114
initial months, even Prime Minister Modi continued this pattern with
President Pranab Mukherjee (India, MEA 2015b) and Vice- President
H. M. Ansari (Ansari 2016 ) flagging East Jerusalem. In a significant
departure, in May 2017 with President Mahmoud Abbas standing by
his side, Prime Minister Modi declared India’s support to the
Palestinians without any reference to East Jerusalem (Kumaraswamy
2017a) and this was subsequently maintained in the BRICS summit
held in Xiamen, China, in September 2017 (Kumaraswamy 2017b).In other words, since the early 1990s, adhocism appears to be the criti-
cal trend regarding the inclusion or exclusion of the Palestine issue in
India’s engagements with the Middle East. It is a fixed agenda in its inter-
actions with countries like Egypt and Syria even after normalization of
relations with Israel but has been sporadic with others. All the significant
joint statements with Iran—during the visit of President Khatami to New
Delhi in January 2003, of Prime Minister Modi to Tehran in May 2016
and of President Rouhani in February 2018—had no direct or indirect
reference to Palestine. The Palestinian issue rarely figured in engagements
with Oman, Qatar and the UAE while Kuwait saw its inclusion despite
tensions with the Palestinian leadership over the Iraqi invasion.
The prevailing political climate appears to the key factor in the inclu-
sion or exclusion of Palestine in joint statements. While its absence does
not indicate abandonment or reversals, non-inclusion also signals that
both parties agreeing to disagree when their differences are insurmount-
able or when they could not agree on a common text. For example, the
political leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been vehemently
opposed to the existence of Israel and seeks to resolve the Palestinian
problem only through the annihilation of the ‘Zionist entity’ (Teitelbaum
and Segall 2012 ). This is in contrast to the Indian position of a Palestinian
state coexisting with Israel. In recent years, the public rhetoric of
President Erdogan towards Israel has been unfriendly and this perhaps
prevented India from finding a common ground with Iran or Turkey and
hence the absence of any reference to the Palestinian issue in the official
statements.
This, however, is not the case vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. Since the time of
Nehru, the Indo-Saudi joint statements devoted considerable attention
and care to the Palestinian question. The interest convergence during the
pre-1992 era was significant. As discussed earlier, their worldview during
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR