Introduction

India and the Gulf relations have evolved over a period of time, from India being a benign power with transactional interaction with the region to being a pragmatic actor and strategic partner to major Gulf economies. The inclusion of strategic components in the relations started over a decade after the end of the Cold War when India signed a strategic partnership agreement with Iran in 2003. Before that, since 1991, both India and the region had already started to embrace each other by shedding off their ideological differences and protectionist economy and by being lenient on non-alignment Third World concern. This was also the time when India ceased viewing the region through the Pakistani prism. Hence, the elevation of Indo-Gulf relations to strategic partnership level is the outcome of changing geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics, internationally, regionally, and nationally. Strategic relations with the region are crucial for India's economic development, social progress, and political ascendance. With growing defence cooperation and the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, the Gulf's role in building India's defence industry is worth examining. The Gulf's importance in India's strategic calculus far outweighs even the immediate neighbourhood, given the volume and percentage of trade, its contribution to India's energy requirements, and gross domestic product (GDP) through remittances sent by 8.5–10 million Indian expatriates in the region.

Thus, it is undeniable that the Gulf is key to India's growth story. The economic and energy component in the Indo-Gulf relations is dominant since the discovery of oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908 and subsequently in the Arab states. Therefore, what tempted the countries to enter into strategic partnerships and what are the objectives of such partnership warrant a detailed examination. Furthermore, it becomes necessary to inspect what corresponds to a strategic partnership in the Indo-Gulf context. Thus, both a conceptual and contextual understanding of Indo-Gulf relationstransformed to strategic partnerships is unique and is a relevant contribution to the existing literature on the subject.

Strategic partnerships as a concept emerged in the 1990s as an important feature in the evolving international relations systems and discourse. Generally, it is multifaceted and multidimensional in character; however, it does not necessarily mean a unique relationship.

The* Gulf region has been a key employment destination for Indian workers, a major source of remittances and vital trading partner for India. Through an examination of speeches and policies and using constructivist discourse analysis, this chapter seeks to assess the nature and drivers of the strategic narratives of the previous Congress Party–led government of Manmohan Singh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government of Narendra Modi to engage the Gulf states and the Indian diaspora in the Gulf region. It is argued that India's engagement with the Gulf states since the 1990s has been shaped by varying domestic political projects that place emphasis on India's advancement as a market-driven state and society with a secular-social democratic identity, under the Singh government, and an identity of ‘marketised Hindutva’, under the Modi government. The chapter aims to compare the nature of engagement produced by these similar but distinct political projects. It also seeks to highlight the foreign policy impact of the external projection of domestic politics and the impact of foreign policy engagement in shaping domestic political projects.

Introduction

India's current policy towards the Gulf States has been advertised as a reinvention and a distinct move beyond just an economic engagement based on the supply of oil to one that encompasses the security and strategic spheres. There is, however, a certain continuity with previous Indian engagements with Gulf nations. India's foreign policy was first transformed significantly following the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s, with economic security taking centre stage to assist a growing economy. Referring to the Gulf nations as India's ‘natural economic hinterland’, the goal of the Manmohan Singh government was to consolidate sustainable economic partnerships that would pave the way for strategic and political alliances, a direction that the current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued actively. Broadly, India's priorities in the Gulf as identified by several governments have been geared towards energy security, trade, investment, strategic ties, and securing the interests of the large Indian diaspora. Another recurring aspect of India's engagement with the region has been to negotiate a tricky path between the Arab Gulf states, the relationship with Iran and to harbour increasingly closer ties with the Jewish state of Israel.

This pioneering volume provides a systematic treatment of India's Gulf policy from multiple thematic and theoretical angles. It seeks to address the mismatch between the Gulf region's economic and security importance to India and the dearth of academic attention paid to India's Gulf policy. Although several books and articles have been published on India's relations with individual Gulf states, few if any offer systematic treatments of India's Gulf policy as a whole. This volume also seeks to reconcile the study of India's Gulf policy with the disciplinary debates and questions that underpin the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis. While much of the study of India's foreign policy remains atheoretical and isolated from broader theoretical and disciplinary conversations, this volume makes a conscious effort at bridging the divide. The editors have therefore conceived this volume as a collection of theoretically informed treatments of India's Gulf policy. The contributors were asked to consider and discuss the theoretical frames and methods that they employed in analysing the various aspects of India's Gulf policy. The volume, therefore, also serves as a practical guide for students of foreign policy analysis to applying theoretical and methodological tools to foreign policy.

The project was conceived in the course of Hasan T. Alhasan's doctoral work under the supervision of Harsh V. Pant at the India Institute at King's College London. The editors would like to thank the India Institute, the editors at Cambridge University Press, the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and various colleagues including Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad, Dr N. Janardhan, P. R. Kumaraswamy, Dr Melissa Levaillant, and A. K. Pasha for their support and encouragement. Hasan is particularly indebted to HRH Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and the Crown Prince's International Scholarship Programme for the generous financial support of his doctoral studies without which his work on this volume would not have been possible.

This chapter addresses the relationship between the Court and the Commission beyond the printed page. By focusing attention on the movement of members from one institution to the other, and to the customary exchanges in Geneva between the members of both the UN organs, it reveals the extent and contribution of the more subtle ties that bind the Court and the Commission.

For decades, India's foreign policy in the Gulf defied explanation. From the oil boom of the 1970s until Manmohan Singh took office in 2004, the density of India's interactions with the region, be it in the form of migration, financial remittances, or trade, surpassed by multiple orders of magnitude India's diplomatic and strategic ties with the Gulf states. Bureaucratic lethargy, the legacy of the Cold War, the lasting effect of Nehruvian non-alignment, and religiously rooted solidarity with Pakistan have been cited as factors that explain this puzzling feature of India's foreign relations in the Gulf. The rapid improvement in India's relations with the Gulf states during the Manmohan Singh years has proved no less puzzling. India's sudden interest in the region has been attributed to the improvement in relations with the US in the wake of the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal and to the desire of the Gulf states to cultivate partnerships eastwards in Asia.

But such factors pale by comparison to the size of India's economic and security interests in the region. During the 1990 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait, India carried out the largest airlift in history by evacuating over 170,000 Indian nationals who had escaped Kuwait via Iraq to Jordan. International sanctions placed on Iraq and occupied Kuwait cut India off from its two main suppliers of crude oil and forced it to purchase oil from the spot market at a massive premium, driving it to the brink of default. The 1990–91 Gulf crisis was ample demonstration that India's own economic and security interests were closely intertwined with those of the region, a lesson that has remained with Indian policymakers. Since then, India's dependence on energy imports from the region, the size of its diaspora, and the financial remittances they send home to their families have grown precipitously. Why India's foreign policy may have neglected the Gulf region, and why the region may then have captured the attention of Indian foreign policymakers, are among some of the questions that this volume seeks to answer.

Scheuerman engages with the right-wing mobilization of “Weimar lessons” in the context of the contemporary US political landscape. The chapter focuses specifically on how the political thought of German Jewish émigré political philosopher Leo Strauss was used by supporters of the Trump Administration in academic circles, based primarily at the Claremont Institute. The Weimar analogy has often been mobilized to highlight the dangers of antidemocratic political forces. The chapter, however, serves as a reminder that the redeployment of Weimar and stories about its legacy can be instrumentalized to serve authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian purposes.

Introduction

Even over half a century after its founder's passing, Nehruvian non-alignment continues to cast a lasting influence over the practice and study of Indian foreign policy. The precise extent of its influence, however, has been a widely debated topic in India's foreign policy scholarship. For some, non-alignment has constituted the core feature of India's foreign policy consensus from independence to the present day, irrespective of differences in ‘leadership styles’ between India's largest political parties. On the other extreme, others have dismissed the notion of a foreign policy consensus among the Indian elite as a mere myth that was sustained by the Indian National Congress (INC) party's ‘dominance over the Indian political landscape’ for over four decades. Finally, straddling the two sides is the view that whereas Indian foreign policy was in fact guided by elite consensus on non-alignment during the Cold War, the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of bipolarity brought down India's foreign policy consensus along with it, allowing more realist tendencies to take hold. Despite their differences, these scholarly views share the assumption that Indian elites serve as the primary locus of consensus or contestation in Indian foreign policy. Citing a host of factors, including high levels of poverty and illiteracy, a lack of information, and a preoccupation with living conditions, some scholars argue that Indian voters tend to exhibit apathy towards most foreign policy issues. Despite the few attempts at challenging this view, the idea that foreign policy has been a strictly elitist affair remains foundational to the study of Indian foreign policy.

Building on Cantir and Kaarbo's domestic role contestation framework, this chapter seeks to break the scholarly impasse on non-alignment and challenge the conventional wisdom on the marginal role of public opinion in the making of Indian foreign policy. It begins from the premise that non-alignment serves as a core constitutive feature of India's national identity that informs the views held by Indian elites and public opinion as to whatroles India should play on the world stage. Indian elites and public opinion can shape or constrain what roles the government chooses to play through horizontal and vertical contestation, respectively. Their success in doing so, however, is mediated by the political or institutional conditions that characterize the domestic sphere.