 2021 article is, has there been a change in India’s foreign policy under Modi? My argument at the time was that it was still not clear. But it was a continuation of what had come before, because the outreach to the Gulf States had begun under the Congress, over the 10 years that predated Modi coming to power. On the India-Israel relationship, it’s true that Modi and the BJP like to publicise a strong relationship with them, but the normalisation of ties happened under a Congress government in the 1990s, and the acceleration of defence ties happened under Congress governments in the 2000s.
What was the major structural change or qualitative change under the Modi government? When I wrote the article, it wasn’t clear to me. I saw hints of the evolving partnerships with the GCC. That’s one of the major achievements, not just in the Modi government's West Asia policy, but foreign policy in general.
The Modi government starts this major outreach in 2015, with the Modi visit to the UAE. You see sustained efforts since then. Modi has been three times to the UAE, has visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman – this is unprecedented. You never had an Indian PM visiting all these different Gulf states and coming up with important deliverables, including the free trade agreement with the UAE.
You’re starting to see, after a couple of years of establishing the bases, the substantive delivery of the cultivation of those partnerships in the GCC. It’s also quite solid now. I’ve written a couple of articles, co-authored with Sumit Ganguly, on the GCC’s responses to communal problems in India, particularly during the Covid period and more recently in what has been called the ‘Prophet’ remarks. In both articles, I find that this was an important test of the rapprochement between the GCC countries and India and to be fair the Modi government has been quite active in trying to deescalate these tensions, and also the GCC governments have been trying to decouple the strong economic and security ties from the communal question within India. They were much more critical, for example, in the 1990s.
We’ve seen a major change in the perception of the GCC towards India, over the last 20 years, but particularly since Modi came to power. That’s the major change.
The corollary is a downgrade in relations with Iran. That was a strong relationship under the Congress and also under the previous BJP government of Vajpayee. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a future improvement in relations, but I see more of a future for Modi’s India and the GCC than with Iran.
A behind the scenes question here. You brought out lots of tools to study these relationships. What is your sense of the depth of scholarship or day-to-day understanding in the MEA of these ties? Despite the growing importance of them, the feeling is that they don’t get the attention that they need. Has this been changing? Is there capacity to understand these ties? How do you go about it?
Studying India-West Asia relations is a much harder topic than studying India-US ties. You do see a wide diversity of expertise and debate about the nature, advantages and cost about stronger relations with the US. I see much less of it on India-Israel or India-GCC ties, despite such a rich and complex subject. There has been strong scholarship on India’s West Asia or Middle East relationships, historically. There have been a few area studies centres, like at JNU, strong scholarship and good scholars, including at places like Jamia Islamia. So there was initially strong expertise.
In my book on India-Israel, you see a series of articles debating the opportunity and cost of developing or normalising ties with Israel at different times. There were these debates that seem to have been forgotten. Now it seems like Israel was always a natural partner.
What’s unfortunate when you see people writing today about India’s relationship with the Middle East is a very presentist bias, not actually going back to all these sources, with debates that actually took place, that are not hard to find. You have to dig a bit, but it’s there. But it does require a more sustained, long-term research effort than just picking up a recent development from the last five years. I think it’s important to understand the degree of continuity or change.
But you can only do that if you’ve actually studied the long-term debates, because these are still shaped by the same drivers – geography, energy needs, the presence of large numbers of migrants since the 1970s. A lot of India’s migration governance policies are shaped by that diaspora in the Middle East, and not so much the visible, successful diaspora that we see in Western countries.
That’s why a better understanding of the history of India’s relations with the Middle East, whether it is people to people connections, energy, trade is vital. There are a lot of secondary accounts, that are easily accessible that were written by good academics in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s. If you have a bit of time to look at the National Archives or the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library, there’s a lot there. And it’s not that controversial, like India-China or India-US issues, where concerns of national security limit access to the archives. For India-Middle East there’s a lot there. In my own research on India-Israel, I only dug a bit in the surface, because I focused on Israel, but ended up touching on India’s relations with Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, other Middle Eastern countries, but I didn’t dig too deep. There’s much more there.
This is really important to understand contemporary policies, both the opportunities and constraints.
I wonder how that plays out in terms of expertise within government.
This is one of the things that’s been changing. For the book, there were a couple of diplomats that I interviewed extensively. You can still meet diplomats who were posted there from the 1970s and onwards. There was an expertise that was natural, because they had been posted in a number of different Middle Eastern countries over the years. It was fascinating talking to them especially about the changes that happened in the 2000s, that they witnessed directly. I interviewed a few ministers as well, I talked to Jaswant Singh, and more recently talked to Shiv Shankar Menon about these ties. This was important, to get personal and practitioner perspectives alongside the archival research.
That’s how I saw there was a strong expertise. The problem is, and it’s not just the nature of the MEA but most diplomatic services, is that you move around, you rarely have experts of a particular region. A few do develop that. These diplomats, because of their personal interest and the contingent history that they ended up being placed in a couple of postings in the region gave them more experience. But most diplomats have been moving around, and there’s no sustained expertise.
That’s why academia and the think tank world is important. And this is where I saw a change when I started working on India-Israel relations and then got interested in broader India-Middle East ties. I noticed that, in the think tank community, there wasn’t that much expertise on the Middle East or Israel. Most of them are academics who were consulted by these think tanks, like IDSA. Over the last few years, a few think tanks have developed expertise on the region. At the Observer Research Foundation, for example, you have Navdeep Suri, Kabir Taneja, so you’ve seen an interest. But I still don’t think it’s sufficient.
I’ll give you one example. My frustration was that when I was reading a lot about the nature and history of India’s Israel relationship, there was not a strong public, think tank debate about the cost and benefit of normalising relations with Israel. It was very binary. Academics were largely a pro-Palestine community, and there was barely any discussion of what would happen if India engaged Israel, and very few advocates of relations. PR Kumaraswamy at JNU was a lone advocate at the time.
And now, 10-15 years later, after normalisation in 1992, we have a completely reversed debate. Now you barely have any discussion about what are the costs of India’s relations with Israel, for the relations with other Middle Eastern actors. Or what would India do if the current government in Israel, which is criticised both internally and externally, is increasingly ostracised by the broader international community. What about the fact that the previous Congress government and now the current Modi government has pursued a free trade agreement with Israel for the past 15 years, and it hasn’t gone anywhere? So there are constraints and problems with the relationship, but we don’t see that. We only see one side of the debate. This is why a good historical, IR, policy expertise on the region is important to see those nuances.
Look out for Part 2 of the conversation with Nicolas Blarel next week. In the meantime, send feedback and suggestions to rohan.venkat@gmail.com