The Middle East in India’s Quest for Status

Introduction

The temptation to explain India’s foreign policy behaviour in the Middle East through the lens of power alone has obscured a rich history of Indian diplomacy in the region that escapes power-centric explanations. While theories of international relations such as structural realism that centre on power are typically intended to account for states’ alliance choices as a function of their relative position in the international distribution of power, they often have little to say about other forms of foreign policy behaviour such as advoacy, mediation, or peacekeeping among others. India’s moral leadership and diplomatic activism in the Middle East since 1947 demands, therefore, to be viewed through alternative theoretical lenses. India’s relentless advocacy for Palestinian statehood, its diplomatic support for the weaker Arab states against Israel and Western powers and its role in UN mediation and peacekeeping missions in the region are difficult to explain using a structural realist framework that privileges power alone.

This article builds on the growing scholarly interest in India’s status aspirations in the international system as an entry point towards a re-examination of India’s behaviour in the Middle East that de-centres but does not abandon the concept of power altogether. It argues that status and power have been articulated in various ways in India’s behaviour in the Middle East. Under prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, India pursued status without power, following a primarily normative strategy of status-seeking in the region. Although India was economically and militarily underdeveloped, Nehru and Gandhi managed to secure considerable deference towards India at the United Nations (UN) and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) through moral leadership and diplomatic activism on Palestinian statehood, opposition to armed interventions by Western powers in regional affairs and participation in UN mediation and peacekeeping. The end of the Cold War triggered a transitional phase in which international society no longer rewarded pro-Arab or pro-Palestinian positions in the way it previously did, implying that the normative incentive for India to pursue such positions diminished. Meanwhile, due to its economic troubles and political instability, India lacked the capabilities that it would have needed to seek status on the basis of power alone. This changed with India’s nuclear tests in 1998, which triggered international sanctions and ultimately paved the way for India’s accommodation into the international system. From there on, power began to underpin India’s approach to status-seeking as it engaged in naval diplomacy and made increasing use of its naval assets to conduct non-combatant evacuations from the region, thereby asserting its claim to higher status.

India’s Quest for Higher Status in the International System

The scholarly literature on status in international politics has paid considerable attention to India owing partly to the mismatch between India’s ambitions for higher status and the great powers’ perceptions of where India sits on the international social hierarchy. The unwillingness of the great powers to admit India as a permanent member into the UN Security Council (UNSC) or the Group of Eight (G8), for instance, are manifestations of the status inconsistency that separates India’s status ambitions from the way its status is perceived by the great powers (Nayar & Paul, 2003, pp. 12–14). In addition to the international constraints on India’s status recognition, internal developmental and political challenges have also obstructed its path towards higher status on the world stage. India’s low per capita income, for instance, allows it to view itself as a developing nation and therefore deserving of ‘special privileges of limited international responsibility’. However, India’s developing nation status in the domain of international trade is inconsistent with, and ultimately undermines, its claims for higher status (Narlikar, 2011, p. 1617).

To remedy its status inconsistency and alter international perceptions of its status, India has pursued various status-seeking strategies. During Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s term, India’s status-seeking strategy consisted of rejecting the pursuit of military power, assuming an active leadership role within the NAM and contesting the dominant norms of the international system (Basrur & Sullivan de Estrada, 2017, pp. 88–89; Nayar & Paul, 2003, pp. 17–18). India’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962, however, prompted a gradual shift away from its counter-order, normative strategy, pushing New Delhi further along the path of acquiring greater military capabilities. The 1962 war with China and China’s nuclear tests in 1964–1965 initiated a transitional period in India during which the impulse to mount a ‘low-risk normative assault’ on the international system coexisted with the impulse to acquire military capabilities and keep the nuclear option open (Basrur & Sullivan de Estrada, 2017, pp. 88–89; Nayar & Paul, 2003, pp. 18–19). According to this narrative, the end of the Cold War has inaugurated a third phase in India’s status-seeking strategy that is characterised by the embrace of military power and nuclear capability, the acceptance of dominant international norms including the marginalisation of NAM and the pursuit of closer ties with the great powers, especially the USA (Basrur & Sullivan de Estrada, 2017, pp. 88–89; Nayar & Paul, 2003, pp. 18–19). Facilitated by its converging threat perception of China with that of the USA, India has since secured considerable status accommodation within the international system. The 2008 US–India nuclear agreement, India’s membership in the G20 and the US pledge to support UNSC reform are strong indicators of growing international recognition of India’s status claims (Paul & Shankar, 2014, pp. 167, 179–186).

Although the scholarly literature on India’s status aspirations has alluded to its status-seeking behaviour in the Middle East, it has failed to appreciate fully the region’s importance to India’s quest for higher status. Nehru’s activism in supporting anti-colonial struggles in the region, opposing armed intervention by the great powers, mediating regional conflicts and contributing peacekeeping and observer forces were central to India’s claim to being a Third World leader. Since the Middle East was marginal to India’s core security and economic interests at the time, Nehru’s activism can scarcely be explained in terms of wealth or power maximisation. Rather, Nehru sought to position India as an important interlocutor for the great powers and an active member of international institutions such as the UN or NAM. Although several factors including the end of the Cold War, India’s ties with the USA and the growth in India’s military capabilities have reshaped India’s Middle East policy, Nehru’s normative, counter-order strategy—as Basrur and Sullivan de Estrada describe it—has continued to find lasting resonance in India’s Middle East policy.

Status Without Power: India’s Status-Seeking in the Middle East During the Cold War

Nehru was indisputably the architect of India’s foreign policy in the post-Independence period until his death in 1964. Nehru chose to pursue a normative diplomatic strategy in the Middle East that often put him at odds with the Western powers. To understand what animated Nehru’s diplomatic strategy in the Middle East, it is important to examine the ideational framework through which Nehru understood and dealt with international politics. Nehru’s non-aligned worldview was characterised by:

(1) alienation from the foreign policies of Western states in general; (2) an ambivalent attitude towards the main international actors, the United States and the Soviet Union; (3) opposition to all blocs and military alliances […] and (4) a belief in the moral superiority of the Indian approach to international affairs […]. (Keenleyside, 1980, p. 463)

In the initial stages of his intellectual development, Nehru advocated ‘the idea of nations giving up sovereignty to international institutions’ for the sake of world peace (Lerner, 2019, p. 1286). By abdicating sovereignty, Nehru thought, nations would resort to resolving their differences peacefully within an international institutional framework, obviating the need for war (Lerner, 2019, pp. 1285–1286; Rana, 1969, p. 300). Nehru’s internationalism was not driven solely by moral considerations, however; it was also driven by the need to shape a more benign international environment in which a weak India would remain secure (Rana, 1969, p. 300). But the collective traumas of colonialism and partition that Nehru underwent eroded his trust in international institutions and in the great powers (Lerner, 2019, pp. 1289–1292). As Nehru understood and confronted the limits of India’s ability to shape its international environment following Independence, he also developed an isolationist tendency that rejected the joining of blocs and military alliances (Rana, 1969, p. 302). Crucially, Nehru rejected power politics and upheld ‘a deliberate policy of friendship with other nations’ as both a more moral and effective means of achieving security (Thomas, 1979, p. 157). He rejected imperialism and the subjugation of nations by one another, viewing them as the main causes of war (Lerner, 2019, p. 1291).

In the Middle East, Nehru’s non-aligned worldview corresponded to a normative status-seeking strategy that involved advocacy of Palestinian rights, support for Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis and opposition to the US deployment of troops in Lebanon in 1958. The Arab states, which Nehru courted, were after all a bloc that carried electoral weight at the UN and the Afro-Asian bloc. Nehru, moreover, sought greater visibility and presence for India at the UN and the Afro-Asian bloc by mediating Middle Eastern conflicts and participating in UN peacekeeping and observer missions. Since certain Middle Eastern nations were still struggling to shake off European colonialism or to limit the intervention of the great powers in their internal affairs, the region presented Nehru with multiple opportunities to demonstrate India’s normative claims to higher status.

The Palestinian cause incarnated much of what India under Nehru stood for. Nehru viewed the Palestinian cause as an anti-colonial struggle to undo a situation that had been imposed by the European colonial powers, especially Britain (Mudiam, 1994, p. 145). His opposition to the partitioning of Palestine along religious lines echoed his opposition to India’s Partition between Hindus and Muslims (Mudiam, 1994, pp. 146–147). Palestine’s struggle for statehood, moreover, resonated with Nehru’s Third Worldist ideal of self-determination. As a result, Nehru tried hard to involve India in international deliberations on the future status of Palestine at the UN. He picked Asaf Ali, India’s ambassador in Washington, to represent India at the UN Special Session on Palestine in April 1947 and ensure that India was included in any fact-finding committee that emerged from the session. Nehru instructed Asaf Ali to advocate the ‘termination of the [British] Mandate and proclamation of the independence of Palestine’ (Blarel, 2014, p. 91; Kumaraswamy, 2010, pp. 91–92). At the UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), India proposed a federal plan that would unite two autonomous Arab and Jewish states within a single federal structure. The plan, which became known as the Minority Plan, was rejected both by the Arabs and the Jews, however. India’s federal proposal was shelved and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) passed Resolution 181 favouring partition (Blarel, 2014, pp. 95–96; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 104). Yet the intensification of violence in Palestine that accompanied British withdrawal prompted the formation of a Second Special Session of the UNGA in April 1948, which India hoped to use to bypass Resolution 181 and push through its federal plan. The announcement of the creation of the state of Israel, however, brought an abrupt end to the Second Session, dashing India’s hope of securing wider support for the federal plan (Blarel, 2014, p. 96; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 107). By inserting India into the UN discussions on the future of Palestine, Nehru hoped to position India as an interlocutor for the great powers and as an advocate for Third World nations in a bid to elevate India’s status in the international system despite its lack of military or economic resources.

Nehru’s advocacy for the Palestinian cause intersected in multiple and often contradictory ways with his commitment to multilateralism. Although Nehru’s advocacy for Palestinian rights secured for India a seat at UNSCOP and ultimately greater visibility at the UN, his respect for the UN framework often constrained his pro-Arab proclivities. Granted, India voted against Israel’s admission into the UN on 11 May 1949, but Nehru felt obliged to recognise Israel in September 1950 once it had gained UN membership (Blarel, 2014, p. 100; Kumaraswamy, 2010, pp. 111–112, 188). Nehru also sought to soften the stance of the Afro-Asian movement on Israel in 1954. At a preliminary meeting held in Colombo in 1954 for what later became the Bandung Conference, Nehru lobbied against the Pakistani proposal to condemn Israel’s creation as a violation of international law (Blarel, 2014, p. 121). Nehru also supported Israel’s participation at the conference, only to back down in the face of Arab threats to boycott (Blarel, 2014, p. 122). At the conference, Nehru called on the Arabs not to exclude a negotiated settlement with Israel and was instrumental in preventing Pakistan and the Arab nations from pushing through a resolution condemning Israel (Blarel, 2014, p. 123). Nehru’s pro-Arab stance, therefore, was partly conditioned on his respect for the UN framework. More often than not, however, India’s relations with Israel were constrained by New Delhi’s need to prevent Pakistan from forming a bloc of Muslim nations against India, even though a few important Muslim countries including Turkey, Iran and Indonesia had already recognised Israel.

Beyond Palestine, the 1956 Suez Crisis presented Nehru with another opportunity to press ahead with India’s status claims as leader of the Third World. India took an anti-imperialist position that opposed Israel’s invasion of Egypt and the deployment of British and French troops to the canal, which Nehru described in a speech at the Lok Sabha as ‘a flagrant case of aggression’ (Pradhan, 2004, p. 8). In letters sent to the USA and the UK, Nehru referred to the Israeli military operation as ‘clear, naked aggression’ and decried the return to the ‘predatory methods’ of colonialism (Blarel, 2014, p. 127). In parliament, Nehru again described Britain and France’s move as a return to the colonial practices of the past (Blarel, 2014, p. 128). According to Blarel, Nehru’s invocation of colonialism was an intentional attempt at framing the Suez crisis ‘as a de-colonisation and self-determination problem’ which ‘linked Israel with Western imperialism’ (Blarel, 2014, p. 128). At the UN, India played an active role in pushing for the withdrawal of Israeli, French and British forces from Egypt (Pradhan, 2004, p. 8). India also joined other regional players including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia in opposing the US Eisenhower Doctrine according to which the USA would respond to a request for economic or military assistance from any Middle Eastern nation threatened by communism (Pradhan, 2004, p. 8). The creation of the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) in 1955, which included Pakistan, had exacerbated India’s security concerns and tied the superpower rivalry in the Middle East more closely to its own immediate neighbourhood. In response, India backed the USSR’s Shepilov Plan that sought to prevent Middle Eastern states from joining military blocs (Pradhan, 2004, p. 8).

Once again, Nehru sought to mediate between the Arabs and the Israelis. India, which had taken a resolutely pro-Egyptian position, was invited to a conference in London in August 1956 whose aim was to review the 1888 Convention of Constantinople governing the control and use of the Suez Canal (Blarel, 2014, p. 125). India, moreover, considered the canal to be of ‘vital importance’ to its economic interests. It proposed a formula according to which Egyptian sovereignty over the Suez Canal would be recognised while calling for free navigation of the canal ‘as a waterway of “international importance”’ (Blarel, 2014, p. 126). On 13 October 1956, the UNSC passed Resolution 118 whose tenets closely resembled those of the Indian proposal, suggesting that Indian diplomacy was at least partially successful (Blarel, 2014, p. 127).

Two years later, the 1958 Lebanese civil conflict allowed Nehru yet again to shine the international spotlight on Indian diplomacy at the UN. Between 1957 and 1958, Lebanon had witnessed sectarian clashes pitting Muslims and Druze against Lebanese President Camille Chamoun and his Maronite Christian supporters (Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 224). In May 1958, Lebanon filed a complaint to the UNSC accusing the United Arab Republic (UAR)—which had been formed out of a union between Egypt and Syria a few months earlier—of interfering in Lebanon by smuggling arms and fighters across the Syrian–Lebanese border (Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 225). As the armed rebellion against his rule gathered steam, President Chamoun requested US military intervention. The July 1958 coup that overturned the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, moreover, heightened Western fears of growing communist influence in the Middle East, galvanising the USA and Britain into deploying forces to Lebanon and Jordan, respectively (Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 229).

Nehru mounted strident criticism of the USA and British deployments in his various correspondences. Writing to the British Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, Nehru said that he was ‘alarmed at the possible consequences of US forces landing in Lebanon’ which he believed could lead to war (Quoted in Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 230). He argued that ‘the basic nationalist urges in Asian countries […] had nothing to do with communism’ (Quoted in Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 230). Nehru also wrote to US President Dwight Eisenhower, warning that ‘the landing of the United States forces in Lebanon’, which he ‘regretted’, could ‘involve them in conflict with the people of Lebanon’ and set the USA against ‘the nationalist urges of the Lebanese people’ (Quoted in Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 230). In a letter to his sister who served as the Indian representative at the UN, Nehru lamented that the US intervention constituted ‘a bypassing of the UN’ and a ‘challenge to Arab nationalism’ (Quoted in Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 231). Meanwhile, Nehru accepted a Soviet invitation to a meeting between the leaders of the USA, the USSR, France and India (Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 231). Through India’s ambassador in Moscow, Nehru made it known to the Soviets that India’s policy was ‘that there should be no foreign intervention in West Asia and that foreign troops in Lebanon and Jordan should be withdrawn’, a position which also underpinned India’s stance at the UN (Quoted in Kona Nayudu, 2018, p. 232). Although the US deployment in Lebanon presented no tangible security threat to India except perhaps by setting a precedent, it presented Nehru with an opportunity to reassert India’s Third Worldist credentials and share the global high table with the great powers.

Nehru went beyond mere diplomacy or rhetoric, committing Indian troops to UN observer and peacekeeping missions in the region. India dispatched observers to the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), created in 1948 to oversee the implementation of the Israel–Arab Armistice Agreements (Choedon, 2007, p. 153). In 1956, India joined the UN Emergency Force (UNEF) that was deployed on the Egyptian side of the Egyptian–Israeli border in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis and was a major contributor of forces until Egypt demanded the withdrawal of the force in 1967 (Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations, 2016). India also deputed Ambassador Rajeshwar Dayal to the UN Observation Group in Lebanon (UNOGIL) which was established in the wake of the 1958 Lebanon crisis (Bullion, 1997, pp. 100–101). Unlike India’s deployment of peacekeeping forces to Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990, for instance, where conflict can have an immediately destabilising effect along India’s borders, the dispatch of peacekeeping troops to conflict zones in far-flung places in the Middle East often served no immediate security objective. ¹ Rather, India’s deployment of forces as part of UN peacekeeping or observer missions appeared to serve normative and political purposes, such as constituting ‘an act of solidarity’ with Third World countries and backing India’s ‘global ambition for recognition and influence on the world stage’ (Bellamy & Williams, 2012, pp. 3–6; Bullion, 1997, p. 99).

Although Nehru left a lasting impression on his predecessors, India’s defeat at the hands of China in 1962 and the improvement in China’s relations with the USA in the early 1970s led New Delhi to reassess its strategic choices and align itself more closely with the USSR. India’s alignment with the USSR was reflected in its status-seeking strategy in the Middle East. In 1971, India supported the proposal, initially made by Sri Lanka at the 1964 NAM Summit in Cairo, of declaring the Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace (IOZP). The proposal, passed by the UNGA as Resolution 2832 (1971), called for denuclearising and eliminating foreign military bases in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) (Joshi, 2019, p. 28; United Nations, 1971). In 1972, India joined the Ad Hoc Committee of littoral states, established through Resolution 2992 of the UNGA, which was tasked with carrying out the consultations required to implement the proposal (Joshi, 2019, p. 34). Yet again, India’s advocacy for Third Worldist principles such as the opposition to great power intervention earned it greater visibility at the UN. The proposal also happened to find favour with the Soviets who, lacking military bases in the region, viewed it as a diplomatic tool that was useful in contesting US military presence in the Indian Ocean. India’s pro-Soviet disposition also helped it smooth relations with Baathist Iraq. Although the Baathists had withdrawn Iraq from the Baghdad Pact following the 1958 coup, Iraq’s poor relations with Egypt—India’s main regional partner during Nehru’s term—dampened Indo-Iraqi ties. In 1966, however, relations between the two sides took a fortuitous turn when Iraq abandoned its pro-Pakistan stance on Kashmir (Mudiam, 1994, p. 63).

In shaping India’s status-seeking strategy, Indira Gandhi appeared to be acutely aware of growing international hostility towards Israel in the late 1960s and 1970s. Her fervent support for Palestinian statehood and scathing criticism of Israel’s policies were, therefore, clearly aimed at bolstering India’s credentials at NAM. Following the 1967 war, the Arab states had stepped up their effort to isolate Israel on the world stage. Sri Lanka, ‘Cuba and 28 of 32 African nations broke off their diplomatic relations with Israel’ partly in response to Arab promises of aid (Dinkel, 2018, p. 191; Levey, 2008, pp. 215–221). The 1973 Algiers conference was a watershed moment, however, in which NAM ‘adopted the strongest anti-Israeli resolution’ in its history, blaming ‘zionist settler-colonialism’ for the ‘systematic uprooting of the Palestinian people from their homeland’ and drawing parallels to racial segregation in South Africa (Dinkel, 2018, p. 192). NAM, moreover, admitted the PLO as a member in 1975 and was on the brink of expelling Egypt at the Havana Summit in 1979 for having signed the Camp David peace accords with Israel (Dinkel, 2018, pp. 234–235).

In keeping with the hostile mood, Indira Gandhi reacted strongly to the 1969 arson attack against Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, raising concerns about the rights of the Palestinians and calling for the implementation of UNSC resolutions on Jerusalem (Blarel, 2014, p. 180; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 210). The External Affairs Minister Dinesh Singh condemned the attack and described it as a ‘barbaric act’ (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 210). When the issue of Al-Aqsa Mosque reached the UNSC, India pushed for ‘an invitation to participate in the council deliberations’, which it received. India framed the issue not as ‘a religious issue’ but rather as ‘a direct consequence of the illegal occupation by Israel of Jerusalem and other Arab areas’, arguing that ‘Israel thus could not be absolved of its responsibility for the incident’ (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 211).

Following Indira Gandhi’s decisive electoral victory in 1971 and India’s role in the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, domestic opposition to the prime minister’s foreign policy dwindled. As a result, ‘India’s support for the Arabs during the October war of 1973 was a foregone conclusion’ (also see Blarel, 2014, pp. 187–188; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 216). India laid the blame on Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and attributed the outbreak of war to Israel’s intransigence (Blarel, 2014, p. 188; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 216). In January 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to allow the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which the 1974 Rabat Summit Conference of the Arab League had recognised as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people to open an office in New Delhi (Mehrish, 1975, pp. 137–138; Pradhan, 2004, pp. 10–11). India also joined the Arab and Islamic countries in voting for UNGA Resolution 3379 which declared Zionism a form of racism (Blarel, 2014, pp. 195–196; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 216).

Although the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai, which ruled during the brief interlude between 1977 and 1979, built ties quietly with Israel, India’s public posturing on Palestinian statehood remained largely intact. Desai’s pro-Western orientation and his desire to temper India’s excessive dependence on the USSR prompted him to invite Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Dayan to India on one or more secret visits (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 218; Sikri, 2009, p. 145). Nevertheless, the secret nature of the visits suggests that it was not intended as a status-enhancing move on the world stage, implying that India’s status-seeking strategy had not fundamentally changed. In fact, External Affairs Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ruled out an imminent normalisation of relations with Israel (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 218). ‘In his first public statement’, Vajpayee argued that despite having recognised Israel’s existence as a state, the creation of a Palestinian state was key to peace in the region (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 218). At the September 1979 Havana NAM summit, India joined the Arab nations in condemning the Camp David accords for ignoring the rights of the Palestinians and Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem, though it resisted Arab demands to expel Egypt from the organisation (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 219). Nevertheless, the government of Morarji Desai softened India’s rhetoric on Israel. Instead of emphasing the Israeli occupation of Arab territories, it shifted its focus on the settlement of border issues through negotiations and affirmed the right of ‘all states in the region, including Israel, […] to exist in peace within secure boundaries’ (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 218).

Upon returning to office, Indira Gandhi resumed India’s active support for Palestinian statehood and Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Indira Gandhi overtly criticised her predecessor’s record on the issue, arguing that ‘Dayan’s visit had “damaged India’s image” and “lowered India’s prestige” in the Arab world’ (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 220). In 1980, India conferred diplomatic privileges on the PLO and backed three UNGA Resolutions that advocated the imposition of economic sanctions on Israel (Blarel, 2014, p. 220; Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 222). Indira Gandhi also reacted strongly to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, describing it as an attempt by Israel to ‘wipe out the Palestinian movement’ (Quoted in Pradhan, 2004, p. 11).

Ambiguous Status, Uncertain Power: The Post-Cold War Interregnum in India’s Status-Seeking in the Middle East

Under Rajiv Gandhi, however, the cracks in India’s normative strategy began to appear. Rajiv Gandhi was keen on improving India’s relations with the USA and viewed Israel, with whom India shared concern over Pakistan’s nuclear programme, as an important conduit to Washington (Kumaraswamy, 2010, pp. 226–229). As a result, he was largely uninterested in mediating Arab–Israeli peace talks, arguing that ‘there were already so many parties involved […] we prefer to watch for a while and see how things turn out before actively trying to take an interest in it’ (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 232). Rajiv Gandhi’s government initiated high-level contact with Israeli officials, especially in Washington. It lifted restrictions on visas and upgraded Israel’s consular mission in Bombay, extending its jurisdiction to Kerala. Although Rajiv Gandhi maintained India’s support for Palestinian statehood by expressing sympathy with the 1987 Palestinian Intifada and the Algiers Declaration of 1988 that proclaimed a Palestinian state, his term marked the beginning of an important shift in India’s status-seeking strategy and the Middle East’s place within it (Kumaraswamy, 2010, p. 233).

The 1991 Gulf War, in which the USA led an international coalition that employed overwhelming military force to eject Iraq from Kuwait, also proved to be an inflexion point in India’s status-seeking behaviour in the region. The war accelerated multiple shifts in the international and regional normative landscape. To begin with, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait worsened the divisions that had been simmering among the Arab nations. While the large Arab states including Egypt and Syria supported the US-led international coalition’s intervening to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, Jordan, Yemen and the PLO opposed it. The North African nations had initially attempted to play a mediating role. Once the hostilities began, however, all except for Egypt sided with Iraq (Greenhouse, 1991). The Arab Gulf states rallied behind Kuwait, hosting the USA and international forces and offering to shoulder the cost of war. Due to these divisions, the regional norm of Arab nationalism took a fatal hit, failing to recover since. Great power intervention was now sanctioned, may invited and funded, by the region’s own inhabitants.

As the parameters of the international system formally shifted with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1992, the Palestinian cause began to lose currency as a rallying cry for the Third World. The PLO’s siding with Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War weakened its support among the Arab states. Moreover, the 1991 Madrid Conference, in which Palestinian and Israeli leaders engaged in face-to-face diplomacy, prompted a wave of normalisation with Israel. There was no longer much international merit, in other words, in taking a maximalist position against Israel. India established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, citing the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Indo-Israeli relations remained low-key, however, until the arrival to power of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999. Although India continued to advocate for Palestinian statehood at the UN, the Palestinian cause no longer occupied the prominent place in India’s status-seeking strategy that it once had (Kumaraswamy, 2010, pp. 246–247).

In addition to an evolving normative landscape, India’s international and domestic calculations began to change. The war, which led oil prices to surge, exacerbated India’s economic malaise, forcing it to seek help from the USA to obtain IMF lending to prevent India from defaulting on its debts. In return, India secretly allowed American military aircrafts to land and refuel on Indian soil. India, in other words, needed the USA and was willing to compromise on its traditional opposition to great power involvement and policy of non-interference to obtain US help. Domestically, India witnessed considerable political instability during the 1990s, with eight governments taking office during the 10-year period between 1989 and 1999. The Indian National Congress had lost its grip on power to the Janata Dal in the 1989 elections, fragmenting India’s political landscape for close to a decade. During much of this period, India’s status-seeking behaviour in the Middle East appeared as a distant preoccupation.

Converging Status with Power: India’s Status-Seeking Strategy in the Middle East Post-Pokhran II

India’s domestic instability or the receding importance of Arab nationalism or the Palestinian cause did not imply, however, that the Middle East no longer had a role to play in India’s status-seeking strategy. From the late 1990s onwards, India’s associational status-seeking strategy involved the Middle East in two main ways. ² First, India’s closer relations with the USA, which India hoped would facilitate its status accommodation in the international system, placed demands on its behaviour in the region. India’s 1998 nuclear tests at Pokhran invited biting American sanctions but also lent considerable credibility to India’s rising power status. The Bush administration worked hard at improving relations with India and even accommodating India within the international non-proliferation regime by negotiating a civil nuclear cooperation agreement. In return, India had to demonstrate its bona fides not only by accepting constraints on its own nuclear programme but also by aligning itself more closely with the USA on Iran. The uncovering in 2002 of Iran’s clandestine effort to build a hardened enrichment plant at Natanz had catapulted Iran’s nuclear programme to centre stage. The US Congress turned India’s position on Iran’s nuclear programme into a litmus test for India’s claim to being a responsible nuclear power, making it explicitly clear that the ratification of any future treaty with India on nuclear cooperation would hinge on its taking a strong and principled stand against Iran’s violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). India took the view that since Iran had signed the NPT—and had in fact pushed for universal ratification of the NPT against India’s wishes—it was obliged to abide by its commitments. India joined the Western powers in voting in favour of two resolutions at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors in September 2005 and February 2006 that found Iran to be in violation of the NPT and referred it to the UNSC.

Second, the Middle East served as an arena in which India sought to put its growing naval capabilities, which were made possible by India’s rapid economic growth, on display. ³ In March 1999, India’s sole aircraft carrier at the time, the INS Viraat, entered Gulf waters to participate in a joint exercise with the UAE, setting the stage for greater Indian naval presence in the western Indian Ocean (Scott, 2007, p. 29). In March 2002, the INS Mysore and INS Godavari conducted joint drills with Saudi vessels off the coastal town of Jubail in the Red Sea (Panda, 2018). In September 2004, India dispatched a flotilla including ‘two destroyers INS Mumbai and INS Delhi, the advanced missile frigate INS Talwar; as well as INS Kulish, INS Pralaya, INS Sindhuraj and the support tanker INS Aditya’ to Bahrain, Iran, Oman and the UAE (Scott, 2007, p. 29).

Following the announcement of India’s ‘Look West’ policy in 2005, India stepped up its naval engagement in the region. Two years later, Suresh Mehta, India’s Chief of Naval Staff, travelled to Abu Dhabi on his maiden trip in his post (Scott, 2007, p. 29). In August and September 2007, ‘a flotilla of frontline missile corvettes and guided-missile cruisers, made up of INS Rajput, Beas, Betwa, Delhi and Jyoti’ were deployed for 48 days during which they made ‘port calls and took part in bilateral naval exercises at Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait’ (Scott, 2007, p. 29). The 2008 visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Oman provided a boost for India’s naval cooperation with Muscat. The two sides upgraded their naval exercises and signed an agreement for Indian berthing facilities in Oman to facilitate the Indian Navy’s anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden (Dikshit, 2009). Since 2013, visits to Gulf and Middle Eastern nations have become a routine exercise for Indian naval vessels (Singh, Forthcoming).

India’s naval diplomacy in the Gulf was upgraded in 2017 by the visit of Admiral Sunil Lanba, then India’s Navy Chief, to the UAE and Oman (The Hindu, 2017). Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Oman the following year provided another boost to India’s power projection capabilities in the western Indian Ocean. In 2018, India signed a berthing agreement with Oman for access to the strategic port of Duqm located close to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, allowing India to sustain military operations in the western Indian Ocean and to contest China’s naval presence in the Horn of Africa (Panda, 2018). In December 2020, General M. M. Naravane, India’s Chief of Army Staff at the time, became the first person in his post to visit the UAE and Saudi Arabia (Press Trust of India, 2020). The improvement in India’s relations with Saudi Arabia also materialised in their first-ever bilateral naval exercise in August 2021 (The Hindu, 2021). Combined, India’s high-level visits by Indian military officials, routine port calls, joint exercises and berthing agreements with Oman suggest that India has utilised its relations with Middle Eastern nations to accentuate its power projection capabilities and, by extension, its prestige.

India has deployed its expeditionary military capabilities belonging to the Indian Navy and Indian Air Force to the various conflict zones of the Middle East to evacuate non-combatant Indian nationals. Although the primary objective of such operations is the safe evacuation of Indian nationals, they nevertheless allow India to join the ranks of select nations such as the USA, France, China and Brazil that are capable of deploying their military assets to rescue nationals stranded on foreign soil (Xavier, 2017). Moreover, India has responded to pleas from friendly nations to evacuate their nationals, allowing India to improve its global status and reputation.

Three evacuation operations that took place in the Middle East—namely Operation Sukoon in Lebanon in 2006, Operation Safe Homecoming in Libya in 2011 and Operation Raahat in Yemen in 2015—were watershed moments for the Indian military. Granted, India had conducted large-scale evacuations in the past, including the 1990 evacuation of 170,000 Indian nationals out of Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion, but these were civilian-led and relied primarily on civilian or commercial assets. By contrast, Operation Sukoon, during which the Indian Navy evacuated roughly 2,300 people from Lebanon following the outbreak of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, ‘was the first one in which the Indian Navy played a leading role’ (Xavier, 2017, p. 47). Operations Safe Homecoming and Raahat evacuated even larger numbers of Indian nationals, not to mention thousands of foreign nationals from dozens of countries (Ministry of External Affairs, 2015; Mukherjee, 2007; Policy Planning and Research Division, 2012).

India’s embrace of the associational sources of status, namely closer ties with the superpower and greater military capabilities, did not completely overwrite India’s respect for international norms, however. Despite the NDA government’s desire for US recognition, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee declined multiple US requests for Indian peacekeeping forces to deploy to Iraq. Although Vajpayee may have been concerned by the potential electoral fallout of Indian peacekeeping forces sustaining casualties in a war that was hugely unpopular in India, the official Indian response cited the lack of UN sanction of the peacekeeping mission as the main reason behind India’s refusal. Moreover, India remained sceptical of the desirability of great power intervention in the region under the pretext of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). As a non-permanent member of the UNSC at the time, India joined Russia, China and Brazil in abstaining from voting on the Western-backed UNSC Resolution 1973 (2011) that authorised the use of force in Libya (Mohan, 2011, pp. 1–2). India’s associational status-seeking strategy was, therefore, constrained by India’s enduring commitment to the UN multilateral framework and scepticism towards, if not opposition to, armed intervention by outside powers in the region.

Conclusion

The evolution of India’s status-seeking strategy since 1947 is reflected in its behaviour in the Middle East. India’s normative claim to Third World leadership placed often onerous demands on its behaviour in the Middle East. It required India to advocate for Palestinian statehood, oppose armed interventions by the great powers in the region, support the Arab states against Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973, and take positions against Israel that often surpassed those of Arab or Muslim nations including Egypt under President Sadat, Iran under the Shah, and Turkey. Although India was tempted at times to moderate the Arab states’ hostility towards Israel at the UN or NAM, it quickly abandoned the enterprise for fear of alienating them. Crucially, India continued to take these pro-Arab positions even when they were misaligned with its core security interests. India’s main Arab partners, including Egypt and later Iraq, often failed to reciprocate India’s support when India confronted China in 1962 or Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 (Mudiam, 1994, pp. 55–56, 63). Yet the impetus for attaining higher status through normative leadership continued to push India in a pro-Arab direction. India’s turn to an associational strategy of status-seeking in the post-Cold War period was underpinned by closer relations with the USA and a build-up in economic and military strength. The Middle East, therefore, became an arena where India was asked to prove its bona fides to the USA by taking a stand against Iran’s nuclear programme at the IAEA in 2005–2006. It also served as a stage for India to parade its naval capabilities in the waters of the Gulf, the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea.

Nevertheless, India’s rejection of the colonial and great-power intervention norms did not translate into a wholesale rejection of dominant norms in the international system. Rather, India embraced multilateralism, viewing international institutions such as the UN and NAM as useful theatres for normative activism, including on Middle Eastern issues. Even in the post-Cold War period, India remained committed to the UN framework and continued to display scepticism towards armed interventions by foreign powers. This enduring normative impulse in India’s foreign policy placed limits on the extent to which its interests could align with those of the United States in the Middle East. It also constrained India’s propensity to deploy or use military power in the region.

The concepts of status and status-seeking are able to account for a range of Indian behaviour in the Middle East that typically elude explanations based on a structural realist conception of international politics. Such explanations, which are meant to make sense of states’ alliance choices, tend to assume ‘a linear relationship between material power and status’ in the international system (Basrur & Sullivan de Estrada, 2017, p. 2; Larson et al., 2014, pp. 20–21). Granted, structural realism may be able to explain India’s opposition to great power intervention as an attempt by a weaker power to keep the two superpowers from meddling in its own neighbourhood during the Cold War, though India at times sought and encouraged great power intervention in its neighbourhood when it perceived such intervention as being in line its interests. ⁴ It may also be able to account for India’s projection of naval power into the region from the early 2000s onwards by pointing to the growth in its military capabilities. But India’s advocacy for Palestinian statehood, its support for the weaker Arab states against Israel, Britain and France, and its participation in UN peacekeeping and observer missions in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria escape a structural realist explanation, especially when they misalign with India’s core security interests. Against structural realism’s simplifying assumption of direct correspondence between material power and status, India’s Cold War-era experience of normative status-seeking clearly suggests that the accumulation of power, whether underpinned by military or economic strength, is not the only pathway to attaining higher status in the international system.

This article has sought to highlight the articulation of power and status in India’s foreign policy behaviour. It attempted to show that during the Cold War, India pursued—and arguably attained—higher status through normative means without the possession or use of power. It also illustrated how, from the late 1990s onwards, India instrumentalised its power in the Middle East to assert its status claims. By shedding light on the various possible ways in which status and power might articulate, this article has tried to step away from the artificial opposition between morals and self-interest as guiding principles of foreign policy that often underpins discussions of India’s choices and behaviour in the Middle East. But the present article is not without limitations. By foregrounding the behavioural implications in the Middle Eastern context of variations in India’s status-seeking strategy, this article embeds India’s normative claims within a framework of instrumental or purposive state action. Conversely, a thick constructivist reading of India’s approaches to status-seeking might attempt to do the reverse, excavating the international or domestic social sources of India’s ideas of status. The inquiry into status challenges the prevalent historiographies and analytical frameworks that have dominated the discussion on India’s foreign policy in the Middle East, generating productive openings for reconceptualising and reimagining the field.