While it would be churlish not to recognise that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has come out well from her first foreign policy crisis, it would be more than churlish not to recognise that our nurses returned safe because of the goodwill that India has built in the Arab world. That goodwill stands in danger of being dissipated if the BJP remains unwilling to nuance its pro-Israel, anti-Muslim approach to West Asia.
That is putting it bluntly, but the fact is that, perhaps for the first time ever, the president’s address on June 9―the new government's first policy statement―did not even mention West Asia and aggravated the omission by waxing eloquent on defence ties with Israel.
Then came Prime Minister Narendra Modi's reply to the debate on the motion of thanks, in which he thundered about how India had suffered not just 200 years of British rule but “1,200 years of mental slavery”. The first thousand of those years were the ones in which India had interacted closely with the Muslim world.
Contrast Modi’s vituperation with Indira Gandhi at Baghdad University (January 1975): “Arab civilisation dazzled the world with its brilliance”; the friendship between India and Iraq “is one of the oldest in history”; and how “during the high noon of the Arab renaissance, there was fruitful exchange between the philosophers and scientists of our two countries”.
If the new government continues to treat the Arabs as slave-drivers who only oppressed us for a millennium―which is the standard sangh parivar perspective―our relations with the Arab world will plummet.
The tone of the India-Arab relationship was set when Mahatma Gandhi wrote in the 1930s, “Palestine belongs to the Palestinians just as England belongs to the English and France to the French.”
In March 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru convened the first Asian Relations Conference. It was there, writes Shankar Sharan in an article commemorating 50 years of the conference, where the delegates from Egypt and the Arab League “disputed some of the statements made by the Jewish delegation. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, with tact and patience, controlled the situation and the whole assembly gave a thundering applause when the leader of the Jewish delegation shook hands with the Arab delegate.”
The following month, India was named in a UN committee to resolve the Palestine issue. India, herself recovering from the partition, took the principled stand that Palestine must not be partitioned. With pressure from the west and the Soviet Union, many UN members changed their views. But not India. We were the only non-Muslim country to vote against Palestine's partition.
Solidarity with Palestinians has been but one aspect of our relationship with the Arab world. When, in 1956, the British, French and Israelis declared war on Egypt over Colonel Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal, we were in the forefront to condemn the aggression. Along with us, Egypt became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement.
Pakistan’s attempts to portray itself as the wronged party in Islamic forums were thwarted by a phalanx of our Arab friends. And, as various Arab countries attained liberation, India was seen by them as a champion of their causes.
While the Arab world is in turmoil at present, whoever emerges victorious, India’s friendship will be valued. This has everything to do with the policy expounded by Rajiv Gandhi at the tenth nonaligned summit in Belgrade on September 5, 1989: “The people of Palestine are denied a state of their own in their homeland and subjected to unspeakable cruelties.... The Intifada is an authentic revolution of our times. We welcome the proclamation of the State of Palestine.”
And in return for such support, the Arabs of West Asia and North Africa have become host to 70 lakh Indian expatriates, and been our principal oil suppliers.
It would be a folly to leach that relationship of its significance to our national interests. Yet, there is the danger of that happening if the sangh parivar’s ideology is going to permeate our relations with the Muslim world. It is a tragedy that must be forestalled.
Aiyar, former Union minister, is an MP and a social commentator.