India’s tortuous stand on the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict reveals a fascinating portrait of the recent evolution of its foreign policy. For decades after Independence, India’s approach to the world was guided by its historical experience of western colonialism. After 200 years of a foreign country speaking for it on the world stage, newly-independent Indians, led by the fiercely anti-colonial Jawaharlal Nehru, were not willing to surrender their freedom to make their own decisions by joining either alliance in the Cold War. “Strategic autonomy” thus became an obsession, leading to the birth of “non-alignment”, or equidistance between the superpowers.
It was a complicated stance. As a leading voice for decolonisation, Indian moralism against imperialism and apartheid often manifested itself as anti-westernism, and indeed on such matters it often found itself ranged alongside the USSR and against the West, even while the country’s steadfast adherence to democracy and diversity at home endeared it to liberals in the West.
When the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition the former British Mandate Territory of Palestine into two states, Israel and Palestine, India voted against. As the victim of a British-driven partition of its own territory to favour a religious minority (when Pakistan was carved out of India’s stooped shoulders by the departing imperial power), it had no desire to acquiesce in another partition to create a Jewish state. India argued for a single secular state for both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, much like the state it had established for itself. It was, however, outvoted on the matter.
When Israel was indeed established, India duly extended recognition, but kept relations at consular level for more than four decades. In the meantime, it became the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1974, and to formally extend recognition to the Palestinian state in 1988. It was only in 1992 that relations with Israel were also upgraded to Ambassadorial level.
The turning point
The onset of Pakistan-enabled Islamic militancy against India, however, prompted New Delhi to see greater merit in warmer relations with Tel Aviv. With both countries sharing similar enemies in Islamist extremists, and both enduring terrorist attacks from self-declared holy warriors, security and intelligence co-operation between the two countries began to grow. Gradually, political and diplomatic relations blossomed.
At the same time, successive Indian governments, conscious of the sympathies of India’s own substantial Muslim population, continued to extend support to the PLO. When Yasser Arafat abandoned the gun for a peaceful solution to the long-simmering conflict, India too became a votary of the two-state solution, calling for Palestinians and Israelis to live in security and dignity behind recognised borders in their own lands. Today, India is one of a handful of countries to maintain Ambassadors in both Tel Aviv and Ramallah.
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The India-Israel relationship has appreciably strengthened in recent years, with Israel becoming a vital source of defence equipment, intelligence co-operation and, reports allege, of surveillance software for use by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly autocratic government against its own domestic opponents and critics. The personal warmth exhibited by Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi in their meetings symbolises the extent of their closeness. Mr. Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel and Mr. Netanyahu has twice travelled the other way.
So when terror struck Israel on October 7 with the killings of 1,400 and the abductions of 200 more of its citizens, Mr. Modi was swift to respond, tweeting that India stood in “solidarity with Israel in this difficult hour”. A second tweet soon followed, in similar vein, as did a telephone call of support to Mr. Netanyahu. The Israeli retribution was loudly cheered on by supporters of Mr. Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, whose antipathy to India’s Muslims is no secret.
The erosion of India’s one-sidedness
The mounting death toll in Gaza from Israeli bombardment and the relentless media coverage of the destruction of neighbourhoods, hospitals and places of worship, however, began to erode the one-sidedness of India’s stand. After some days, the country’s External Affairs Ministry put out a statement voicing support for the “resumption of direct negotiations towards establishing a sovereign, independent and viable state of Palestine, living within secure and recognised borders, side by side at peace with Israel”.
Editorial | Lost voice: On India’s abstention on the Gaza vote at the UN
But the Prime Minister’s Twitter-finger was not so quickly deployed. A call to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to convey his condolences for the loss of innocent lives as a result of the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, was all he managed to do to express sympathy for the victims of Israeli retribution in Gaza. Though Mr. Abbas is in Ramallah and has no control over Gaza, since he heads the Fatah faction of the PLO to which Hamas is unalterably opposed, Mr. Modi no doubt believed this would redress the balance that had been disturbed by his uncritical support for Israel.
India then announced that Mr. Modi had “reiterated India’s long-standing principled position on the Israel-Palestine issue”.
And yet, when the United Nations General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority to call for an “immediate, durable and sustainable humanitarian truce”, India chose to abstain, on the grounds that the resolution had failed to condemn the terror attacks of October 7. But several other countries, including France — historically an ally of Israel — had voted for the resolution while, in a speech explaining their vote, deploring its failure to condemn terrorism. India’s stand was, in other words, more pro-Israeli than France’s — and France, unlike India, was historically an ally of Israel.
It struck many as odd, to put it mildly, that the land of Mahatma Gandhi did not vote for peace, and that a country which calls itself the voice of the Global South took a stand that isolated it from the rest of the Global South. Though a corrective occurred at the United Nations General Assembly this week, when India finally joined the overwhelming majority (153 to 10, with 23 abstentions) to vote, for the first time, in favour of a resolution in the UN General Assembly that demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the conflict, the echoes of the previous vote have not died down.
China’s rise, an American affinity
Despite many areas of continuity, India’s foreign policy has begun to change in important areas under Mr. Modi, arguably beyond recognition on the Israel issue, and more subtly in other areas. The rise of China has already prompted a greater affinity to the United States and its strategic concerns about Beijing’s intentions, concerns which New Delhi has good reason to share after the killing of 20 soldiers in Galwan in June 2020.
It was not surprising, therefore, that, in keeping with its new receptivity to U.S. strategic thinking, India associated itself with the reorientation of the geopolitics of the Middle East following the Abraham Accords, joining a quadrilateral dialogue dubbed the “I2U2” (India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the United States). The G-20 summit in New Delhi announced IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe-Economic Corridor), an India-Middle Eastern Economic Co-operation initiative whose trade route would go from India through Saudi Arabia to the Israeli port of Haifa.
Though that scheme now lies in ruins along with most of Gaza, the intentions are clear. With Russia a decreasingly useful partner in global geopolitics, and China nibbling away at India’s disputed frontier with it, the makings of a fundamental reorientation have become apparent. Gaza is the latest manifestation of a perceptible change in India’s view of the world.
Shashi Tharoor, a third-term member of the Lok Sabha (Congress), representing Thiruvananthapuram, is a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, former Minister of State for External Affairs, and former Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Effairs. He has written extensively on international relations and foreign policy. Among his 25 books are Reasons of State (1981) and Pax Indica (2012), plus the co-authored The New World Disorder (2020, with Samir Saran)
