At a time when the Indian government is struggling to combat COVID-19 and strategically relax its highly restrictive lockdown, it is simultaneously being forced to internationally defend its record of religious rights and freedoms. In recent weeks, there has been increasing international scrutiny and criticism with regards to targeted attacks and growing hatred towards the country’s Muslims. For the first time, elites of several Arab nations expressed their distress at the vilification and stigmatization of Indian Muslims in the wake of the hateful media campaign that followed the outbreak of the virus at the Tablighi Jamaat, with many calling out the government for its complacency. But does this sudden shift in the posturing of the Arab citizenry towards India have the potential to translate to tangible foreign policy changes in India?
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office for the first time in 2014, communal violence and crimes against Muslims have increased, which has come hand-in-hand with increased state clampdowns on dissent. Last year, his administration’s decisions to revoke the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state and put its political elite and people under a complete communication blackout for months, along with the introduction of the religiously discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act were met with widespread protests all over the country. New Delhi also saw its worst communal riot that claimed over 50 lives at the same time that Modi entertained US President Donald Trump in the capital city.
Nevertheless, members of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)–Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar–have been unfettered by all this so far, maintaining radio silence or displaying a neutral stance on India’s internal matters. This is because, contrary to popular belief, faith and religion have hardly ever played a role in determining foreign policy directions of these countries towards India in their over 5000-year long relationship with the country. With respect to Kashmir, despite official statements by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) supporting the self-determination of the region, GCC countries have always ignored Pakistan’s attempts at gaining sympathy at the forum and have rather maintained non-interference in the matter, with many governments recognizing this as India’s internal issue. This is also why the OIC’s condemnation of growing Islamophobia in India right now may not be the right parameter to judge whether the Islamic world will actually sanction Modi for his inaction, considering that their statements and suggestions are non-binding.
In fact, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, no Gulf country has attached much significance to religion in the public sphere. The UAE prides itself in its ‘geopolitics of soft power’, wherein it manages to maintain a uniquely moderate stance that allows it to compete with regional powers for Islamic leadership, while simultaneously projecting itself as a haven for tolerance and liberalism. Even in Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by a rigid Wahhabi doctrine, religion is not a factor in employment and is used more as a domestic political tool than a serious affiliation to belief. This is reflected in King Salman’s war in Yemen and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s (MBS) attempts at liberalizing the Kingdom’s laws. While the Salman family considers itself the self-proclaimed leaders of the Islamic world due to their control over the religion’s holiest pilgrimage sites, their foreign policies have never really reflected a deep concern for the worldwide Muslim community. For example, MBS confirmed the country’s ambivalence towards foreign Muslims when he excused the Chinese Communist Party’s ethnic cleansing of Uighur Muslims as the ruling party’s sovereign right to defend themselves from “terrorism”.
Former Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia Talmiz Ahmed notes that after the 2002 Godhra communal riots that occurred under Modi’s Chief Ministership in Gujarat, the Kingdom’s royal family did not want any explanation on the violence and maintained that this was an exceptional episode. They had complete confidence in India’s commitment to its core tenets of religious pluralism and diversity. Even as Modi’s image took a beating in the international community, the GCC countries’ realpolitik view allowed them to see India as being prone to religious discord owing to its difficulty in governing its unique pluralities, as illustrated by previous incidents like the 1986 Meerut riots and the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition.
During his term as Prime Minister, Modi has continued India’s legacy of robust economic and strategic ties with the Gulf. In 2016, during his visit to Riyadh, he was conferred the Order of King Abdulaziz, the highest civilian honour in the Kingdom. In 2019, Modi was also awarded UAE’s highest civilian honour, the Order of Zayed, for his work in strengthening ties between India and the Gulf region. One would think that Modi’s close relations with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu would irritate his contemporaries in the Gulf, but on the contrary, escalating tensions between the GCC and Iran have caused a slight thaw in their dynamic with Israel, allowing for Modi to launch a direct Air India flight to Tel Aviv via Saudi airspace in 2018. Modi has even been allowed to export Hinduism to the Emirates, inaugurating UAE’s first Hindu temple in the same year.
Currently, roughly 8.5 million overseas Indians currently reside in the six GCC states. As of 2018, this diaspora remitted a whopping $80 billion back home, with around 70% employed in blue-collar jobs and at least 20% being professionals dominating the upper levels of the medical and financial sectors. Under Modi’s leadership, India has ramped up military, security, and defence ties in the Middle East, and has also managed to counter a growing Chinese influence in the region by increasing its corporate presence and inviting Gulf investments in its domestic companies.
So far, India and the Gulf have maintained a working relationship based on rapprochement, or harmonious relations, where the maintenance of historical economic ties has always taken precedence over concern for each others’ internal sociopolitical realities. Just as the Gulf has maintained a diplomatic distance and refrained from commenting on India’s treatment of Muslims, India has returned the silence on their blatant abuses against its own diaspora. Modi’s government has not really done much to ease the lives of its immigrant labour population residing in these countries, spare for ensuring timely repatriations of stranded workers during the current pandemic.
But it is worth noting that the current issue of hateful and bigoted tweets about Muslims, especially Arabs, made by BJP parliamentarians and radical Hindu Indians working in these countries, has caught the attention of Arab elites and capitalists who may sanction, or divest in, Indian businesses as a consequence. Growing hatred towards Muslims and the vocalization of these thoughts in highly censored regimes has led to tens of deportations of radical Hindus from the UAE just in the past month. Indian Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Indian missions in the GCC have reacted to the Twitter storm–which was found to have been exacerbated by Pakistani trolls using fake accounts–with immediate urgency, ‘warning’ countries of India’s religious tolerance. According to India’s MEA, Kuwaiti leaders backtracked on their statements later; yet, Delhi Police registered a case of sedition against Zafarul Islam Khan, the chairman of a quasi-judicial body Delhi Minority Commission, for thanking Kuwait for its role in highlighting the issue at the OIC.
In the short term, despite this apparent backlash and haphazard damage control being carried out in the midst of a global pandemic, it seems highly unlikely that Modi or India will face any real sanctions immediately, spare for the retraction of some foreign investments by private Arab or Emirati entities and an increase in the deportation cases of Hindutva propaganda-spewing Indian workers living in these countries. The pandemic has seen a strengthening of medical diplomacy from both ends. Further, as one of the GCC’s biggest oil-importing countries, India is currently a major asset to Saudi Arabia and others who have been battered by the ongoing global oil price war. For economies in the Gulf that are moving away from petroleum, India remains a crucial partner to import labour. The priority, therefore, would be to try and iron the creases that the coronavirus crisis has caused, rather than to escalate hostilities based on religious freedoms. At most, these recent skirmishes on Twitter have exposed Modi’s Hindutva agenda to the Gulf and planted the first seeds of suspicion among its people that the country may no longer be shaped by the traditional values that they have lauded it for in the past.
Yet, the reality of the situation is that despite Modi’s late and half-hearted tweet to mitigate the issue, religiously motivated fights will continue between the citizenry of both regions in the digital space without much diplomatic capital being lost. The coronavirus pandemic has thrown several economic challenges that require robust cooperation for both India and GCC countries to ensure recovery. At the same time, Indian Muslims will endure the brunt of hatred on ground, perpetuated by BJP leaders. The Indian right, with the support of the Modi government, will continue to aggressively deny Islamophobia and justify their actions under the garbs of anti-terrorism and anti-extremism; retorts from the Gulf will be painted in mainstream media as Pakistani attempts at slander or Islamic hatred, and reports like the USCIRF will be denied due to their Western biases, without any reflection of the truth they may carry. India’s Muslims, therefore, cannot rely on Islamic countries to be their saviours in the current scenario. It is only Modi and his exquisitely designed media campaigning team that can reverse the damage that his tenure has caused to minority citizens.
Image Source: South Asian Voices
Gulf Backlash Over Islamophobia Won’t Affect Foreign Policy Towards India
May 6, 2020
