By Manoj Kumar Mishra
While Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Israel at a time when it was a phase of relative lull following the latter’s massive Gaza campaign, Tel Aviv’s pre-emptive strike on Iran on the very next day of his visit, and the tit-for-tat offensives that continued in the aftermath of the visit, turned the diplomatic endeavor into a moral burden for New Delhi.
India’s quandary
During the Cold War era, India, in consistence with its ideals of Non-alignment policy, championed the cause of Palestinian statehood and supported diplomatic moves to facilitate a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine territorial issue. The disintegration of the Soviet Union -- India’s largest defense partner, spelling the end of the Cold War era, propelled India to pragmatically expand its relations with multiple major powers without being constrained by the pressures of bloc politics and military alliances of the Cold War.
While diversifying its relationship, India established a full diplomatic relationship with Israel since January 1992. Until recently, New Delhi was leveraging from a delicate balance that it maintained in its policy towards the Gulf region, including Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other, while sticking to its support for the Palestinian cause. However, Israel’s pre-emptive missile strikes against Iran (killing its supreme leader and his family members)-another Indian partner in the Gulf, in clear violation of international law, in alliance with the US, without credible evidence of the imminence of the Iranian threat, the resultant tit-for-tat offensives and massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, oil depots, refineries and blockade of Strait of Hormuz following Modi’s visit to Israel put diplomatic and moral pressure on India to break with its balancing act.
India’s decades-long partnership with Iran, anchored by strategic investments like Chabahar port, faced delicate recalibration. India may have been able to retain balance to a certain extent by getting assurances from Iran as regards the safe passage of Indian-flagged vessels through the Strait of Hormuz and the evacuation of Indians from Iran. However, the caveat remains that as New Delhi deepens strategic ties with Israel, the challenge will persist to navigate a precarious balance—protecting its interests without appearing to align against Tehran.
India maintained reticence in the evolving war in the Middle East, much as its approach to Russian encroachment into Ukrainian territory, demonstrating downsides to its ability to maintain a balance of interests.
India’s strategic thinking needs a revisit
While post-Independence India rejected the key tenets of the realist paradigm, such as the balance of power, deterrence, alliance formation, and power maximization, which underpinned the strategic understanding of the West to realize its broadly defined security objectives, India’s growing economic and military power and its rising power status in the post-Cold War era has led it to approximate and incorporate the Western tenets in terms of the country’s security perspective and military preparedness.
Post-Independence India considered global peace and economic development as two sides of the same coin. It was based on the premise that India’s ability to deliver on non-conventional threats such as poverty, diseases, and unemployment largely depended on peace in the neighborhood and beyond.
However, the changing strategic mindset aligned with India’s growing economic and military power has led it to adopt policies to accumulate more military strength by procuring arms, ammunition and defense technology from multiple major powers by maintaining a delicate balance of relationships with all these powers – a policy course known as multi-alignment.
In this light, India has emerged as a pivotal partner in Israel’s defense exports, accounting for over 38 per cent of the country’s arms sales between 2014 and 2024, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In recent years, India has consistently ranked among Israel’s top customers, absorbing more than 30 per cent of its global defense shipments, underscoring the deepening strategic ties between the two nations.
India and Israel are fortifying their defense-industrial partnership, updating frameworks to foster deeper collaboration and bolster confidentiality. Their shared ambition is to co-produce cutting-edge weapons systems, expanding beyond drones and ammunition to explore “new categories” of technology. This strategic alliance aims to elevate the sophistication and scale of joint production, weaving together innovation and security in a dynamic, forward-looking alliance.
India is also inspired by Israeli air defense systems, including the Iron Dome and Iron Beam. While New Delhi continues to procure upgraded weapons systems from great powers, including the US, Israel, Russia, and France, to mitigate its defense concerns, it has given up its role that it was seen playing during the Cold War days in shaping the world public opinion (NAM) and
discourse formation on the negative aspects of wars, proliferation of arms and ammunition on the global population and the environment by using the platforms like the Non-Alignment Movement.
India, by leading the Movement, could pool the collective energies of developing and underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa on different issues.
The driving factors behind India’s non-alignment foreign policy were apprehension toward the great powers, bitter experience under colonial rule, the militaristic nature of Cold War politics, and the yearning for independence of action and socio-economic development as a newly independent country. The coordinated preemptive military strikes carried out by the US and Israel
leading to the violation of the sovereignty of Iran demonstrates that power politics, alliance formation, and impulses of imperialism and colonialism exist much like the Cold War.
India needs to throw its weight behind countries that aspire for global peace for their development, and help build collective synergies to build a common platform to actively engage in mitigating violence by any state and/or non-state actors.
India needs to reckon with the hard fact that it may have to lose what it can get from a major power by jettisoning the balancing act, for instance, India and Israel signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) in diverse areas ranging from agriculture, geophysical exploration, heritage, science, education, the economy, cyber cooperation, technology, security to artificial intelligence including provisions allowing 50,000 Indian workers to be employed in Israel over the next five years but by adopting a collective approach to global peace it can ensure a better world where many can thrive in the long-run.
[Dr Manoj Kumar Mishra is a senior lecturer of Political Science at SVM Autonomous College in Jagatsinghpur, Odisha, India.]
The views expressed are not necessarily those of The South Asian Times
