Pax Indica: Why Modi's I for an I' shouldn't include Iran

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high-profile visits to Washington and Jerusalem-Tel Aviv were watched closely worldwide, but nowhere more so than in Islamabad and Beijing, where India is considered anything but a friend. While Mr Modi’s visit to Washington ran along predictable lines, and was indicative of India’s well-known desire to be on the right side of any US administration, it was the Israel visit, three long years in the making, ever since Mr Modi won the 2014 election, and which has seen more preparatory visits by Indian and Israeli officials to both capitals than any other, that has grabbed the eyeballs. Being feted at the White House was always on top of Mr Modi’s agenda. More so, after US President Donald Trump’s hosting of China’s President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago Florida property and the consequent bonhomie, the embrace of China as a partner in arms to whom the job of keeping the recalcitrant North Koreans in line was outsourced: all deeply troubling, given India’s growing unease over Beijing’s protection of Pakistan’s jihadist machinery that has upturned years of relative peace in Kashmir, and the timing of its ratcheting up of tensions in the Sikkim-Bhutan region, thus keeping India on its toes on its eastern and western borders, even as Mr Modi made nice with President Trump. With New Delhi’s Israel policy no longer a matter of conjecture, both Beijing and Islamabad will undoubtedly rework their strategic calculus to factor in India’s powerful friend and what that could entail. Israel’s quiet transfer of guns and missiles since the Kargil conflict; air and naval defence systems, state-of-the-art technology in unmanned drones and thermal imaging and other interception software that enables the Indian military to stay one tiny step ahead of Pakistan’s terror infiltration machine has, after all, given Pakistan’s “Terror Central” much heartburn.

But the attention it draws in Iran’s capital Tehran, where India’s special ties have stood it in good stead through successive governments in both capitals, despite the ritual calumny heaped on Delhi’s Kashmir policy at every Organisation of Islamic Conference session that India largely takes in its stride, is what India must watch out for. This time, days before Mr Modi’s arrival in Tel Aviv, Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered an out-of-turn anti-Kashmir tirade. That can only have been a signal to the Indian leadership that its well-crafted balancing act of keeping Tehran — major oil and gas supplier and its friend and ally on Afghan policy — happy, even as it came out of the closet on hitherto close ties with Israel, is a strategy that needs revisiting with urgency; Mr Modi’s pathbreaking May visit to Tehran notwithstanding. Israel is after all the one nation that has always publicly declared Iran as public enemy number one, and vice versa. The changing geopolitical dynamics that brought about ISIS’ rise and reinforced the civilisational Sunni-Shia divide between Saudi Arabia and Iran, may have seen an unprecedented meeting of minds between the Jewish state and the new powers-that-be in the Saudi establishment. Here, as in other Gulf nations, particularly the UAE, they have put aside years of vilification of Israelis as hated Zionists.

Riyadh, and to a greater extent the UAE, like Qatar, have been pragmatic, with Abu Dhabi even allowing an Israeli trade office. Israel, after President Trump’s triumphal visit when he broke the embargo and flew directly from Riyadh to Tel Aviv, is now firmly anchored in the Saudi-led Sunni alliance. India, however, despite Tehran’s alleged transfer of nuclear technology to Pakistan, through the machinations of the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, avowed India-hater A.Q. Khan, has never picked sides. The Tehran versus Jerusalem battle was seen as irrelevant to India’s own security paradigm. With India’s embrace of Trump’s Washington and the Israeli establishment, a ticket to Mr Trump’s inner circle, will that change? Neither Tehran’s historical support of the Hezbollah, the Palestinian cause and Hamas and Syria, that placed it front and centre as public enemy number one in Israel, has ever sat easily with earlier Indian governments. Equally, India has also stayed well away from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby’s fury at former US President Barack Obama’s embrace of Iranians in a bid to contain Tehran’s nuclear weaponry, and its role in reversing it.
New Delhi has chosen, instead, to treat the relationship with the Saudis and Gulf nations, with Palestine and Tehran, and now Israel, as distinct from one another. This despite the fact that Tehran is talked up at every security meet in Israel as one nation that must be de-fanged, with Iran’s growing nuclear power a major source of concern for the Jewish nation. Indeed, as far back as mid-2009, Israel’s covert cybersecurity squad targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities, using Stuxnet, a first-of-its-kind Israeli “cyber-missile”, to sabotage Iran’s Natanz nuclear centrifuge fuel-refining plant from the inside as well as other unnamed centrifuge plants.

Again, Israel’s much-vaunted spy network in Russia, recently and inadvertently outed by Mr Trump while he was talking to the Russians, showed the extent of their expertise. Now, that’s the technology India must have its eye on. India’s newfound relationship with Israel was captured on camera, epitomised by the extraordinary bromance between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Modi, splashing around, trousers rolled up on a Haifa beach. But it is 26/11 and Pakistan’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the Jewish Chabad House, that is the unspoken glue that binds, underscoring shared Indian-Israeli concerns on cross-border and indigenous terror attacks on its respective peoples. As the two PMs swapped well-crafted speeches on the tarmac, Mr Modi talked up “I4I”, or “India for Israel and Israel for India”, while the flamboyant “Bibi” Netanyahu trotted out the formulaic “I squared T squared”. That’s “Indian talent plus Israeli technology equals India-Israel ties for tomorrow”! Whatever the jargon, as long as “I for an I” doesn’t include Iran, India may have hit the sweet spot.