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As the fighting between Israel and Hamas intensifies, the world is bracing for the widening of a conflict that has the potential to escalate quickly and bring in outside powers from the region and beyond.
According to one long-time watcher of India’s relations with West Asia, India’s position in the aftermath of the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th—and the subsequent Israeli military response—has been noteworthy. This is the conclusion of Nicolas Blarel, Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University in The Netherlands. Blarel joined host Milan Vaishnav on last week’s episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Unlike many countries in the Global South, which offered qualified support for Israel after the attacks and have positioned themselves with the Palestinian cause, India’s initial response made no mention of Gaza at all, said Blarel, who is the author of The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922.
“[India’s position] contrasted with a lot of positions from the Global South but also with past positions India has had. There were two initial tweets [from Modi], which were the sole reaction, and that seemed to be unequivocally tilting towards support for Israel without mentioning any context or talking about the initial reprisals against Gaza,” Blarel noted. “And the fact is that we had to wait for five days from a reaction from the ministry of external affairs spokesperson to call for respect for international law and to reiterate India’s position in favour of a two-state solution.”
Read Here: India’s security planners keep close tabs on Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza
Blarel admitted that this came as a surprise “given India’s more balanced response to previous Israel-Hamas or Israel-Gaza crises”.
India’s closer embrace of Israel has been an incremental process, with the bilateral relationship finally “coming out of the closet” during the Modi years. Noted Blarel, “I don’t think people are as much aware of the historical interest that India had into the Palestine question…and that India was looking at the Israel-Palestine issue through its own kind of decolonizing process. The partitions of British India and Israel-Palestine are deeply interlinked.”
Blarel explained that the way that India looked at the potential partition of the mandate of Palestine mirrored the debates that were happening within the Congress party and the broader debates that took place between Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, and Azad. “The Congress could not take a position supporting the partition of the mandate of Palestine on religious terms if it was defending a separate position at home,” said Blarel.
In fact, Blarel noted that for decades India was very wary of wading into the Israel-Palestine quagmire. “India recognized Israel in 1950 but did not establish diplomatic ties for another 42 years,” explained Blarel, pointing out that “India also did not have relations with any Palestine entity” for decades. Blarel argued that India was very circumspect about engaging in diplomatic discussions with various representations of the Palestine cause because it did not know which group was the legitimate representative of the Palestine national cause and which were merely instruments of neighbouring Arab states. This changed in the 1970s when India became the first non-Arab state to formally recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
Grand Tamasha: Understanding India’s stance on Israel-Hamas conflict – Hindustan Times
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