dna edit: Going big in the Middle East....

The Saudi Arabian crown prince and Iranian foreign minister’s visits this week point to the challenges facing India’s new Look Middle East policy

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s meeting with the Indian top leadership this week has come at an important juncture in Delhi’s long overdue foreign policy recalibration. Despite India’s considerable economic and strategic stakes in the Middle East, the region has languished in comparative obscurity when it comes to Delhi’s engagement. The heads of mission conference in Bahrain last December, attended by Indian envoys based in the Gulf countries, North Africa and West Asia and chaired by external affairs minister Salman Khurshid, pointed to an attempt to change this with the formulation of a new ‘Look Middle East’ policy. The crown prince’s visit provides pointers as to how this might shake out. And it underlines the difficulties as well, coming as it does in the same week as Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif’s visit. Saudi Arabia and Iran are rivals in a rapidly shifting calculus of power and influence in a Middle East in turmoil — and balancing them as well as the other players in the region won’t be easy.

But it is crucial nevertheless. Delhi’s failure to engage adequately with the region has always been an oddity given its importance for India’s energy security and trade as well as the vast number of Indian expatriate workers in the Middle East. Out of the 70 per cent or so of its petroleum that the country imports, the Persian Gulf supplies about three-fourths as well as large amounts of its natural gas. The region also hosts about 3.5 million Indian nationals — and of the $69 billion remitted to India in 2012, flows from the Gulf countries accounted for over $30 billion. The trade figures are just as significant; by 2015, trade with the six Gulf Cooperation Council nations is expected to hit $200 billion.

The stakes and challenges now are high and growing higher. On the one hand, Delhi’s engagement with Riyadh, kickstarted in 2006 by King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud’s visit — and furthered this time by a memorandum of understanding on defence cooperation for greater exchange of information and training as well as four agreements to jointly promote and facilitate investments and trade — has the potential to facilitate ties with other nations in the region as well given Saudi Arabia’s influence. On the other, Riyadh has shown a clear interest in courting Islamabad, which could complicate matters — and the sectarian strife expanding from the Syrian conflict could so even more. Riyadh and Tehran, jostling for influence in the region and backing proxies on opposing sides of that conflict, might be inimical to each other, but they are both equally important to Delhi. The external affairs ministry will have to be exceedingly nimble-footed to finesse its Look Middle East policy given these factors.

For this, it must work on identifying long-term objectives — counter-terrorism is as important as energy security and trade here — and formulating a holistic approach for furthering them. It has worked in silos for too long, viewing West Asia and the Gulf region as separate entities and fearing to engage adequately with them given the messy nature of regional politics and fear of domestic political repercussions given India’s Muslim population. It is time to look past those old formulations and go big.