| |
Why India dumped the
Palestinians
By Ramtanu Maitra
India's remarkable change of stance on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows the impact of the
pro-Israel policymakers in New Delhi. Having been in the
forefront of support for Yasser Arafat and the Palestine
Liberation Organization for decades, India today is a
silent spectator, refusing to comment on the Israeli
actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip lest it
antagonize Tel Aviv, New Delhi's newfound bania (trading
class) friend and comrade-at-arms.
It is not
that the Palestinians did not seek out India's support
against the Israeli incursions. In fact, President
Yasser Arafat sent his personal emissary, Hani al-Hasan,
to meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Afterward, al-Hasan told reporters that Palestine "would
like India to play a role in West Asia … Politicians are
generally balanced. We want a just equation." But Hani
al-Hasan did not know that India was busy working out a
new equation in which the Palestinians do not figure.
While the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) - wearing Hindu sentiment on its sleeve -
helped the Israeli "cause", New Delhi's decision to
befriend the Israelis and abandon the Palestinians was
put in place earlier. In 1992, following the
disintegration of India's ally and fellow backer of the
Palestinians, the Soviet Union, the P V Narasimha
Rao-led Congress party government granted full
diplomatic relations to Israel. Under the leadership of
then finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh, India began its
economic reforms and liberalization, and economic
necessities began increasingly to shape India's foreign
policy.
In this context, Israel's importance
came to the fore. Ultimately, the "benefit" aspect of
relations between nations drove New Delhi to switch
sides. If the BJP Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani seems
to represent the strongest pro-Israel BJP voice in
India, it should be noted that the strongman of
Maharshtra, Sharad Pawar, formerly of the Congress party
(and perhaps soon to be a Congressman again), is no less
a favorite of Tel Aviv. There are other reasons as well
behind India's classical pirouette.
Security To
begin with, the Muslim issue, and Pakistan in
particular, seemed to be an important factor in Indian
decision-makers' tilt toward Israel. The Israeli lobby
within India - large although not very well organized -
had been chipping away at India's policymaking behemoth
for decades, arguing unabashedly that India's
"appeasement of the Muslims through the support it lent
to the Arabs and the Palestinians" was a distortion put
in motion by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and carried further by his daughter, the late
Indira Gandhi.
The lobby is forthright in
pointing out that the policy of appeasement resulted in
no gains and many losses to the country. The Arabs never
really supported India in its conflict with Pakistan - a
Muslim nation. The Islamic nations did not support
India's military intervention in carving out Bangladesh
from Pakistan. The Islamic nations did not appreciate
India's contribution in stopping the massacre of fellow
Muslims by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan, and
Yasser Arafat, himself, had never really attacked the
terrorist outfits Pakistan deployed against India to
destabilize Kashmir. Some claim that Arafat glowed when
Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in the bleak Chagai
Hills in 1998. He welcomed it not as a Pakistani nuclear
bomb, but an "Islamic" nuclear bomb.
If one puts
aside the loaded word "appeasement", these accusations
are by and large factual, but it still does not quite
explain why the Palestinians, who are Muslims, were
forsaken. It is difficult to deny that the Palestinians
have been systematically victimized and alienated in
their own land by the Israelis. It is somewhat
depressing to go back and read the kind of name-calling
that Indian policymakers indulged in, berating the West
from the 1950s through the 1980s for supporting Israel
against the landless-in-their-own-land Palestinians -
because Indian policymakers have now adopted the same
policy that most of the West practiced during the Cold
War days: the policy of benign neglect.
Another
reason behind New Delhi's sidling up to Tel Aviv is the
desire to get access to various weapons technologies
that Israel has lifted from the Pentagon while the
sentinels were looking the other way. Since Washington
is most uncooperative in providing New Delhi with
advanced weaponry technology and hardware (and is more
keen to impose sanctions as soon India takes one
"unfavorable" step), Israeli offers of stolen American
weaponry technology to India were most welcomed,
particularly by the Indian men in uniform.
Defense-related ties between India and Israel
have become the most prominent part of this new
relationship. There are unconfirmed reports of Israeli
military "technologists", based in India, "helping out"
New Delhi to secure the porous Line of Control that
separates the Indian-held part from the Pakistani-held
part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
There
are also some in India who put forward the view that
Narasimha Rao's normalization of relations with Israel
was related to India's involvement in Sri Lankan
affairs. India has had a longstanding interest in the
stability of Sri Lanka because of the island's proximity
and the daily interaction it has with Colombo and the
Sri Lankans. Colombo's virtually racist policies against
the Tamil minority, and the terrorism subsequently
unleashed by the Tamil Tigers, created a regional crisis
which jeopardized India's national security in the 1980s
and through the mid-1990s.
Colombo, meanwhile,
had developed security linkages with the United States,
Pakistan and Israel. Since India did not have adequate
leverage in pressurizing either the United States or
Pakistan, New Delhi sought to neutralize Israel. The
propagators of this theory claim that the United States
had set up an arc to contain the Soviet Union during the
Cold War era. The southwestern flank of this arc of
containment stretched from Turkey and Israel via the
Gulf and Pakistan. The arc also effectively contained
India's foreign policy initiatives, the argument goes:
India's normalization of relations with Israel in 1992
essentially broke that arc, these analysts claim.
The Muslim issue While both India and Israel
consider the rising power of Islamic fundamentalism a
threat to national security, there is, however, little
similarity between the kind of problem that India faces
from the Islamic fundamentalists in the state of Jammu
and Kashmir and the kind Israel faces in Palestine. In
fact, the Palestinians belong to Palestine, while the
Israelites came in from outside to establish their
claim.
Helped by the British colonialists, the
Balfour Declaration and the massacre of Jews by Adolf
Hitler, Israel was born. Palestinians lost part of their
land where they lived and there is a possibility that
they may lose more, if not the whole of it. There is no
basis for Palestinians to have a friendly attitude
toward Israel, or those who perpetrated, or even
benignly overlooked, this calamitous policy.
In
Jammu and Kashmir, however, no such thing happened.
Jammu and Kashmir is a Muslim-majority area, which was
left under a weak king when the British left in 1947.
The king had the option to join either Pakistan or
India, or remain independent. Both India and Pakistan
coveted Jammu and Kashmir and the king, to save himself
from the invading Pakistani troops, opted to join India.
The local Kashmiris raised their voices, and later
lethal arms, only when it became evident to them that
neither Pakistan nor India was interested in making
Kashmir an independent country.
In the meantime,
India and Pakistan remained locked in the dispute, going
to war at least twice in the past five decades. Helped
by the Cold War, and foreign interference at every
level, Jammu and Kashmir became a festering sore to the
point that Islamic mercenaries, trained and armed in
Afghanistan by Western nations and Pakistan, moved in
almost four decades after the dispute had begun. In
other words, while Israel cannot be made secure until
the Palestinian issue is resolved and Israel is left
with no choice but to make peace with the Palestinians,
such are not the dynamics at work in the case of
Kashmir.
In Kashmir, Islamic fundamentalists who
infiltrated from Afghanistan and Pakistan to give the
Indians a bloody eye through acts of violence, killed
thousands of Indian army personnel, innocent civilians
and militants. But these mercenaries had neither any
commitment to the Kashmiris nor to the Pakistanis. It is
a certainty that sooner or later the Kashmiri leaders,
now caught up in violence, will understand this little
truth. It is likely that the ordinary Kashmiris have
already seen through this deception.
These
mercenaries wave the Islamic flag and work under
instructions from an anti-India Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI). Despite many complexities that
surround the Jammu and Kashmir issue, it is not
difficult to see that both the Pakistanis and the
Indians can work out a solution with the help of the
Kashmiris, and that would marginalize the zealots and
killers who wear Islamic garb. The process would require
some give and take. Unlike the case of Palestine,
neither India's, nor Pakistan's, survival is directly
linked to the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
Some problems Despite the common interest
expressed by the two countries in aggressively
eliminating the Islamic fundamentalists of various hues,
Israel and India have different friends. Israel, for
instance, is unlikely to abandon its two-decade-old
military ties with China to lessen Indian concerns.
While Israel has expressed its concerns over
India's suspected nuclear cooperation with Iran, there
are no indications to suggest that India has raised the
Chinese issue during bilateral discussions. This silence
should not be taken as a sign of India's acquiescence or
endorsement of the Israeli-Chinese ties. Israel's
involvement and participation in projects such as
China's F-10 fighter are bound to undermine India's
long-term security interests.
Unlike the case of
the United States, whose friendly relations with
Pakistan are a subject of much anger among Indian
policymakers, Israel's military relations with China are
not yet a subject of discussion in New Delhi. But, it is
anybody's guess how long such silence will prevail. And,
for domestic as well as regional considerations, India
intends to continue consolidating its political and
economic cooperation with Iran. In recent years, New
Delhi embraced Iran as a principal ally in countering
the anti-India campaign by Pakistan in the Islamic
world, and India looks to Iran as a major transit route
in developing its future economic and political
relations with the Central Asian republics.
Now,
reverting back to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it is
to be noted that the basic dimensions of that conflict
have not changed much, but the Indian position has taken
almost a 180-degree turn in recent years. In the past,
Yasser Arafat and many other Palestinian leaders visited
Delhi regularly to drum up support for the Palestinian
cause. Such visits do not take place any longer and, in
fact, Arafat now depends more on China than on the
tongue-tied Indian political leadership in New Delhi.
It is widely known that the Palestinian
ambassador in Delhi, Khalid Al-Sheikh, was running from
pillar to post in spring to get the Indian government at
the highest level to issue a "favorable" statement at a
time when Ariel Sharon was tearing down West Bank towns
and was on an anti-Yasser Arafat rampage. India did
issue a respectable statement against the Israeli
invasion of the West Bank, but the statement came from
India's UN ambassador based in New York, and not from
the South Block power center. Khalid Al-Sheikh must
admit that things have really, really changed.
Beside that statement, however, not much forward
movement in favor of the Palestinians has been noticed
in India. Very few Indian authorities found time to show
solidarity with Yasser Arafat and while the Israelis
kept the Palestinian president a virtual prisoner in his
own office at Ramallah, Delhi chose mostly to ignore the
gravity of the situation. On the other hand, Indian
policymakers and the men in uniform kept falling over
each other to get to the right side of Israel. One
delegation after another visited Israel to sew up one
deal or the other. An equal number of Israelis, if not
more, visited Delhi and other places, sometime overtly
and sometime covertly.
(©2002 Asia Times Online
Co Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and
syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
