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In this initial foreign policy period, running roughly from April 2014 to July 2015, West Asia was a peripheral interest. There were small indications the Modi government had an eye to the Persian Gulf region — the center of India’s West Asian interests. But on the policy front there was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was in keeping with India’s traditional Gulf policy.
A restatement of India’s long-standing West Asia policy was laid out by Secretary Shri Anil Wadwha, the senior diplomat in charge of the region, in April 2015.[3] He iterated the standard Indian interests in the Persian Gulf: security of oil and gas supply lines, remittances and employment for the roughly seven million-strong Indian diaspora, trade and investment relations, and some skin-deep defense and security ties.
While expressing concern at the region’s political chaos, Secretary Wadwha stressed India was “non-prescriptive and non-judgmental” about events there. New Delhi was “not in the business of exporting democracy.” He saw India’s success as having ensured “bilateral relations with virtually all countries of the region have been progressing … we have managed to insulate our core interests from the negative fall-out of regional developments.” The country’s West Asia policy was, in effect, a bundle of individual relationships and India’s goal was to ensure there was no entanglement. “We would not wish to create parallel mechanisms that will affect our bilateral relations,” he said.
Wadwha repeated New Delhi’s standard arguments for keeping the region at arm’s length. One, as home to the world’s third largest Sunni and Shia populations, “we need to be sensitive to the perceptions of our own religious and ethnic mix in the population.” India had to be “cautious” that its “approach to the region should not be misconstrued as being partisan or sectarian.” He admitted India had been asked to play a “more active role in the Middle East,” however “we need to assess this based on our strategic leverages and realistic consideration of our strengths and limitations.” He critiqued the Arab Spring as having “exacerbated regional faultlines, heightened regional rivalries with competing ideologies and skewed the regional balance of power.”
Insofar as New Delhi had any solution for the turmoil in West Asia, it was to hope Washington would play its traditional role and restore order to the region. As Secretary Wadwha put it: “India believes the US … remains an important player for regional stability” and, in an oblique reference to China, felt other countries which have “gained in appeal as a counterweight to the West in the region” had questionable “economic capacity and sustainability.”
This was boilerplate West Asia policy for New Delhi.
One point the new government did raise repeatedly was to specifically urge Gulf sovereign wealth funds to invest in Modi’s ambitious infrastructure and manufacturing plans.
These appeals began within a few months of Modi’s elections and became embedded in any official comment relating to West Asia. When the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, came visiting in March 2015, he was invited to put some of his country’s wealth into India’s “mega industrial manufacturing corridors.”[4] It was the only point where the Persian Gulf intersected with Modi’s domestic agenda. But India also approached a number of other countries about investments in its infrastructure.