India relives proud legacy by honouring Sultan Qaboos with Gandhi Peace Prize
“Strategic partnership” with India
The citation for the Gandhi Peace Prize is accompanied by a thoughtful tribute from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi spoke of Qaboos as a “beacon of peace for our region and the world”; more importantly, he recalled him as “a true friend of India” who shaped the “strategic partnership” between the two countries.
These remarks barely do justice to Qaboos’ respect and affection for India. The sultan was deeply conscious of the historic and civilisational ties that have bonded the Indian and Omani people over several centuries. His first act after becoming sultan was to pay a private visit to Bombay in 1970 and pray at the grave of his grand-father, Sayyid Taimur, who had been exiled to India by the British in 1932 and had died in 1965. And, while the sultan had an official “Arab” garment as his ceremonial dress, he also adopted the Indian sherwani and fur cap as the other formal dress of the ruler.
But the sultan went beyond such external gestures and shaped a special place for India in his strategic vision. In 1993, after the end of the Cold War and the First Gulf War nearer home, Sultan Qaboos recognised the need for a strategic partner to safeguard Oman’s security. He turned to India as the nation with which Oman had had long-standing economic and community-based ties, with the two countries enjoying a high degree of cultural comfort with each other. The modern “strategic partnership” would, in his view, establish firm security ties, with Oman offering India access to its ports along the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Hormuz.
To provide a solid economic foundation to the partnership, the sultan proposed that two high-value projects be executed by government companies, one in Oman and the other in India. Besides this, Indian and Omani private companies should set up a joint holding company to pursue projects in the two countries, as also in third countries.
It must be noted with regret that India just could not rise to this opportunity. It took over a decade for the joint venture fertiliser project to be completed at Sur, with the project being badly delayed by political disputes and name-calling in India, with vested interests making every effort to subvert the initiative. The project in India, the oil refinery at Bina in Madhya Pradesh, was in fact subverted by vested interests not wanting a new refinery in India, so that Oman had no choice but to withdraw from it. The private sector initiative went nowhere – the Indian companies simply conveyed that they just could not work with each other.
It is possible that, at some stage, Sultan Qaboos realised that his vision for a real strategic partnership with India, that would yield advantages to both sides, was going nowhere: when I met the sultan at my farewell call after the completion of my ambassadorship and recalled the successful completion of the Sur project, Qaboos ruefully remarked: “You took your time over it, didn’t you.”
Qaboos, born in 1940, ascended the Omani throne in July 1970 through a bloodless coup that overthrew his father, Sultan Said bin Taimur, with the help of British intelligence, and ushered in an era of…
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