“Jerusalem has been a holy city for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Lately, it has also become a holy city for the Indian armed forces.”1 Though odd—and some might say controversial—this formulation aptly reflects the newly found Indian fondness for Israel. Since the establishment of relations in January 1992, India has come a long way. Within a short span of time, bilateral relations have flourished considerably, often frustrating countries whose historic ties with India could not match the profile that Israel has acquired within a decade of normalization. The transformation has been astronomical.
In 1947, represented by the Congress Party, the Indian nationalists opposed the partition of both India and Palestine. They were not prepared to accept the notion that religion could be a defining identity for nationalism. Recognizing the Muslims as a separate “nation” that entails a separate state would have opened a Pandora’s box. The presence of over five hundred princely states at the time of the British withdrawal frightened them. Endorsing a religiously based self-determination was seen as detrimental and disastrous for India, a country of diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and caste-based divisions and cleavages. The Indian leaders were equally realistic. Despite their deeply seated reservations and disapproval, they were prepared to accept the partition of the subcontinent along communal lines. A large portion of the Muslim community rejected Pakistan and stayed behind in a predominantly Hindu but secular India. This not only vindicated the ideological stand of the Congress Party but also provided an opportunity for free India to establish its secular credentials.
India exhibited the same political realism vis-à-vis Israel. Its advocacy for a federal solution and opposition to the partition plan in the UN Special Committee were part of its larger position regarding religious nationalism. During its freedom struggle, India saw Zionism as the external version of the Muslim League and subsequently Israel as another Pakistan. As with the partition of the subcontinent, New Delhi was prepared to accept the political situation of the Middle East. Israel had become a reality and was recognized by a host of countries, including the rival bloc of the cold war. The hopes for a Palestinian state never materialized because of inter-Arab squabbles and aggrandizement. India thus had to approach Israel realistically. If it could accept a “religious partition” in its neighborhood, how could it adopt a different position with respect to the Middle East?
There was a fundamental problem, however. While the Indian readiness to accept Pakistan was quick, formal, and complete, Israel was less fortunate. Indian recognition took more than twenty-eight months to materialize, and it was not followed by normal relations. In the initial years, it was eager to establish full relations with Israel, and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made a formal commitment when the senior Israeli diplomat Walter Eytan met him in New Delhi on March 4, 1952. Nehru even asked the foreign ministry to prepare a budget for a resident Indian mission in Tel Aviv. This never materialized, and normalization became entangled in Indian domestic politics.
Nehru’s cabinet colleague and close confidant Maulana Azad was often blamed for the situation. But the problem was much larger. Since the early 1920s, the Indian nationalists perceived the Middle East, especially Jewish political aspirations in Palestine, through an Islamic prism. Mahatma Gandhi was more honest and candid than most of his contemporaries and successors. He was prepared to see the Arab opposition to Jewish aspirations in Palestine as an Islamic and not a nationalist issue. He openly endorsed the concept of Jazirat al-Arab and argued that the Islamic lands of Palestine must not be handed over to non-Muslim rule. He accepted the divine injunctions of Prophet Mohammed over Islamic places and explicitly ruled out non-Muslim sovereignty.
As a country with the largest Muslim population in the world, British India could not ignore the Islamic dimension of the problem. The Congress Party sought to expand its support among Muslims and counter the efforts of the Muslim League by adopting pro-Muslim and pro-Arab positions on the Middle East. The Congress Party, however, projected this pro-Arab policy through secular rationales. Anticolonialism, anti-imperialism, and opposition to religion-based nationalism became its main arguments regarding the yishuv.
This Congress Party–Muslim League rivalry took a different turn after 1947. Contrary to the expectations of the historian and future diplomat K. M. Panikkar, free India did not adopt a “Hindu” view toward Zionism, if this had ever been feasible. It still had a large Muslim population, and Israel became a Middle Eastern pawn in the Indo-Pakistan rivalry. If the Congress Party was competing with the Muslim League in the past, now the competition operated at two levels. Domestically, the support of the Muslim population was essential not only for the electoral success of the Congress Party but also to maintain its secular credentials vis-à-vis the Hindu nationalist parties on the right. Externally, India was competing with Pakistan for political favors from the Islamic countries, especially over the Kashmir dispute. To complicate matters, Nehru had to deal with Israel’s regional isolation, India’s strong political and economic ties with the Arab world, and his own evolving friendship with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The domestic dimension has perhaps been the most important factor in shaping India’s understanding of the Jewish history and political struggle. While the Pakistan factor has received considerable attention internally, the domestic dimension still remains taboo. There are honorable exceptions, such as Appadorai, but for the most part mainstream scholars carefully avoided and still avoid discussing the influence of the domestic Muslim population upon India’s Israel policy. Such an inquiry was dismissed as communalization, partisanship, or as being part of a right-wing agenda. It never occurred to them that the foreign policy of a democracy is a function of its domestic politics and that Indian Muslims have strong historic, cultural, and religious links with the Middle East. The absence of dispassionate debate regarding the domestic inputs into India’s Middle East policy remains a major challenge. This is further compounded by India’s policy of not releasing official papers pertaining to even Nehru’s tenure as prime minister (1947–1964).
The absence of relations and avoidance of serious debate over the domestic dimension have made Israel the most controversial aspect of India’s foreign policy. Ever since the issue was first raised in the Constituent Assembly in December 1947, more than five months before its establishment, Israel remained a hotly contested and passionately debated foreign-policy issue in India. For the non-INC opposition parties, Israel became an important political instrument to criticize the government. During upheavals like the June war, the Indian parliament witnessed heated, uproarious, and acrimonious debates. At times, the Indian government found itself on a shaky wicket, for example during the row over the September 1969 Rabat fiasco.
India’s Israel policy is not exclusively domestic. Such an understanding would be wrong, misleading, and incomplete. While domestic concerns regarding the Muslim population resulted in India viewing the Jewish-Israeli problem through an Islamic prism, there are also other secular and nonreligious considerations. Its concerns vis-à-vis Pakistan in the Middle East are driven by calculations of national interest. The numerical strength of the Arab and Islamic countries and Pakistan’s efforts to forge an Islamic front dominated its thinking. This competition at times resulted in India making controversial choices, like its futile attempts at attending the Rabat conference.
Indeed, for decades Pakistan functioned as India’s litmus test for its relations with the outside world. This, however, could not be implemented in the Middle East. Its pro-Palestinian stance did not yield political dividends in the Middle East, and on numerous occasions it was disappointed over Arab support for Pakistan. The lack of Arab reciprocity during conflicts with Pakistan did not result in any dramatic Indian moves. India could neither demand reciprocity nor retaliate for the Arabs’ pro-Pakistan position. In fact, India could not even publicly criticize the Arabs for letting their old friend down during crucial moments. If its political leverage, especially after 1962, was limited, its economic leverage was non ex is tent. It was vulnerable to Arab economic and energy pressures. India settled for the least resistance: suffering in silence. By not openly discussing the Arab reaction and by praising their “understanding,” it sought to minimize any negative fallout. By not responding forcibly, it hoped to convince the Arabs to reexamine their pro-Pakistan position. Thus India never took the Arabs to task for their prolonged pro-Pakistan stance and their refusal to accommodate India despite the latter acceding to their demands on Israel. Thus India kept Israel at a distance to placate the Arabs, but the latter had no qualms about cozying up to Pakistan during its conflicts with India. This Indian path led to a peculiar development when it acknowledged Arab “help” during its conflicts even while it was receiving unacknowledged military assistance from Israel.
When Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992, he completed a process that began over four decades earlier. India became the last major non-Islamic country to establish full relations with the Jewish state. Through normalization, Rao put an end to India’s treating its relations with Israel as a zero-sum game. No longer would India assume that support for the Arabs and Palestinians had to be accompanied by a total absence of formal ties with Israel and that even a modicum of relations would be a betrayal of the Palestinians.
This shift was possible both because of the end of the ideological divide in international relations and due to specific circumstances that enabled India to revisit and re orient its Israel policy. The international community, especially in the Middle East, has been less hostile to Israel since the end of the cold war. For the vast majority of Arab and Islamic countries, there is no military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In practical terms it is no longer an “either/or” question. Unlike the past, India can maintain cordial ties with Israel and with the Palestinians. Its new desire for great-power status and its growing economic strength have resulted in India gradually diluting the Pakistani factor from the Middle East. The region has ceased to be a battleground for Indo-Pakistan diplomatic rivalries.
The domestic Muslim opinion has shown signs of accommodation on Israel. Improvement in Israel’s diplomatic status in the Islamic world resonates among Indian Muslims. Although their pro-Arab sentiments are visible and palpable when the peace process turns violent, they are not blind to the growing political recognition of Israel by countries such as Saudi Arabia. Rabid opposition to Israel’s right to exist is largely confined to marginal radical elements. The mainstream Islamic world has serious differences with Israel’s policies but less with its existence.
During the cold war, the Indian approach to the Middle East had the peculiar feature of being a zero-sum game. It was unable to decouple its bilateral relations with Israel from the wider problems in the Middle East. In its assessment, the furtherance of its interests in the Arab world demanded not only remaining distant from Israel but even treating it as an outcast. By not establishing formal ties with the Jewish state, it sought to promote its interests in the Middle East. It was unable to make a distinction between bilateral ties and multilateral problems. It had yet to learn the art of conveying its disagreements with the policies of Israel while maintaining formal ties. It is often forgotten that even those parties that clamored for the normalization of relations were equally critical of Israel’s occupation of the Arab lands following the June war. Normalization did not have to be an endorsement of Israel’s policies. But India was not pursuing a nuanced approach.
Thus the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992 has to be seen within the wider context of the far-reaching domestic changes that were happening within India. Despite the obvious shortcomings both within and outside the country, there are today suggestions of a “rising” India and unmistakable signs of great-power aspirations. The tone for this grand self-imagery, both problematic and exaggerated, was set by some of the critical decisions taken by the Rao government, which signaled the arrival of a new India. While pretending to adhere to the “continuity” of Nehru’s sociopolitical model, the Congress Party made nuanced changes. Its leadership signaled a reorientation of foreign policy and in the process redefined India’s role on the world stage. Abandoning the Soviet model, the Indian leadership also opted for economic reforms that fundamentally changed its domestic and foreign-policy priorities. The transformation was slow but decisive, and it resulted from a set of complex social, political, and economic factors and compulsions that affected every aspect of the Indian polity.
The period between the late 1980s and the early 1990s was one of immense political instability, social turmoil, and economic crisis. Political violence and separatist militants in Punjab, Kashmir, and the northeast undermined internal security. These challenges were complicated by political ineptness, raising doubts about national unity and cohesion. Within a span of six years, both Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv fell to terrorists. Perpetual discord over caste and communalism threatened social cohesion. The decision to empower members of lower castes through increased affirmative action resulted in a backlash from those wedded to meritocracy. Around the same time, Hindu-Muslim community harmony reached its nadir. Decimated in the earlier elections, the Hindu right sought better political fortunes by raising the question of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. There were widespread tensions and communal passions in different parts of the country, which, coupled with the shortsightedness of political leaders, considerably weakened many institutions of the state and undermined the principle of secularism enshrined in the Indian constitution.
These in turn adversely affected the Indian economy. The Soviet Union, its principal supporter during the cold war, was preoccupied with its own survival and was not in a position to come to India’s rescue. Mikhail Gorbachev was increasingly sucked into the political and economic mess of the Stalinist model of state capitalism. In 1991, India had the dubious distinction of having to fly out and mortgage two hundred tons of its gold reserves just to pay for a two-week import of essential commodities. The defeat of the Congress Party in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections unleashed the phenomenon of coalition politics and weak and unstable governments at the center. The Congress Party lost its hegemony in Indian politics and was forced to share power with various regional parties, factions, and leaders. Their unfamiliarity with foreign policy proved costly when India endorsed the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait by closing its embassy in Kuwait City in early August 1990. The international climate was equally challenging. The cold war was moving to a close, and the Soviet Union was crumbling along with the Iron Curtain. The Iraqi action against Kuwait shifted global attention from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Persian Gulf.
In short, this period witnessed India undergoing an organic crisis. The convergence of domestic turmoil and major shifts in international politics remain the key to understanding the trajectory of the post–cold war foreign policy of India.
Democracies either find a way to confront grave threats or they cease to exist. To survive, the Indian political elites adapted themselves to the new situation and readjusted India’s overall economic and foreign-policy orientation. Both great-power aspirations and coalition compulsions prevented them from completely abandoning the past or capitulation. Under the leadership of Rao, they initiated a cautious path toward integration with the global market and reached out to the Western world, especially the United States. Driven by economic reforms, India consciously engaged Washington, and, discarding the ideological blinders of the cold war, the Indian establishment began to see the United States in friendlier terms. Those who for decades had harped on the entry of USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971 began recognizing the usefulness of Washington in furthering India’s great-power aspirations. Democracy and shared political values with the United States gained prominence.
To mend relations with Washington, India needed to convince the world that it was prepared to make a clean break from the past. If its cold-war worldview was truly obsolete, it had to make a visible foreign-policy gesture. This came in the form of normalizing full diplomatic relations with Israel. Besides political and geostrategic calculations, one cannot ignore the symbolic nature of the decision. Normalization of relations was announced literally hours before Prime Minister Rao left for New York to attend the summit meeting of the UN Security Council.
In making a break from the past, India did not take a U-turn. Such a move would have been detrimental to its aspirations of influence in the wider world. While normalization marked a new beginning, a zigzag policy would have been disastrous. Nor did the domestic and coalition situation enable the Congress Party to abandon its past policy regarding Palestine. This is marked by continued Indian support for the political rights of the Palestinians and their rights for statehood.
Normalization of relations with Israel marked a definite break from the past. Rao’s new approach to Israel was followed by mainstream political forces within the country. Despite occasional pressures from some Muslim and communist groups, India resolved not to revert back to the old ways of treating Israel as an outcast.
Interestingly, normalization also undermined some of the conventional wisdom regarding Indian foreign policy. Normalization did not happen when India was witnessing political stability, economic growth, or Hindu-Muslim communal harmony. On the contrary, it happened when all of them were absent or most unfavorable. Indeed, within months after the establishment of relations with Israel, religious tensions reached its height when the controversial Babri Mosque in the sleepy north Indian town of Ayodhya was destroyed by right-wing Hindu activists, burying secularism in its rubble.
Likewise, the conventional wisdom argues that in parliamentary democracies weak governments cannot undertake strong, assertive, and far-reaching foreign-policy decisions. Political stability and single-party domination are often seen essential for a break with the past. The Indian example, however, exhibited the opposite. Rao indeed did not have a simple majority when he reversed the four-decade-old policy initiated by Nehru. Not only Israel but even a larger rapprochement with the West since the early 1990s was brought about by centrist coalition governments. There has been remarkable continuity in India’s foreign policy since the end of the cold war. Regardless of the hue of the coalition that forms the government in New Delhi, India’s foreign policy has been more realistic. Despite their differences when in opposition, both mainstream parties, namely the Congress Party and the BJP, have pursued a markedly pro-U.S. policy when in power.
Finally, India’s new foreign policy has abandoned its erstwhile binary shibboleths. Normalization and its new friendship with Israel has not meant the abandonment of the Palestinians. This approach has not been confined to the Middle East: there are other examples. Since the early 1990s, India has strengthened its relations with the United States without weakening its ties with the Russian Federation. Likewise, India seeks closer ties with both Tehran and Washington.
Normalization marked the second phase of India’s relationship with Israel, in which India recognized that it was possible and necessary to maintain closer ties with Israel and the Arabs. In this pragmatic worldview, India’s new relationship with Israel was not an abandonment, let alone betrayal, of the Palestinians. Given that the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors were seeking a negotiated political settlement with the Jewish state, there was no compelling reason for India to treat Israel as an outcast. Once the Madrid Middle East peace process began in October 1991, where was the need to be more Palestinian than Arafat?
Even nearly two decades after normalization, Israel continues to draw considerable attention within India. While progress has been slower than many have hoped, relations have blossomed. Even the al-Aqsa intifada could not bring about a “course correction,” as many on the left demanded. Domestic pressures do result in India not favoring any high-profile contacts with Israel, the visit of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in September 2003 being an exception. With the sole exception of Egypt, most of the Arab and Islamic countries have come to terms with Indo-Israeli bilateral ties. Significant improvements in its relations with principal Islamic countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia happened after and not before Indo-Israeli normalization. Even Pakistan, which in the past was paranoid about an Indo-Israeli “conspiracy against the Islamic world,” is not averse to moving closer to Israel.
India’s relationship with Israel has slowly moved into a third and more complex phase: namely, the delinking of bilateral relations from the vagaries of the Middle Eastern peace process. It has strong reservations over the direction and substance of the peace process and differs with Israel over key issues such as Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, national boundaries, the question of Jerusalem, and combating Palestinian violence. Even the Hindu-nationalist government was not prepared to endorse Israel’s assassination of Palestinian leaders. During the second Lebanon war, even traditional supporters criticized Israel’s attacks against the civilian population. These disagreements have not prevented India from forging closer economic and military ties with Israel. By expressing its reservations over the peace process, India is contributing to the consolidation of domestic support for bilateral relations.
Vocally distancing itself from Israel’s controversial peace policies is essential if India is to consolidate bilateral ties. This is rather un-American: a robust bilateral relation with Israel accompanied by strong criticism over the peace process. Therein lies the long-term stability of Indo-Israeli relations.