Leveraging diplomacy in Gulf
A diplomatic drive by the government to reconcile multipolarity in India’s extended neighbourhood is expected to place New Delhi way ahead of its competitors for influence in the Gulf as mass vaccination efforts at both ends and an economic rebound prepare the region to overcome the adverse impact of the pandemic.
A new trend in geopolitics is towards multipolarity within regions. For this reason, India chose not to confine its latest diplomatic initiatives to the Arab side of the Gulf alone.
If the effort succeeds, Indian workers who had left the UAE during the pandemic will be able to return to that country in the post-Covid-19 scenario while others who remain in the UAE and face uncertainties in their workplaces could be reassigned to new employers. Across the Gulf, on its Persian and Shia side, the drive has already positioned India better than most other countries to do business with Tehran as the new Biden administration in the US is weighing the option of rejoining the multi-nation nuclear deal with Iran. Most of all, proactive actions in Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman, where heads of state or government passed away recently, have given India an early start in engaging the new leadership in these countries.
Before External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar left on his recent visit to the UAE, it was made known that his mission, in part, was to find ways for the rehabilitation of Indian workers in the seven emirates, which make up the federation. About 3.5 million Indians lived and worked in the UAE before the onset of the pandemic. Many left when the pandemic caused disruptions. This is no small population. Nor are the remittances they send home insignificant. The return to the UAE of many of these Indians is already work in progress, a big relief for states which send them overseas in large numbers as guest workers.
Also underway is an effort to prevent any further exodus of Indians. The evacuation flights daily, known as ‘Vande Bharat’, have already become the biggest repatriation in the history of mankind. The UAE’s leadership gave a sympathetic hearing to Jaishankar’s suggestion that workers from India who could lose more jobs should be re-employed wherever possible instead of being asked to return to India. This is crucial for the large Indian community because in the Gulf states, residence of foreign workers is tied to their employment. If new employment cannot be found for anyone who loses his job, he will have to leave the country: for that reason, this initiative is very vital and timely.
In Bahrain and Oman, the External Affairs Minister condoled the deaths of their PM and Sultan, respectively. For most governments the world over, the new normal is to show such gestures remotely because of Covid fears. Both these departed leaders had a long history of engaging India well before British rule ended in their region. When the Amir of Kuwait died recently, India took a rare decision to observe State mourning on the death of a foreign head of state. In a culture which values personal interaction, India’s quick fallback on pre-Covid style of diplomacy has ensured not just continuity in relations with these Gulf countries, but also early engagement with the incoming leadership there.
A significant change from the past in South Block, the seat of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), is the realisation that a new trend in geopolitics is towards multipolarity within regions. For this reason, India chose not to confine its latest diplomatic initiatives to the Arab side of the Gulf alone. When Jaishankar visited Persian, Shia Iran, he revived a bilateral Joint Commission at a time when most countries were keeping Tehran at arm’s length for fear of incurring Washington’s wrath.
Afterwards, India hosted the first Trilateral Working Group meeting among India, Iran and Uzbekistan on the joint use of the Chabahar Port. Among the major democracies in the world, India is one of the few countries which can be equally active on both sides of the Gulf. The US cannot and has not done so for 40 years. It may be a long while, if at all, before Britain can do so either. Other than India, it is only France, Germany and Japan which have attained this level of diplomatic leverage in this region which is critical to India.
It has come as a great relief to New Delhi that the nearly three-year-old fracture within the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ended four weeks ago and normal relations with Qatar have been restored mutually by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain. This was a multipolarity which was more difficult to deal with than engaging the multiple poles in Tehran and Riyadh. There were no ethnic, linguistic or religious differences between the UAE and Qatar: the differences were over ideas and policies and not fundamental unlike the great divide across the Gulf between Shia Iran and the Sunni rest.
India is friendly with all GCC countries and has a stake in each one of them going beyond the large Indian communities in the entire GCC. Since mid-2017, South Block struggled to balance its interests in all four Gulf states torn apart by the break in their relations. When the MEA issued a statement post-haste when this dispute ended, the joy was palpable. ‘We welcome the reconciliation and rapprochement between countries in the region. India shares excellent relationship with all the countries in the GCC which is in our extended neighbourhood…We will continue to work with GCC countries for the strengthening of our bilateral cooperation.’
Other than Michael Pompeo, the former US Secretary of State, the only foreign minister from outside the region who was proactively present in Doha eight days before this rapprochement was Jaishankar. Qatar hosts slightly more than seven lakh Indians. Its Amir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, is expected to be one of the first foreign leaders to visit India once normalcy, post-Covid, restores old-style diplomacy. When the next grand quadrennial football championship, the FIFA World Cup is held in Qatar in 2022, it will be played in a stadium built by Larsen and Toubro, an Indian company. Jaishankar was to visit Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well, but his schedules were disrupted by unexpected developments related to the coronavirus.
