See my post above. The US from WW2 supported and insisted on Indian independence. Afterwards, successive US administrations wanted closer relations with India more than Pakistan. But India keeps on flirting with the high road, the road that lead to USSR since Pskistan was wise enough to make itself strategically important to the US when India was unwilling to do so.
Birth of NAM 2.0
Analysts often ask why India does not play larger roles in global disputes. New Delhi has often come close to answering such questions directly, specifically regarding the Middle East. In 2003, then-Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee warded off rumors that within his administration that were supporters of the call made by George W. Bush for India to send troops to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration was expecting India to send up to seventeen thousand troops to be deployed around the Kurdish region of Mosul, the second-largest city of Iraq, today better known as the place from where Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the emir of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), used the Great Mosque of Al-Nuri to announce the so-called Islamic State, or the launch of the caliphate.
At the time there was, perhaps surprisingly when we look back, much public support for the idea of sending Indian troops into Iraq. Noted analysts such as C Raja Mohan and Sanjay Baru wrote in favor of such a deployment. In a piece titled “India’s decision time on Iraq” published in May 2003 in the prominent The Hindu newspaper, Mohan argued that an Indian deployment in northern Iraq would “signal to the world that New Delhi has finally broken out of the traditionally limiting political confines of the subcontinent.” However, after weighing the pros and cons, Vajpayee took a decision not to send the Indian military to join the United States and Britain in being part of the “war on terror.” Had Vajpayee gotten India involved in Iraq, it would have been a departure from India’s traditional non-interventionist and non-aligned posture and would have derailed one of the most successful diplomatic balancing acts undertaken by a state in the Middle East region. This diplomatic status quo that Vajpayee managed to protect was responsible for the successful evacuation of more than 110,000 Indians during the First Gulf War via the Jordanian capital Amman.
Over ten years before Vajpayee’s support of neutrality, another example of India’s positioning itself as a supporter of a multipolar political order in the Middle East was when New Delhi in January 1992 established official diplomatic relations with Israel. At the time this was a long-overdue policy correction that had been held hostage to an obsolete outlook toward the Israel–Palestine issue by Indian foreign policy. The formalization of ties with Israel—which already in 1992 had been developing strongly despite a lack of formal diplomatic outreach—gave New Delhi a third pole of power to navigate in the region, a pole whose very existence was cause for much of the region’s turmoil.
As such, India continues to this day to walk a tightrope in its diplomacy with the MENA region. This tightrope walking is not for the faint-of-heart, as managing full diplomatic relations with the contesting three poles of power in the region— namely Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel—can be challenging. All the same, the outcomes of such political maneuvering have been largely rewarding for New Delhi. Today, India thoughtfully engages with Middle Eastern actors while at the same time maintaining distance from regional fractures and conflicts, all of which has allowed India to have not just cordial relations across the region, but also fledging trade and migration.
NAM means non alliance 2.0.
Like it or not our aim is to build our capabilities instead of boosting on others wait for sometime till 2030.
@asianobserve what you have to say about this.
