Introduction

One of the major shifts that the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi intended to make after taking power in 2014 was to empower India's states in the centre's foreign policy decision-making. This revision was ideally suited for the government's ‘Look West’ policy, with Modi's outreach to West Asia, particularly the Gulf, perhaps uncharacteristically being the single largest success story over the past six years.

The initial posture to empower Indian states more from within the federal structure as far as foreign policy goes seems to have been a non-starter. The idea behind empowering states to have a say in India's foreign policy in a framework of institutionalized sub-national exchanges to promote trade, culture, tourism, and people-to-people ties required both political vision and realpolitik zeal. However, in the times of multilateral dysfunctions and traditions of global diplomacy being potentially re-written by changing polities, citizenry, and more particularly the ecosystem and infrastructures designed around our current understanding of globalization and the world order, paradiplomacy conceptually would need to evolve.

India, the Gulf, and Iran have had historic and civilization ties. Currently, nearly 10 million Indians live and work in the larger West Asian region, and more than USD 50 billion annually are sent into the Indian economy by this diaspora as remittances. Indian states such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and others have had close connections with countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. With over 200 million Muslims, India's outreach to West Asia till an extent has a natural existence, with state policies only following and attempting to incentivize existing connections by tapping into the principles of paradiplomacy. From a policy perspective, thinking about a controlled democratizing process for states to engage with sovereign states with a degree of autonomy is inviting on paper and challenging in practice despite intent at the highest levels.

In this chapter, we will look at the issue and potential of the sub-national approach of diplomacy beyond the charters of a sovereign state's relations with another on the same level from two practical approaches. First is the Indian state of Kerala, which provides a unique perspective by heavily relying on migration and employment in the Gulf States for its local economy and the Gulf's direct outreach to the state during the 2018 floods amidst a row between the state government and the centre.