Opinion C Raja Mohan writes: Why Modi government condemned Hamas attack – and Congress did not

Five broad changes stand out.

The first was PM Modi’s decision to bring India’s relationship with Israel out of the closet and signal full political ownership. To be sure, it was Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who ended the policy of keeping a distance from Israel. P V Narasimha Rao followed through by establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel. Atal Bihari Vajpayee built on the foundation and ended Delhi’s reluctance to host the Israeli Prime Minister. But the UPA government, under pressure from the left and Congress’s confusion over the Middle East, went back to pious posturing and drawing the veil over deepening security ties with Israel. Modi, in contrast, discarded Delhi’s traditional inhibitions on acknowledging the growing convergence of interests between India and Israel. He also became the first Indian PM to visit Israel.

Second, the NDA government has sought to align India’s position closer to the realities on the ground. While Congress continues to believe that Delhi must bear (or at least pretend to) the cross of the “Palestinian cause”, the NDA government has come to terms with the fact that several Arab countries have begun to make their peace with Israel without preconditions. The violent religious extremism of Hamas and other forces threatens not only Israel but also moderate Arab states in West Asia. These shared concerns have opened much space for cooperation between Israel and several Arab states. It’s a pity that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist politics prevented Israel from taking full advantage of the possibilities to build a “New Middle East” in partnership with Arabs.

The divisions within Palestine, too, have become deep between the Palestine Authority in Ramallah and the Hamas in Gaza. Contrary to widespread perception, the NDA government is not abandoning Palestine. It maintains solid ties with the PA, and Modi travelled to Ramallah in 2018. The NDA continues to support a two-state solution to the crisis in Israel-Palestine relations. The Modi government is unwilling, though, to fudge the question of terror as the Congress Working Committee did on Monday or hide behind “root causes” (the Palestine question) to stay silent on the Hamas attack. “Root causes”, it might be recalled, is also part of Pakistan’s argument that there can be no peace with India (and no end to cross-border terror) until the Kashmir question is resolved (to its satisfaction).

Third, the political focus on India’s current solidarity with Israel masks the extraordinary transformation of Delhi’s ties with the Arab world in the last decade. For all its rhetoric on supporting Arab causes, the UPA government struggled to modernise the relationship with Arab countries. Under the NDA, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have emerged as important strategic partners. If India was hobbled by its mercantilist approach to the oil-rich Gulf in the past, the Khaleeji capital today promises to contribute massively to economic growth.

Fourth, the NDA government ended India’s traditional anti-Western stance in the Middle East. Limiting the Anglo-American role in the Middle East was among the main objectives of Indian diplomacy in the Nehru years. As Indian foreign policy acquired a more radical orientation in the 1970s, bashing the West passed off as policy. Today, India is in a quite different place; it partners with the US, Israel, and the UAE in the I2U2 grouping. Delhi has teamed up with the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to build a corridor between the Subcontinent and Europe through the Arabian Peninsula. India’s unambiguous critique of Hamas terror puts it on the same side as the West, even as Russia, China and much of the Global South offer a wishy-washy “two-handed” reaction to the terror attack. The clarity of India’s response underlines its interest-driven foreign policy.

If the refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine was shaped by the need to protect Delhi’s long-standing equities in Moscow, Delhi’s staunch support to Tel Aviv is rooted in the centrality of the terror question in India’s security calculus.

Finally, the biggest change in India’s Middle East policy under Modi remains understated. It is the de-linking of India’s regional diplomacy from religion. The partition of the Subcontinent based on religion and Pakistan’s quest for mobilising support in the Middle East in the name of Islamic solidarity severely complicated India’s engagement with the region. This was further muddied by Congress’s claim for the Muslim vote at home. If Congress’s reaction to developments in the Middle East continues to be shaped by the religious question, many on the Hindu right, too, tend to view the region through the prism of faith. Shared religious identity with the Middle East also dominates the political discourse in Pakistan. The region’s recent history shows how nationalism, ethnicity, tribalism, and sectarianism continue to trump presumed Islamic solidarity. If the pragmatic pursuit of common interests with the Arab world has produced many gains for Delhi in the last few years, the framework of religious kinship has yielded little dividend for Pakistan.

As the current tragedy propels the politics of the Middle East into a new and dangerous moment, one thing is certain — the region demands greater Indian contribution to its stability and prosperity. The Indian political class, in turn, must shed its self-referential discourse without respect for structural trends in the Middle East and build a new national consensus on engaging the region.

The writer is senior fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express