India's Israel Policy by P. R. Kumaraswamy & Kumaraswamy Kumaraswamy

Author:P. R. Kumaraswamy & Kumaraswamy Kumaraswamy [Kumaraswamy, P. R. & Kumaraswamy, Kumaraswamy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Middle East, Asia, History, General
ISBN: 9780231525480
Google: 5EHJHVXmLeEC
Goodreads: 17167870
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Once the present Muslim policy of a separate Islamic state in India (popularly known as Pakistan) is realized, which it will be in the course of the next two years, Hindu opinion on the question of Palestine will find its natural and untrammeled expression.

—Historian and diplomat K. M. Panikkar

9 Nehru and the Era of Deterioration, 1947–1964

Panikkar’s prognosis, which he made in April 1947, was quickly proved wrong, either because of misreading or wishful thinking. Within months of his observation, India not only opposed a Jewish homeland in Palestine but also had voted against the UN partition plan. Jawaharlal Nehru did not radically alter India’s policy toward the Middle East. If he was the chief foreign-policy spokesperson for the Congress Party during the nationalist phase, he laid the foundation of free India’s policy. Earlier, Nehru had to compete with Mahatma Gandhi’s towering personality; now he emerged as the uncrowned monarch on foreign-policy issues. As such, much of India’s foreign policy was designed and institutionalized by him. No account of India’s external policy or relations would be complete without understanding and recognizing the Nehruvian model. As Michael Edwards observes: “No other democratic Prime Minister has ever had such a free hand in the formulation and execution of his country’s foreign policy.”1 For his entire seventeen-year tenure as prime minister, he was also India’s foreign minister and personally nurtured the ministry.2 His influence was so overwhelming that even the non-INC governments that came to power long after his death could only change the style and not the substance of India’s foreign policy. “Continuity and change,” the perennial Indian mantra, is primarily a reaffirmation of Nehru’s vital contributions.

India’s policy toward Israel is primarily a study of nonrelations or the absence of normalization. For over four decades, the changing international political situations, the Eurocentric cold war, compulsions of interests, and domestic electoral calculations meant that the absence of normalization was prominent in India’s Israel policy. Nonrelations did not mean that the two countries were not interacting with each other. At least in the early years, both countries were cooperating internationally. Slowly, they drifted apart, and India soon emerged as the principal non-Arab and non-Islamic country to castigate Israel for its policies and practices.

Between the formation of Israel in 1948 and the normalization of relations in January 1992, India had seven prime ministers.3 With the exception of the Janata government (1977–1979) and two coalition governments from 1989 to 1991, the Congress Party ruled India for much of this period. Of these, the longest, the Nehru era (1947–1964), was the defining period for Indo-Israeli relations. Most critical decisions regarding Israel were taken during Nehru’s reign. It was under his leadership that India advocated the federal plan, voted against the partition plan, and grudgingly recognized the Jewish state. Nehru played a crucial role in the Organization of the Afro-Asian movement that eventually culminated in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. As will be discussed, Nehru backed Israel’s exclusion from this bloc of newly independent countries, which in turn signaled and consolidated Israel’s isolation from the Third World.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.