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.

The radical Right has turned to the Left’s iconic hero Antonio Gramsci for inspiration and guidance on how to launch a counter-hegemonic struggle against liberal cultural and political domination. Gramsci provides a powerful way to understand the globalisation of the Right, and many of Gramsci’s ideas, particularly cultural hegemony, historic blocs, and counter-hegemonic movements have been self-consciously and strategically appropriated by the Right. What radical Right intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’ provides them with a global sociological, ideological, and political framing, as well as a political economy with capitalism and class at its centre. It provides a strategic direction that seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them from classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves. The global Right is not ideologically unified, nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, their counter-hegemonic ideologies enable diverse actors and agendas to find common cause despite their differences.

Introduction

Indian foreign policy towards the Gulf has seen a tectonic transformation over the past three decades. From its active pursuit of non-alignment during the Cold War to a steadily growing pragmatism in its approach towards the Middle East, contemporary Indian engagement with its western extended neighbourhood has been progressively expanding. India's unprecedented economic development ever since its economic liberalization during the last decade of the twentieth century has seen its gross domestic product (GDP) rise from USD 458.82 billion in 1999 to USD 2.875 trillion in 2019. Consequently, India's growing economic interlinkages with the rest of the world have gradually increased its stakes as well as their associated vulnerabilities. India of the post–Cold War world seeks to position itself as a leading power on the global stage, seeking to be a rule-maker as opposed to a rule-taker away from the idealism of the past.

Accordingly, India's relationship with the countries in the Gulf has evolved since the end of the Cold War with New Delhi's newfound pragmatism forming the foundation of its new partnerships. This evolving international system, India's transforming perception of its role on the global stage, and the resultant implications on New Delhi's relations with the Gulf have been scrutinized by scholars of Indian foreign policy. Researchers have used a variety of theoretical tools from mainstream, constructivist, and critical international relations (IR) theories to help better explain these changes. However, as Robert Cox states that ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, the question of analysis for this chapter is to understand what the implications of the shifts in global and regional distribution of power are for India's foreign policy in the Gulf. To answer this very question, this analysis primarily relies upon theoretical tools drawn from the mainstream IR school of realism with their positivist ontology.

Putting the last three decades into perspective, this chapter proposes that as India's relative material capabilities have increased, so has its tactful diplomatic engagement with the Gulf intensified, transforming its role in the region.