India’s shift in foreign policy to Israel

GLOBAL Spotlight

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi’s historic visit to Israel this week was indicative of a significant shift in India’s foreign policy orientation.

Ever since India’s independence from Britain, it was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, to the extent that, until 1992, it would not allow citizens to enter Israel on an Indian passport.

While India recognised Israel from 1950, it strongly supported a twostate solution, and used a plethora of multilateral platforms to articulate its support for Palestinian rights.

There was even a time when India released a stamp with both the Indian and Palestinian flags intertwined, signifying the country’s solidarity with the Palestinians.

Only in 1992 did India, led by the Congress Party, establish diplomatic ties with Israel. At the time it was largely driven by India’s desire to get closer to Washington.

While economic and trade relations between India and Israel were warm over the past two decades, India kept this relationship discreet and continued its unwavering support for the Palestinian cause in international forums. With the rise of the BJP in the 2014 elections, India became more restrained in criticising Israeli human rights abuses.

During the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2014, the Indian government prevented a parliamentary resolution condemning Israel’s violence. It did, however, vote with the Brics grouping at the UN Human Rights Council that year in favour of investigating Israel’s human rights violations.

Any nuance that existed at the beginning of the Modi administration has now fallen away as the government forges a public alliance with the Israeli state.

As Modi made the first visit of a sitting Indian prime minister to Israel this week, optics suggested the two countries would be the closest of allies. Modi dressed in colours of the Israeli flag – blue and white – articulated a slogan “India for Israel.”

While Modi claims India still the Israeli state, India is now accused of abandoning its long-standing commitment to upholding rights of colonised people to fight for freedom.

Activists also allude to India’s failure to uphold universal rights that it once rightly claimed for itself.

Modi’s foreign policy towards Israel is exactly what Israel wanted to achieve – to ensure countries in the developing world forge close relations with it, breaking the global south’s solidarity with the Palestinian people.

What Netanyahu pulled off this week through Modi’s state visit was a diplomatic coup. Israel will now expect India to vote with it at the UN and in other international bodies, and hope that other countries follow suit.

But the reality is that solidarity with Palestinians remains strong across the developing world – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

This week, at the ANC policy conference, delegates resolved South Africa either had to downgrade or close its embassy in Tel Aviv.

This is the strongest position taken yet by the ANC in solidarity with the Palestinian people and was intended to send a strong message to Israel.

Academics who’ve analysed what underlies the meeting of minds, of Modi and Netanyahu, put it down to the rise of exclusionary politics.

The BJP the ideology of Hindutra – the supremacy of Hindus over others – is entrenched as the government turns a blind eye to the lynching of Indian Muslims by cow vigilantes.

But for Modi the primary driver of India’s foreign policy towards Israel is to become an unrivalled military power in the region.

It is the massive potential for acquiring copious amounts of hi-tech weaponry, which may give India an edge over Pakistan when it comes to Kashmir, especially with Israel’s latest drone technology.

Israeli military technology will help India to fuel its military modernisation programme, but will also probably led to a renewed arms race between two nuclear powers with potentially fatal consequences.