Abhinav Pandya is a policy analyst specializing in counterterrorism, Indian foreign policy, and the geopolitics of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is the founder, director, and CEO of the Usanas Foundation, a prominent India-based security and foreign policy think tank. A graduate of Cornell University with a focus on public affairs, Pandya completed his Ph.D at OP Jindal Global University. He has authored several books, including his most recent work, Inside the Terrifying World of Jaish-e-Mohammad, (Harper Collins, 2024). Diwan interviewed him in early October to discuss India’s relationship with the Middle East.
Armenak Tokmajyan: The “Middle East” is a popular term for the region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, but not in India. What do you call this region, and why?
Abhinav Pandya: India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) refers to the region as West Asia. There is a separate wing in the ministry called WANA, which stands for West Asia and North Africa. However, WANA does not include Iran. India’s foreign policy experts and historians find “Middle East” to be Eurocentric a term, which comes with colonial baggage. From the European perspective, countries such as India, China, Japan, as well as other South East Asian countries are considered Far East. Hence, the Arab region is treated as Middle East. However, for India this region is toward the west. Therefore, we call it West Asia.
The term “West Asia” is also preferred because it denotes India’s civilizational and trade ties with this region. The Indus Valley civilization had trade ties particularly with the cities of Dilmun (Bahrain) and Magan (Oman). In Syria, Sanskrit inscriptions have been found which can be traced to the Mittini dynasty (1500–1350 B.C.). Indian numerals reached the Arab world. In medieval times, Islamic invaders from West and Central Asia occupied several parts of India. Persian influence was prominent in the Mughal court, which used Persian as its language.
AT: India has the world’s fifth-largest economy by GDP, is the fourth largest oil importer, and is a major exporter of technology, services, and labor. What drives India’s economic policy in the Middle East?
AP: India’s economic policy in the region is primarily driven by its energy security concerns and the presence of a huge Indian diaspora of workers in the region. India is the world’s third largest consumer of crude oil, and has a high import dependence of over 85 percent. In December 2021, India imported over $3.1 billion worth of crude oil from Iraq, constituting 24.6 percent of India’s crude oil imports. This was followed by Saudi Arabia, constituting 16.6 percent of oil imports, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which made up 12.5 percent. Iran has also been one of the top three oil suppliers to India. However, under U.S. pressure after it imposed sanctions on Iran, India had to diversify and explore new sources of oil such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, and Angola. After the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, India began importing discounted Russian oil to reduce its oil import bill. By May 2023, the imports from Russia had peaked at an all-time high of $4.5 billion. However, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries continue to account for 50 percent of India’s total crude oil imports and 70 percent of gas imports. Qatar remains the largest gas exporter to India. GCC countries are most likely to continue to be India’s biggest oil and gas exporters and remain crucial to India’s energy security.
As for India’s diaspora, About 8.7 million mostly young Indians work in West Asia, mainly in blue-collar jobs. They generate more than $30 billion in remittances. The UAE has the largest number of Indian migrant workers at 3.4 million, followed by 2.6 million in Saudi Arabia, 1 million in Kuwait, 750,000 in Qatar, and 700,000 in Oman. The construction industry, with massive infrastructure projects, remains the largest employer, followed by healthcare, and hospitality, in which Indians primarily work as cleaning and housekeeping staff.
Economic ties are also diversifying. New partnerships are emerging in the field of technology, renewable energy, space, cyber, tourism, pharma, and investment in infrastructure. In fiscal year 2023, the bilateral trade volumes reached $52.76 billion with Saudi Arabia, $85 billion with the UAE, $4.42 billion with Israel (excluding defense), and $1.7 billion with Bahrain. India signed a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the UAE in 2022 and both nations aim to achieve a non-oil bilateral trade target of $100 billion by 2030. The UAE has emerged as India’s fourth largest source of foreign direct investment, with a major focus on infrastructure and special economic zones.
AT: India maintains important ties with both Israel and Iran, supporting a two-state solution in Palestine and condemning both the October 7 atrocities orchestrated by Hamas and Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Can you explain the rationale behind this foreign policy? And how is India able to pursue such a balancing act when global polarization is at its height?
AP: First, immediately after its independence from the British, Indian foreign policy during the time of Jawaharlal Nehru was idealistic. It was influenced by India’s cultural and civilizational values and the colonial past which resulted in its support for the Palestinians. India did not recognize Israel. Between 1950 and 1990, the influential segment of Indian academics and strategic experts continued to see Israel as an occupier of Palestinian land.
Additionally, India was averse to joining power blocs and championed nonalignment. Nehru personally was also influenced by the Soviet Union’s Bolshevik revolution and nurtured socialist leanings. All these factors played a crucial role in shaping his anti-Israel policy. However, India and Israel continued to have unofficial security and intelligence ties, beginning from the 1960s. In the 1980s, India began facing major internal security-related problems from Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Punjab and Kashmir, which strengthened the necessity to have stronger ties with Israel. Also, by the early 1990s, India’s friend the Soviet Union had disintegrated, so Delhi needed new friends. Therefore, India recognized Israel in 1994, after which the Israeli-Indian relationship strengthened. During the Kargil War between India and Pakistan in May–July 1990, Israel provided India with crucial intelligence and defense-related support.
Second, India’s West Asia policy is determined by a critical factor, namely Delhi’s sensitivity toward the sentiments and beliefs of its large Muslim minority. India is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, some 172 million people, and is surpassed only by Indonesia, with 209 million. India’s Muslims constitute 15 percent of the country’s population. Some unofficial estimates suggest the actual population figure may be as high as 225–230 million. The overwhelming majority of Muslims is staunchly anti-Israel and perceive it as an Islamic issue. Recently, after Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, Muslims organized anti-Israel protests in various parts of India. India is already going through intense communal polarization and radicalization, so alienating Muslims over the Palestinian issue can have serious external and internal security ramifications for the country.
The right-wing political parties, such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Jansangh have always advocated stronger ties with Israel. Under the BJP governments led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi, Indian-Israeli ties have strengthened. Today, India has robust intelligence, defense, economic, technological, and cultural ties with Israel. But Hindu-Muslim polarization is increasing and the fault-lines are widening. The BJP’s voters are largely constituted by right-wing Hindus who are highly supportive of Israel, particularly its counterterrorism policies.
Hence, in political circles, the strategic community, and among the masses in today’s India, there is immense support and love for Israel. Sympathy for Palestine is confined to Muslims and a miniscule segment of left-wing Hindu intellectuals and academics.
However, at the diplomatic level, India supports a two-state solution and mostly abstains in United Nations voting on Palestine issues. India has not yet declared Hamas a terror organization, even though there is a huge demand for that because of support for Israel and Hamas’s establishing of links with anti-India Islamist groups such as the Popular Front for India. But India’s support for a two-state solution is largely restricted to formal pronouncements and lacks the substance it had before 1990. It is boilerplate, with no real meaning. There is a strong understanding and trust between Israel and India that offsets the minor irritants that come up when India abstains in UN voting on Palestine. So, in effect, India is not balancing between Palestine and Israel. India’s policy has, de facto, completely shifted toward Israel.
With Iran, India has civilizational and historical ties going back to its ancient and medieval periods. Also, the Iranian Islamic regime’s strong influence over India’s large Shiite population and India’s reliance on oil imports from Iran also impel Delhi to have cordial ties with Tehran. In the past, explosions outside the Israeli embassy in Delhi, and Iran’s alleged involvement in such actions, led to friction between India and Israel as the Israelis were not content with the seriousness and depth of the investigation conducted by the Indians. In the future, given the rising tensions between Israel and Iran, India will find it difficult to balance between the two countries. Also, Indian-Iranian relations under the Hindu nationalist Modi government are ridden with tensions, as Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticized India after its abrogation of Kashmir’s special status and for its treatment of the Muslim minority.
AT: How has the Gaza war impacted the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) project, considering that the relations between Israel, on one hand, and Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, on the other, are tense? Also, given that such tensions might deescalate, but are unlikely to disappear in the near future, will India wait out the crisis in the Middle East or seek an alternative solution?
AP: India was very enthusiastic about IMEC because it needs an alternate trade route. The current traffic from India to Europe moves through the Suez Canal. IMEC can be an alternative and complementary economic corridor. As per the European Commission’s statistics, it will likely reduce travel time by 40 percent and costs by 30 percent. However, India is skeptical about the future of IMEC because of the escalating conflict in the Middle East, but also because most of the infrastructural needs have yet to be built. India is also concerned about the Suez Canal route because of the possibility of blockades by state actors and attacks on shipping by nonstate actors such as the Houthis.
Such uncertainties have made India explore an alternate strategic connectivity project, the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which passes through Iran, Azerbaijan, and toward Europe through Russia. However, INSTC brings other sets of challenges. It passes through Azerbaijan, which has close ties with India’s archrival Pakistan, and Türkiye, Pakistan’s firm supporter on the Kashmir issue. A better option for India would be if the INSTC passed through neighboring Armenia, not Azerbaijan. Moreover, looking at the larger picture of worsening European-Russian ties, there is a sense of ambivalence and skepticism regarding the future of INSTC.
Although, this pessimism and the lack of seriousness and policy vagueness vis-à-vis strategic connectivity projects hardly finds any mention in the formal pronouncements, India, at the moment, is not vigorously pursuing any of these projects. Rather, it gives more weight to bilateral and mini-lateral engagements. For example, India has already signed a ten-year agreement with Iran to operate Chahbahar, a free-trade zone port on the Gulf of Oman.
