domestic politics 155
Domestic calculations again came to the fore when Prime Minister
Rao sought to change India’s four- decade- long nonrelations with Israel.
In a candid but unpre ce dented move, Foreign Secretary J. N. Dixit, who
had announced normalization to the media, subsequently disclosed:
The Prime Minister discussed this crucial issue with se nior cabinet
colleagues [on or around January 23, 1992]. The only person who
maintained a sulking silence after murmuring some initial doubts
was [Human Resources Minister and Deputy Prime Minister] Arjun
Singh. Arjun Singh felt that this decision might aff ect Muslim sup-
port for the Congress and went on to imply that establishing relations
with Israel would be a departure from the Nehruvian framework of
our foreign policy.^52As a result, when Singh became the most se nior cabinet minister to visit
Israel in 1994, a section of Indian academia mildly disapproved. Singh’s
“secular credentials” became suspicious. How could a person who had
adopted a strong position against the de mo li tion of the mosque at
Ayodhya visit Israel?^53
A relatively candid offi cial admission had to wait until the summer
of 2000, when Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh visited Israel. During a
talk or ga nized by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations on July 2, he
admitted: “India’s Israel policy became a captive to domestic policy that
came to be unwittingly an unstated veto to [sic] India’s larger West
Asian policy.”^54 This remark was quickly picked up by the Indian me-
dia, and Singh was castigated for not only discussing domestic issues
on foreign soil but also for casting aspersions on India’s “principled”
policy toward the Palestinians set out by Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru.^55
In the words of one leading commentator, Jaswant Singh’s assertion
“was as demeaning as it was factually untrue. He owed no apology or
explanation to Israel for a policy pursued by pre de ces sors, Jawaharlal
Nehru included, a policy which incidentally earned rich dividends at
the United Nations— to Pakistan’s chagrin— and was indeed rooted in
Gandhi’s and Nehru’s perceptions on the merits of the Palestine
question.”^56
Any lingering doubts that scholars might have had over the impor-
tance of domestic compulsions were settled during the run up to the
controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program, when the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was preoccupied with the matter. There