Introduction

The Gulf region, comprising the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states – namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – Iran, and Iraq, has come to acquire a place of prominence in India's foreign policy and international relations over the last three decades. A number of factors, including the post–Cold War shift in Indian foreign policy, growing trade and financial remittances, energy security, and a converging threat perception of transnational terrorism, are responsible for the change. This is a far cry from the decades of the Cold War when, despite the geographic proximity and historical linkages, the region was peripheral to India's foreign policy and was viewed through the prism of solidarity among the postcolonial states. This had resulted in India's Middle East policy becoming initially Cairo-centric and later revolving around Baghdad. The non-alignment policy and the preoccupation with Pakistan meant vital regional countries, namely Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, remained on the periphery of India's Middle East policy during much of the Cold War era.

The end of the Cold War, disintegration of the Soviet Union, and domestic economic compulsions forced India to begin a gradual shift in its foreign policy, and simultaneously, India's Gulf and Middle East policy witnessed a change. The need for foreign economic partners and energy security concerns led New Delhi to reach out to the Gulf countries, especially Oman and Iran, and at the same time, Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao took the bold step to normalize relations with Israel to adjust to the changing global order. Despite the shift, the idea of non-alignment continued to remain central to India's foreign policy discourse – and even at times its foreign policy conduct – with the concept of strategic autonomy acquiring importance.8 The discussions on India's engagement with the world, including the Middle East, continued to revolve around non-alignment, as underlined in the report Nonalignment 2.0 – published in 2012 – which articulated the need for India to adopt strategic autonomy and balancing as the abiding principles of its international engagement.9

Although India's foreign policy debates displayed extraordinary sensitivity to alliance-building as violating the principles of non-alignment and strategic autonomy, in practice, however, New Delhi had begun to shift to a policy of multi-alignment soon after the 1998 nuclear tests over which India faced international condemnation.