India's Role in the Persian Gulf

24th Apr 2023 by Simon Mabon

Guest post: Saloni Kapur. This is part of our series reflecting on external powers in the Middle East. 

In this report, I address the question of whether India’s relationship with the Persian Gulf states has gone through a paradigm shift since the election of Narendra Modi as the Indian prime minister in 2014. This hypothesis is rooted in a wealth of empirical literature suggesting that this is the case. Scholars have argued that US sanctions have had a detrimental impact on India-Iran ties. They have suggested that India-Iran trade and strategic cooperation have been affected (Hafeez, 2019; Johny, 2017; Saran, 2020; Siyech and Singh, 2018; Wani, Mir and Shah, 2019). Others have emphasised a strengthening of India’s relations with the Arab states of the Gulf subregion, especially the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. They have attributed this to the Arab states’ disappointment with Pakistan’s reluctance to support Yemeni war efforts and the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism, the prospect of a US-Iran deal, India’s rise, and its friendship with the United States. They have also underlined India’s wish to “isolate” Pakistan by courting its traditional Sunni-majority Arab allies, and India’s desire to attract investments from the Arab Gulf states. In addition, they have highlighted India’s quest for renewable energy, as well as the fact that the size of the Indian diaspora in the Arab states of the Gulf far outstrips the size of the Indian diaspora in Iran, as factors that have driven India’s purported pivot away from Iran (Ahmad, 2015; Burton, 2019; Chaudhuri, 2017a, 2017b; Hussain, 2017; Mohan, 2020; Pradhan, 2020; Siyech, 2017).

I employ Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT), as put forward by Buzan and Wæver (2003), to assess whether India is now acting as a great power in the Gulf. I build on previous work by Buzan (2002, 2011) and Pardesi (2015) that categorises India as a great power due to its success in projecting its power beyond its home region of South Asia and into the adjacent subregion of Southeast Asia. Based on the existing empirical literature and the premises of RSCT, I begin with the hypothesis that India’s ties with the Gulf have gone through a paradigm shift, but that the underlying cause is India’s intense desire to be recognised as an Asian great power. Departing from the empirical literature, which credits the personalities of Modi and former US President Donald Trump with being the drivers of this pivot, I argue, based on RSCT, that India’s long-standing quest for great power is the driving factor (the independent variable), whereas Modi and Trump’s personalities are intervening variables that have helped things along.

This implies that India will continue to move closer to the Arab countries even if the new US administration under President Joe Biden succeeds in reinstating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). This is because the movement towards the Arab states is part of a long-term Indian quest for great-power status that transcends the administrations of both Modi and Trump.

I embarked on my inquiry by scouring the online archives of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. The documents I studied included speeches, statements, interviews, media reports, and questions and answers from parliamentary proceedings. I focused on the premierships of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004), Manmohan Singh (2004-2014), and Modi (2014-present). I used 2021 as the cut-off point for documents that made it into the study. The main bilateral ties I centred my research on were those with Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Contrary to the picture painted by the existent empirical studies, I discovered that the pivot away from Iran and towards the Arab states occurred during the Singh era rather than the ongoing Modi phase. Of the two documents I studied from the Vajpayee period, both demonstrated a positive attitude towards Iran. Neither of the documents mentioned the Arab countries of the Gulf subregion. Interestingly, during the Singh era, there was a marked shift. Of 21 documents analysed, 29 per cent were positive towards Iran, 14 per cent were neutral towards Iran and 19 per cent were negative towards Iran. On the other hand, an overwhelming 90% of the documents suggested a positive stance towards the Arab states of the Gulf. Ten per cent of the documents demonstrated a neutral attitude to the Arab states, while only 14 per cent were negative about the Arab countries. Finally, during the Modi era, merely 3 per cent of the records I looked at were negative towards Iran. Forty-one per cent showed a positive approach to Iran, while 15 per cent were neutral towards Iran. When it came to the Arab Gulf countries, 5 per cent of the archives from this period indicated a negative position, another 5 per cent were neutral, and 48 per cent were positive. Furthermore, 100 per cent of the records from the Vajpayee era, 38 per cent of those from the Singh period, and 27 per cent of the documents from the Modi phase placed the statements on the Persian Gulf subregion in the context of India’s desire to be seen as a great power (Ministry of External Affairs, 2023).

Table 1. The official Indian discourse on ties with the Gulf states.

The content analysis I conducted validated my hypothesis that India’s evolving approach to the Persian Gulf was driven by its quest for great-power status. My research showed that this has been India’s consistent mindset at least since the Vajpayee era (2004 onwards), and not only during the ongoing Modi premiership. 

However, the study negated the expectation that India had gone through a tilt away from Iran and towards the Arab states under Modi. Instead, the data revealed that this pivot took place during the Singh administration. On the contrary, the approach towards the Iranian/Arab divide seemed more balanced during Modi’s prime ministership.

I interpret this data in terms of two factors: (1) international sanctions on Iran, and (2) India’s desire for great-power status. India’s rhetoric under all three prime ministers has indicated an underlying wish to be seen as a great power by projecting its power into the neighbouring Gulf subregion. In contrast, the shifting attitude towards Iran seems directly correlated to the imposition and lifting of sanctions on Iran. During the Vajpayee administration, there were US sanctions against Iran as a “state sponsor of terror,” but the nuclear sanctions came into effect while Singh was in power. Alongside the signing of the US-India nuclear deal under Singh, this explains the ebb in India/Iran ties during this period. Finally, for most of the Modi era under study (2014-21), either the United States was part of the JCPOA, or it had given India a waiver to continue to import oil from Iran. Modi took over six years after the signing of the India-US nuclear agreement and thirteen years after US nuclear sanctions on India were lifted. Hence, his government was in a more secure partnership with the United States than Singh’s and under less pressure to acquiesce to US demands.

The broad trend of India seeking to project its power into the neighbouring Gulf subcomplex follows the pattern described by RSCT. It suggests the emergence of a supercomplex in South-West Asia. While the internal dynamics of the South Asian and West Asian (Middle Eastern) Regional Security Complexes remain intact and significant, the interregional dynamics are strong and sustained with India as an external power consistently pushing for influence in the Gulf. This has taken place through trade, investments and collaborative ventures. This indicates that, whether or not the United States returns to the JCPOA, India will continue to seek to deepen its ties with the Gulf. If the United States does return to the JCPOA, this is likely to give a boost to Indo-Iranian trade and collaborative ventures such as the Chabahar port project and the Chabahar-Zahedan railway line. But this is unlikely to be accompanied by any Indian pivot away from the Arab countries, since the broader trajectory of India’s approach to the Gulf is to seek to project its power into the whole of the Gulf subregion, including both Iran and the Arab states.

Saloni Kapur is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at FLAME University. Her research focuses on critical security studies in South and West Asia. She received her PhD from Lancaster University and was a visiting professor at the Symbiosis School of International Studies at Symbiosis International University. She has worked for the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and International SOS-Control Risks.

References

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The Oxford handbook of Indian foreign policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 539–555.

Burton, G. (2019) India’s ‘Look West’ policy in the Middle East under Modi. Available at:

https://www.mei.edu/publications/indias-look-west-policy-middle-east-under-modi (Accessed: 9 June 2021).

Buzan, B. (2002) ‘South Asia moving towards transformation: emergence of India as a great

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Buzan, B. (2011) ‘The South Asian security complex in a decentring world order:

reconsidering Regions and powers ten years on’, International Studies, 48 (1), pp. 1–19. doi: 10.1177/002088171204800101.

Buzan, B. and Wæver, O. (2003) Regions and powers: the structure of international security.

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https://www.mei.edu/publications/indias-balancing-act-gulf (Accessed: 9 June 2021).

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https://mea.gov.in/ (Accessed: 8 March 2023).

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 I collected data up to 2021.