Delhi's Pragmatic Policy-Making

The Modi Government has done well to refuse to pass a parliamentary resolution criticising Israel for the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Israel is a friend and, like India, it too is also threatened by Islamist terror

 By refusing to censure Israel for its ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip, the BJP-led NDA Government has taken a firm and decisive steps towards correcting a historical anomaly in India’s foreign policy. Traditionally, New Delhi has been driven by a strong pro-Arab sentiment, which is what translates into its ‘full support for the Palestinian cause’ stand, even though this has hardly ever helped further our national interest. This policy-tilt can be traced as far back as the Khilafat Movement of the early 20th century which opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in the former Ottoman lands. Later, the Congress also adopted a negative approach towards Jewish nationalism, partly to offset the rising popularity of the staunchly anti-Zionist Muslim League which was then championing the cause of a Muslim homeland. But these appeasement efforts failed as India was eventually partitioned in 1947. By then, the pro-Arab/anti-Israel stance had been hardwired into Indian foreign policy thinking.This was not just a matter of political expediency but also the result of an ideological bias furthered in no small measure by the Mahatma himself. For the Indian leadership, which had just drawn the curtains on 200 years of British rule, Israel was (falsely) seen as a ‘colonial power’, an ‘occupying force’ — labels that still resonate with the old guard here.

Meanwhile, India’s radical support for Arab causes which continued at least till the 1980s brought it almost no rewards. For instance, the Arab nations never favoured India on the Kashmir issue, and till date, their support for Pakistan has not wavered. In fact, one of the reasons why Jawaharlal Nehru accorded official recognition to Israel in the late 1950s (full diplomatic relations were established much later), having opposed the Jewish nation’s membership to the UN in 1949, was because he was upset with Egypt for not supporting India on the Hyderabad issue at the global forum.

Over time, there were several such disappointments — including India’s exclusion from the 1969 Rabat conference which paved the way for the establishment of the powerful Organization of the Islamic Conference, whose doors are still shut for India. There is little merit in listing all such instances but it suffices to say that India’s Arab appeasement foreign policy, mostly an extension of the Congress’s Muslim appeasement on the domestic front, was a lonely, one-way street.

The situation changed gradually after the fall of the Soviet Union as well as India’s own economic liberalisation in 1990s. Though the pro-Arab rhetoric has remained, New Delhi’s policy towards Israel has changed dramatically. Following the establishment of full diplomatic ties in 1992, relations between the two countries have evolved rapidly — the extent and scope of which is not always acknowledged in public. Proof of this is the fact that Israel’s crucial support to India during the Kargil war is hardly ever publicised.

On the other end of the spectrum, India’s Arab appeasement tendencies have also dried up significantly. For instance, though India still allocates 20 million dollars for the Palestinian cause, it has toned down its official language on the Arab-Israeli conflict and taken a largely neutral stand in recent years, occasional deviations (such as the anti-Israel parliamentary resolution passed during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon) notwithstanding.

Against this backdrop, the new Government’s refusal to pass a parliamentary resolution criticising Israel essentially builds on processes that have been quietly underway for two decades now. The difference is that the incumbent BJP-led Government is not squeamish about India’s ties with Israel, and has no qualms in acknowledging that the Jewish nation has been a long-standing friend of India’s. Also, given its tremendous popular mandate, the Modi Government is neither beholden to the whims of coalition partners (such as the Left parties under UPAI which still romanticise the Palestinian cause, ground realities be damned) nor does it have reason to play vote-bank politics with the Muslim community. This, in turn, allows the Modi Government to take a clear-eyed view of the situation: First, India has no business meddling in the larger Arab-Israeli conflict; second, as far as the current crisis is concerned, it is a case of self defence which Israel, as a sovereign nation under threat, has the right to exercise.

The larger geo-politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict notwithstanding, there can be no two ways about the fact that this latest of fighting has been provoked by Hamas, the globally-designated terrorist group that has been controlling the Gaza Strip since 2006. It hoped that Israel would eventually retaliate and cynically strategised that it could use the assault to regain public support.

Hamas has been at its weakest — politically and economically — in recent times. Gazans are disillusioned with the group which has failed to govern entirely. Moreover, the group’s support bases in Syria have been destroyed and its patrons in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, is once again being driven underground by the military which has come back to power in Cairo. In fact, this was precisely why Hamas, after seven years of bitter rivalry, joined hands with Fatah to form a Unity Government in early June. The arrangement breathed life into the terror outfit which focused on doing what it does best: Street-level resistance. Hamas began firing rockets — first into southern Israel and then all over that country including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv — after Israel arrested many of the group’s supporters in the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers in West Bank, which in turn led to the retaliatory murder of a Palestinian boy.

After days of incessant rocket fire from Hamas, which could claim only one Israeli life, thanks to the enormously successful Iron Dome which intercepts such missiles, Israel retaliated with airstrikes on Gaza on July 8. Despite the rising Palestinian death toll as a result of Israeli bombing (not to mention Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields), Hamas did not stop its rocket fire and, in fact, spurned ceasefire offers. The situation took a turn for the worse on July 17 when 13 Hamas militants penetrated Israel through underground tunnels and killed two Israeli soldiers near Sufa kibbutz close to the border. The ‘discovery’ of these tunnels prompted an Israeli ground incursion, bringing back memories of the bloody 2008 Operation Cast Lead.

Essentially, Hamas has sought to attack Israel from the ground below, having failed to inflict any serious damage through airstrikes. This is not a new strategy (Hamas has similar tunnels on the Egypt border that are used to smuggle goods and weapons) but it has enormous security implications for Israel as the case of Gilad Shalit stands proof. In 2006, the Israeli soldier was taken from his border outpost by Hamas militants who had burrowed underground. He was released five years later in exchange for a 1,027 Palestinian militants, many of whom have since returned to their terrorist activities.

Still, the extent and sophistication of the tunnel network, worth millions of dollars (ostensibly Western aid that has been misused), seems to have taken the Israeli military by surprise. Dismantling these (and Hamas’s overall terror infrastructure in Gaza) requires a major on-the-ground offensive which is bound to take a heavy toll on Palestinian as well as Israeli lives. A UN-monitored demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip is the only way to break this cycle of violence, but it is unlikely without serious concessions from both sides.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on July 24, 2014)

BRICS: Getting Back to Business

The group's annual summits have been low on substance in recent years. Still, the upcoming gathering in Brazil has piqued some interest. It is Narendra Modi's first engagement at a multilateral forum and will probably see the finalisation of the BRICS development bank

Over the past few years, the six-country grouping of emerging market economies BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has lost much of its sheen. Home to 40 per cent of the world’s population and accountable for a quarter of the global output, BRICS was trumpeted to be the next big thing on the global stage — both economically and politically — but it seems to have been unable to live up to the hype in either case.

Economically, growth rates in all these emerging markets, except China, have dropped considerably. When Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs came up with the acronym in 2001, it was expected that, by 2050, the BRIC economies (South Africa was added to the group much later in 2010) could rival the G7 (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan) in terms of global growth. However, in August 2013, Mr O’Neill conceded that the group’s performance had been below par, that he was most disappointed with India’s record and the only country that deserved BRICS status was China.

Politically, the group was supposed to mark the turning point from a unipolar to multipolar global order. But here too BRICS had failed to consolidate its position primarily due to internal disagreements stemming from the group’s inherent dichotomies.
Consequently, the group’s annual summits that bring together the heads of all five member states, though high on style and show, have been low on substance in recent years. Nevertheless, the upcoming BRICS annual summit in Brazil has piqued some interest. This is not to say that there has been a drastic change in course for BRICS but recent developments in India and abroad give enough reason to keep an eye on the happenings in Fortaleza.

For India, the summit is of particular interest because it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first foreign engagement at a multilateral forum. He has been in office for less than two months during which foreign policy initiatives have received much attention. Mr Modi has made clear that his administration will focus on South Asia but outside of that there is little clarity on how he will script India’s engagement with the rest of the world. The BRICS summit is, therefore, his opportunity to add more substance to his foreign policy.
Much attention will also be on Mr Modi’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping — he has met neither leader since taking over as Prime Minister, so this will be a power-packed first. It will be interesting to see how the meetings play out because they will serve as a precursor to state visits scheduled for later in the year. President Xi is expected to visit India in September and President Putin in the coming months.

Another area of interest during Mr  Modi’s Brazil tour will be his meetings with a host of South American leaders. On the invitation of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is seeking to reiterate her country’s position as the regional leader, all BRICS heads of state will be travelling to Brasilia after the summit to meet with their counterparts from Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and Suriname.

It is unclear whether Mr Modi will have bilateral meetings with some or all South American leaders but his interactions will be closely monitored for clues on how India’s relationship with that region may evolve under the new regime in Delhi. Traditionally, India has not had close ties with South America but this has been changing, and in some cases rather rapidly so.

Across the world, the one announcement that has created much excitement about BRICS is that of the development bank. There has been talk of such an institution for a while now but given the many differences between the BRICS member states on key issues, including who would fund the bank and by how much, few had expected that the project would have a real presence outside the communiqués.
However, earlier this month, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Li Baodong announced that all five countries had reached a broad consensus on their $100 billion development bank. They have reportedly agreed to fund the bank equally — $10 billion each — to create a $50 billion corpus. Other details, such as the location of the bank (Mumbai, Shanghai and Moscow are all in the running although China’s commercial capital seems to be ahead in the race), however, are yet to be finalised.

Once established, the BRICS bank will serve as the developing world’s response to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which are dominated by the US and Europe. For long, emerging economies, who have to take out huge loans from these established institutions to fund their national infrastructure projects, have complained that such financial assistance often comes at a high cost — needless meddling in their sovereign affairs by Western powers. A BRICS bank may then allow emerging economies to sidestep these institutions altogether and, eventually, build their own global governance structures.
Providing an alternative to the existing Western-led political and economic international architecture has always been an important motif for BRICS. However, rarely has the mood of individual BRICS member states been so definitively anti-West. Brazil is upset about the snooping scandal, so is India. China does not appreciate Western interference in South China Sea while Russia is bristling about the sanctions imposed in the aftermath of the Crimean crisis.
President Putin, for one, has made a clear shift to the East. Apart from good relations with India, he has now sought to strengthen ties with Beijing in the hope that together they can take on an imposing West. Indeed, there is no denying that the Obama Administration is inadvertently pushing Russia into China’s arms. The landmark $400 billion gas deal signed between the China National Petroleum Corporation and Russia’s Gazprom is just one example. A decade in the making, it was finalised in May and paves the way for Russia to deliver about 38 billion cubic metres of natural gas a year to China’s burgeoning economy, starting around 2018 — thereby reducing Moscow’s dependence of the European market as well as diversifying China’s energy source basket. Similarly, a cash-strapped Russia’s decision to sell weapons to Pakistan, a friend of China’s may also be seen in this context.

Yet, not all is hunky dory in the blossoming China-Russia relationship. Moscow fears that it may be relegated to the position of a junior partner. In fact, China’s economic might is very much a matter of concern for all other BRICS countries, who worry that the grouping might become China’s fiefdom. In fact, this was one of the reasons why Russia, Brazil and India strongly opposed China’s offer to fund a larger share of the BRICS development bank corpus.

There are several currents and counter-currents at work here. The sixth annual BRICS summit will offer an interesting view into how they play out.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on July 10, 2014)