Source: Indian Express
The visit of Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi this week is part of Delhi’s unprecedented political and diplomatic engagement with a volatile region that is so vital to India’s security and prosperity. If Delhi’s approach to the region in the past was defined by political diffidence, pragmatism now shapes the Modi government’s outreach to the Middle East. Unlike his recent predecessors, Modi is willing to explore the prospects for a strategic Indian role in the region.
Recall that the Middle East did not figure in the list of foreign policy priorities identified in President Pranab Mukherjee’s first speech to Parliament under the Modi government in mid-2014. During its initial months in power, the government seemed more interested in underlining its special interest in Israel. Its regional diplomacy has come a long way since then.
To be sure, the NDA government has brought India’s partnership with Israel out of the closet. President Mukherjee’s visit to Israel at the end of 2015 was the first by an Indian president. In doing so, Modi has also ended Delhi’s obsession of viewing the region solely through the prism of Arab-Israeli conflict. No nation in the Arab world is making Israel the touchstone of relations with the rest of the world.
On his part, the PM, who did not travel to the region during his first year in office, has more than made up since. Over the last one year, the PM visited the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar and Turkey. Vice President Hamid Ansari, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and the newly appointed minister of state, M.J. Akbar, are all contributing to India’s new diplomatic activism in the Middle East. The intensity of this engagement stands in contrast to the UPA government’s passivity in the region. During his decade-long tenure as PM, Manmohan Singh barely made it to the region four times. Two of those were for non-aligned summits — in Egypt during 2009 and Iran during 2012.
India’s relations with Egypt do indeed reflect the twists and turns in Indian foreign policy in the Middle East. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, unveiled an all-round outreach to the Middle East by signing a series of friendship treaties across the region — from Iran to Turkey. But Egypt was very special. It was Nehru’s special bond with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser that captured the political essence of India’s regional policy — bilateral partnership, Arab solidarity and the construction of the non-aligned movement.
After Nehru and Nasser, India’s bilateral relations with Egypt steadily declined as Delhi became increasingly defensive in the Middle East.
If the impact of the Cold War, the region’s shifting international relations and the rise of Islamist identity in the Middle East produced new constraints on Delhi from the 1970s, India’s inward economic orientation, an ideological foreign policy and the temptation to elevate domestic political considerations above national interest contributed to Delhi’s steady marginalisation of the region. India’s growing oil imports from the region and its manpower exports did generate greater economic interdependence, but the political class was unwilling to build a strategic edifice on it.
It was only with economic reforms and the reorientation of India’s foreign policy since the turn of the 1990s that the Middle East began to acquire a new salience in Delhi. One particular problem since the end of the Cold War has been the fact that India’s gaze towards the Middle East has drawn closer towards our own frontiers, especially the Gulf region. This, in turn, contributed to the reduced interest in Egypt. Modi, however, appears eager to change this.
Thanks to the PM’s special outreach to Sisi at the United Nations General Assembly last year, the Egyptian president has chosen to visit India twice in less than a year. Sisi was in Delhi for the Africa Summit last year. After Nehru, the visits of Egyptian leaders to India have been rare. President Mohammed Morsi, who rose to become the head of Egypt after the Arab Spring of 2011, was the first to visit India in 2013 after three decades. Neither Modi nor his Egyptian guest would want to recall Morsi, who was ousted from power by Sisi in 2013 shortly after his visit to Delhi.
Under Nehru, India’s relationship with Egypt was not constructed on slogans alone. Nehru’s support for Nasser on the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, so central to Egypt’s national identity and economy, was critical in consolidating the partnership. It was also defined by India’s contribution to the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile and in exploring joint defence projects like the building of a jet engine and a fighter aircraft.
Today as Egypt faces many urgent imperatives — defeating the threat to the current political order, accelerating economic modernisation, and regaining its regional primacy — Modi must offer unstinting support to Sisi. This must involve four important elements.
First, the PM must publicly affirm India’s faith in Egypt’s natural leadership role in the Middle East and Delhi’s conviction that it is a matter of time before Cairo overcomes some of its current problems and regains its centrality in the region. Second, Delhi must outline a set of urgent measures that will help Sisi demonstrate quick and visible economic improvement for Egyptian citizens. While Delhi can’t deploy the kind of resources that Beijing can mobilise for massive infrastructure development, there are other areas like job creation that the Indian public and private sector could contribute to.
Third, Modi must seek significant expansion of security cooperation to counter international terrorism in the subcontinent and the Middle East. Fourth, Delhi and Cairo have a common interest in a stable Gulf region. Modi and Sisi can order their military establishments to develop a coordinated approach to regional security in the Gulf.
The context in the Middle East today is vastly different from that which brought Nehru and Nasser together six decades ago. Yet, the current regional dynamic and their common interests suggest there is much that Modi and Sisi can accomplish together.
This article was originally published in the Indian Express.