EDITORIAL: Confirming media reports that India has been providing drones and artillery shells to his country in its war on Gaza, a former Israeli ambassador to New Delhi, Daniel Carmon, has justified it as reciprocation for Tel Aviv’s support during the 1999 Kargil conflict with Pakistan. “The Indians”, he said, in an interview with a news outlet of that country, “don’t forget this and might now be returning the favour”.
Indeed, New Delhi received military supplies, including guided munitions and drones from Tel Aviv for its confrontation with Pakistan. This though did not happen in a vacuum. Although after initially voting against the establishment of Israel, India recognised it in 1950; but relations remained lukewarm in the next five decades; for the most part because India under Jawaharlal Nehru, who along with four other leaders, including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, founded the Non-Aligned Movement, did not want to offend the Arab countries. So the friendship failed to gain traction.
Interestingly, however, as revealed by thousands of Israeli documents declassified earlier this year, from the mid ’60s onwards the country, surrounded by its then hostile Arab neighbours, started forging ties with Hindu nationalist parties in India for their hatred of Muslims.
The strategy worked best when Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, and openly embraced Israel becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. The bond since has been growing from strength to strength, reinforcing ties in trade, defence and some other fields.
Yet adept at playing the game of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, the Modi government has strongly condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza, terming the humanitarian crisis in the besieged enclave as “simply unacceptable”. That it said while supplying the aggressor with lethal weaponry for its campaign of genocide against the Gaza Palestinians.
Not very different is the policy towards the wider Gulf region. On the one hand, India maintains close economic and political relations with oil-rich Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, describing them together with Israel as its strategic partners.
On the other hand, it has significant economic engagement with their regional rival, Iran, from which not only it imports oil — disregarding US sanctions on that country — but has also helped Tehran develop the Chabahar Port which is to serve as major trading hub, connecting India via the port to Afghanistan and Central Asian states.
In theory ethics are central to international relations, but in practice increasingly assigned to the margins. India, obviously, subscribes to another view advanced by some scholars, according to which, the states’ behaviour is neither moral nor immoral — it is simply amoral. Ethics have no places in the conduct of its foreign policy.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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