Jaziratul Arab! This expression, literally meaning the Island of Arabia, has been a common parlance in India for centuries. In that respect, the Arabian Peninsula and Arabs have occupied a significant place in its psychology, common sense and world-view long before the modern age. This is primarily due to the strong historical linkages and cultural interactions between the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula. Trade ties, land and maritime forays, acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and spirituality were some of the forces that brought the two land masses and their populations closer and paved the way for the exchange of people, cultures, languages and ideas. For example, Kalila wa Dimna , the most popular text for children commonly used in the Arab world, is a translation of the ancient Indian fable Panchatantra that travelled to the Peninsula through Arab and Persian traders and travellers and eventually became integral to Arab folklore.
Similarly, the influence of Arab culture on southern coastal regions of Malabar has been due to constant people-to-people contacts, and many Arabic words and expressions are part of the common parlance in the local vernaculars. Indeed, the expression ‘India’ is an Anglicized version of the name that the Arabs gave to the lands beyond River Sindh, that is, Hind. Some Arab authors also claim that India’s ancient name Bharat was also given by the Arab traders and travellers who used to visit to the lands especially for trading spices, which in Arabic is called baharat (singular bahar). Most interestingly, many traditional spice markets in the Arab world are still known as souq al-hind or the Indian Market!
Cultural and civilizational associations between India and Arabia flourished primarily because of geographic proximity. The Deccan Peninsula of India is separated from Arabia only by the Arabian Sea, thereby making Arabia India’s maritime neighbourhood. In the pre-partition era, the north-western part of India had land contacts with Arabia through Iran and Mesopotamia, what is now known as Iraq. Hence, trade links between the two flourished centuries before Christ.
These geo-historic interactions were strengthened with the advent of Islam, and the new faith arrived on the Indian shores shortly after the death of Prophet Mohammed. Since then the contacts between the two transformed into cultural, religious and societal linkages, and under the British they assumed strategic dimensions. Primarily to safeguard its commercial interests in India and through the Suez Canal, Britain formulated a policy towards the Persian Gulf which was administered and at times shaped by its interests in India. British India having the largest concentration of Muslims added a religious dimension vis-à-vis Arabia.
The partition of the subcontinent and India’s independence in 1947 cut off direct land contacts with Arabia, and the formation of new kingdoms and sheikhdoms in the Arabian Peninsula changed the way India and Arabia engaged. The political distancing between the two accompanied the loss of geographical continuity. Driven by strong anti-imperial and anti-colonial sentiments of the nationalist phase, independent India and its leaders were not prepared to build on the British interests and influence in the Gulf Arab countries. Due to their fragile domestic situations and regional threats, especially from the more powerful imperial Iran, some of the Arab countries sought external support and patronage.
These, in turn, contributed to the psychological distance between India and Arabia. The communal partition of the subcontinent resulted in the former taking a negative view of religion-centric national identities. The strong religious and traditional outlooks of the new Arab monarchies radically differed from the modern, secular and multi-national state that Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues were trying to develop. Indeed, as will be discussed, during the Cold War the political gulf was significant and profound than the Arabian Sea that separated India from Arabia.
The Arabian Peninsula, the land mass surrounded by the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, comprises of Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen in the east and south, Kuwait, Iraq and Jordan in the northwest, and Bahrain and Qatar in the eastern part protruding in the Persian Gulf. The largest and thus far the most dominant country in the Arabian Peninsula and, according to some, the inheritor of Jaziratul Arab, both in geographical and psychological sense, is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Thus, after the partition of the subcontinent, India and Saudi Arabia emerged as the national inheritors of the two ancient neighbourhood geographies and civilizations. Ideally, this should have enabled them to maintain and consolidate their contacts towards evolving a strong political partnership. Why did this not happen? Or what has been India’s policy towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?
Even though both the leaderships tried to continue historical links through political contacts, they proved short-lived and insufficient. A variety of factors were responsible for this, but the two most critical were their different worldviews and the formation of a Muslim Pakistan. Though the former during the Cold War could have been glossed over if not ignored, both India and Saudi Arabia allowed the Pakistani factor to dominate and in the process undermine their interests vis-à-vis one another. Since independence, India looked at Saudi Arabia primarily through the Pakistani prism and this lingered on until the end of the Cold War. Despite intermittent political contacts, the ‘gulf’ between the two could not be narrowed, let alone bridged. In a nutshell, the Kingdom remained on the periphery of India’s overall approach towards the Middle East. This has been the case during much of the Cold War era.
The disintegration of the USSR brought about an end to the Cold War, resulting in fundamental structural changes in the global political order. At that time, scholars termed the unfolding new era as ‘end of history’ or the heralding of a ‘unipolar’ world dominated by the United States (US). Though these prophecies proved misleading and wishful, the transformation of global politics was felt in all parts of the world. India was forced to come to terms with the new US-dominated world and re-examine the vintages of its past policies. Russia, the inheritor of the USSR, which for much of the Cold War era, was India’s close friend, was weak and was unable to help or influence other countries. Until then India relied on the Cold War–centric non-alignment and built its reputation and influence by extending support to underdogs and weaker parties to make its presence felt. In so doing, it relied on the Soviet Union for nation-building projects, military capabilities and modernization. The sudden end of the Cold War and the emergence of a weakened Russia meant that India had to come to terms with the new world order dominated by the US.
These external changes could not have come at a worst time. The end of the Cold War coincided with the domestic economic crisis. Despite being the second most populous country after China, the Indian economy remained small, heavily indebted and with a slower growth rate. Its mixed economy model came to symbolize the inefficiency of the socialism and exploitative nature of capitalism. The Kuwait crisis was a further burden as it forced India to evacuate over 150,000 of its citizens from the emirate and the additional financial loss in the form of stoppage of remittances. These cut into India’s ability to import essential items.
Under such circumstances, the government headed by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao decided to adopt a policy of gradual economic opening and its integration with the global economy. The path chosen was to allow privatization and reduce government control over economy and trade. Along with the economic reform measures, Rao also recognized the need to reorient the foreign policy both to ensure the success of the economic reforms and to reclaim India’s position in the global politics. The sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union also exposed the fallacy of military might without a firm economic basis. Hence, the economic reforms and political reorientation had to go hand in hand and their successes were inter-dependent and closely linked. Indeed, the weakening of India’s international influence, especially after the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962, was due to its weak economic power.
At the foreign policy level, the post–Cold War Indian approach changed and shed its ideological hesitation and sought friendly relations with all major powers of the world. It strove for better relations with the US, Western Europe, Australia, Japan and other First World countries without abandoning its traditional constituencies in the Third World. It felt the need to befriend not only Russia but also the newly independent former republics of the USSR. The economic ascendance of China meant India would have to find ways of benefitting from the former’s economic progress without undermining its interest.
This approach was more palpable in the Middle East. Both to recognize the Arab willingness to pursue a political settlement to the Arab -Israeli conflict and to signal a break from the past, in January 1992 India normalized relations with Israel. Ending the four-decade-old recognition-without-relations indicated New Delhi’s willingness to come to terms with the end of the Cold War.
The shift also became necessary vis-à-vis Iran as well as oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. The economic reforms grew the appetite for energy resources as the domestic resources could not cope with the galloping hydrocarbon requirements. Until then India managed its energy needs mainly through local production and relying on a mixed basket of sources such as coal, wood and other traditional means. This was no longer feasible with the pace of its economic growth, and the need for stable sources of energy resulted in the Gulf Arab countries, which are geographically closer and oil-rich, becoming a key player in its calculations. For their part, the Gulf countries were also looking for a stable markets, primarily due to stagnation in their traditional markets in the West, and began seeing India as a natural destination.
Until the 1990s, due to the weak economic basis, India’s approach towards Arabia was marked by political rhetoric and its leaders often flagged the absence of relations with Israel as a sign of their commitments to the Arabs. Though it was in continuation of the anti-imperial and anti-colonial phase of the nationalist struggle, this indicated the absence of any political influence or interest convergence between India and the Gulf. The economic reforms and exponential expansion of energy demands provided a much-needed but long absent economic wherewithal to the bilateral relations.
It is mostly within this emerging context one could understand and explain the transformation of India’s policy towards the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has the largest known oil reserves in the world and has been the largest oil producer and exporter since the 1970s. Because of their size, energy resources and relative internal resilience, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran emerged as the core component of India’s new approach towards the Gulf. Though it procures the bulk of its oil from other countries such as Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE and gas from Qatar, India’s Middle East policy has been dominated by Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Reforms and resultant economic growth also contributed to India’s power aspirations and led to it seeking a strategic partnership with Gulf Arab countries. Due to its size, location, religious importance, regional influence and global standing, Saudi Arabia emerged central to India’s interests in the Gulf. The Kingdom having over three million expatriate labourers—the largest concentration of people of Indian origin outside the country—was also important. For its part, Saudi Arabia also began looking at India beyond the traditional prisms of being an underdeveloped economy. The September 11 terror attacks and the resultant backlash against the Kingdom as well as Islam resulted in Riyadh adopting a Look East policy, which had economic and strategic dimensions beneficial to India.
These paved the way for an interest convergence, and for the first time since 1947, India and Saudi Arabia began learning to sidestep, if not ignore, the persistent irritant that prevented them from developing closer ties, namely, the Pakistan factor. While this was critical to the improvement in relations, another contributing factor has been India’s growing confidence. In some ways, the nuclear tests in May 1998 were a defining moment. Though the US and its allies imposed punitive measures, India withstood these sanctions and registered a continuous economic growth since the early 1990s. These, in turn compelled the West, especially the US, to come to terms with India’s growth story and in the process led to greater regional and international engagements with New Delhi. They, in turn, elicited a favourable response from countries like Saudi Arabia.
A politically confident and economically growing India found a willing partner in Saudi Arabia. For long there were hesitations on both sides due to past indifference. The visits of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the Kingdom in 1982 and of Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal in 1981 proved insufficient to break the shackles of uncertainties and mutual suspicions and misgivings. With hindsight, one could argue that a real breakthrough happened in January 2001 when External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh visited the Kingdom. This was the first foreign minister–level visit, also indicating the prolonged Indian apathy. Singh’s visit paved the way for furthering the bilateral relations and shed past hesitations over Pakistan in reaching out to the Kingdom. Even though there were exchanges of business and trade delegations, Singh’s visit contributed to the transformation of Indo-Saudi, and since 2001 there have been three state visits between the two countries, including the visit of King Abdullah to India in January 2006.
The fewer political contacts during the Cold War were accompanied by two factors which maintained the flourishing of people-to-people contacts, namely, haj and expatriate workers. The annual pilgrimage began with the advent of Islam and the faithful assemblage of the largest congregation of humanity in Mecca—the heart of Arabia—where Prophet Mohammed was born and where he began preaching the new faith. The Indian Muslim participation in the annual pilgrimage has always been substantial, and during the British Raj many Muslim ruling Nawabs, princes and wealthy philanthropists generously contributed to the upkeep of the Ka’aba and in the process earned respect and admiration of Arabs and other Muslims.
Though the records of these princes and Nawabs performing haj have been scant, the tradition of sending family members, mainly elderly women, along with emissaries, to Arabia has been recorded in many medieval Indian texts. Many Mughal noblemen who lost favour with the rulers and were no longer required were sent on ‘goodwill’ haj pilgrimage, mostly never to return home given the dangerous journey. After independence, the number of haj...