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)