A new milestone in India-West Asia relations

K. P. Nayar

Strategic Analyst

WHEN United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan landed in Ahmedabad last week, travelled in a motorcade along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi — cheered by adoring crowds — and attended the 10th Vibrant Gujarat Summit, it became an understated landmark in the evolution of India’s contemporary history.

The UAE President is the first head of state of a Gulf nation to visit Gujarat since Modi became the PM nearly a decade ago. Before Sheikh Mohamed, visits by numerous Presidents and Prime Ministers to Gujarat were captured in stunning images by news photographers worldwide. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Modi seated together on a swing charpoy on the Sabarmati Riverfront, former United States President Donald Trump at the Narendra Modi Stadium with a crowd he could never gather back home, and the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, also on the riverfront, are among those memorable images. The last big visit to Gujarat before Sheikh Mohamed’s was by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April 2022, months before he resigned.

The Protocol Department of the Gujarat government has no record of any head of state or government from an Islamic country — i.e. where Islam is the state religion — visiting Gujarat for official travel during the nearly 13 years when Modi was the Gujarat Chief Minister. Nor did any monarch or titular or executive head of any Islamic government visit Gujarat after Modi shifted to New Delhi as PM. The UAE President was the first.

Like the 2014 US decision to lift the visa ban on Modi from going stateside, Sheikh Mohamed’s presence at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit as the chief guest marks a psychological and emotive turning point in West Asia’s engagement with today’s India. Such engagement would have had a yawning gap without political relations at the highest level with Gujarat, merely limiting relations with this important state to business. Especially when Israel had stolen a march over the Arab countries. In January 2018, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was hosted by Modi at a roadshow similar to what was held in honour of Sheikh Mohamed last week. Netanyahu’s visit to Ahmedabad was a splendid success. So will the UAE President’s visit be, and it will have a long-term spin-off. The Gujarati diaspora is big in the Gulf, and it has been making a multi-faceted imprint especially in the UAE since Modi became the PM.

Next month, the Swaminarayan Hindu Mandir, a largely Gujarat initiative, will open in Abu Dhabi. Prominent overseas Gujaratis have been making the case across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations that their home state is an all-round success, acknowledged by the United Nations in multiple spheres, and that engagement with Gandhinagar at the highest possible levels is imperative for the GCC’s overall plurilateral relations with India.

A similar landmark in India’s contemporary history was reached in 1995 when then Iran President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani addressed a huge crowd of Shia Muslims at the Bada Imambara in Lucknow and complimented India’s secularism. It came as a surprise even for then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, who had carefully cultivated a friendship with Rafsanjani beginning with the September 1992 Non-Aligned Summit in Jakarta. The Ram Temple Movement was gaining momentum across northern and western India and there were already lurking fears that the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya would be brought down. The demolition happened exactly three months after the Rao-Rafsanjani meeting and the new bonhomie with Tehran proved critical.

At his press conference in New Delhi before embarking for Lucknow, Rafsanjani snubbed a Pakistani journalist who asked a question about Babri Masjid. A year before Rafsanjani’s visit to Lucknow, at the April-May 1994 session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), Iran stymied a resolution of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) on India’s human rights record in Kashmir. Incidentally, both the UNHRC and the OIC have since been rechristened.

Like the frequent meetings between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his UAE counterpart Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan in the last nearly five years, a meeting between then Foreign Minister Dinesh Singh and his Iranian counterpart Ali Akbar Velayati a month before the UNHRC meeting turned out to be crucial. Singh was virtually immobile after suffering a series of strokes, but Rao chose the ailing External Affairs Minister — not a Minister of State or any other Cabinet member who was not handling foreign policy — for the journey to Tehran so that Rafsanjani would grasp the seriousness of the business involved. Velayati, a physician and initially Health Minister in the first Islamic revolutionary government, was totally taken aback when he watched Singh alighting from the special aircraft that took him to Iran. Singh’s power of speech had been affected by the strokes, but his Iranian interlocutors paid rapt attention to what he was telling them. It is documented in the archives of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) that Velayati clasped both hands of the Indian minister as he took leave and said: “Ali Hashemi wants me to convey through you to his friend Narasimha Rao that Iran will do everything to ensure that no harm comes to India.” Rao’s strategy of deputing Singh on this mission worked. Iran stopped the OIC from proceeding with the vote at the UNHRC, resulting in the withdrawal of the Kashmir resolution, much to the chagrin of Pakistan. It was taken for granted in Islamabad that the resolution would pass with OIC support, and that Kashmir would, thereafter, permanently be on the UN agenda in Geneva.

Like the unfolding horizons of the India-UAE relations today, India-Iran ties opened new vistas two decades ago. Given the complexities of geopolitics and geoeconomics in West Asia, India’s engagement with Iran, to a great extent, opened the doors for New Delhi in Riyadh, Kuwait, Baghdad and other regional capitals. Successive Prime Ministers persisted with Rao’s Iran policy until Manmohan Singh developed cold feet in 2005 under pressure from Washington and cut out Iran as a diplomatic priority. The potential of Sheikh Mohamed’s latest outreach in Ahmedabad should not, therefore, be underestimated, going by lessons from India’s diplomatic legacy.

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