Opinion Saudi troops march into Bahrain

In India,all those fulminating at the prospects for Western

intervention in Libya and emphasising the holy principle of

‘non-intervention’ are not likely to utter a word against the House of Saud; because it is politically incorrect.

This does not mean,the Saudi action in Bahrain will not have its unintended consequences.

The tiny island state Bahrain is linked to eastern Saudi Arabia by a cause way and is virtually a political extension of the Saudi Kingdom.

Riyadh has traditionally lent strong support to Bahrain’s Sunni

minority that rules over the Shia majority.

As the Shia in Bahrain pressed for political reform,Saudi Arabia feared that the aspirations for change might infect its own population,especially the restive Shia minority in the oil rich eastern part of the kingdom that borders Bahrain.

As demonstrations continued in Bahrain and some were threatened in Saudi Arabia,Riyadh hinted at a muscular response. It has kept its word. It cracked down hard to prevent a ‘day of rage protests’ in Saudi Arabia last Friday and moved quickly into Bahrain.

For good measure,Saudis took the precaution of getting a regional multilateral cover. It organised the intervention in the name of the Gulf Cooperation Council,the regional forum that binds the six monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula.

Saudis are betting that their intervention draws a line against

further instability in its neighbourhood.

But there is no guarantee that the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia and the Shia majority in Bahrain will take this lying down. Nor will Iran keep quiet; it has many levers to bother the Saudis.

The Saudi move reframes the current turmoil in the Middle East by lending it a sectarian dimension. The Arab Shia,it is said,have not enjoyed either majority rights or minority rights.

At least until George W. Bush intervened to overthrow the minority Sunni rule in Iraq and allow the majority Shia to gain their rightful place in post Saddam Iraq. Initial reports from Iraq suggest there is much concern among the Shia majority there about Saudi intervention in Bahrain.

Besides Bahrain,where they are a majority,the Shia constitute significant minorities in Saudi Arabia,Kuwait,United Arab Emirates and Oman.

The Saudi move also adds to the growing recent tensions between Riyadh and Tehran,which has not been shy of standing up for Shia rights and more broadly contest the Saudi dominance of the region.

Saudi intervention will also alter the focus of the world’s attention from the internal struggles for change in the Gulf to its geopolitics.

Until now the Indian foreign policy discourse tended to view the Persian Gulf from two very limiting prisms: one is the paradigm of ‘West versus the Third World’ and the other is the framework of Israel versus the Arabs.

Any sensible policy of India,which has huge interests in the Persian Gulf,must begin to adapt to the deepening of the Arab-Persian divide and the sharpening Shia-Sunni contradiction in the region.