national interests. For making peace with Israel, Egypt paid a po liti cal
price: it was excluded, isolated, and eventually expelled from the Arab
League. This regional unpopularity naturally infl uenced the Indian stance,
and it began underlining the defi ciencies in the Egyptian- Israeli peace
accord.^75 It felt that the question of Palestinians and their inalienable
rights were ignored and that the Camp David agreement was silent on
the status of Jerusalem.^76 Not to antagonize the Arab countries, at the
Havana NAM summit in September 1979, it joined with other nations
and condemned the Camp David accords. Egypt, however, had one conso-
lation. Despite strong pressure from some Arab members, India refused
to endorse their demand to expel Egypt from the NAM.^77 The NAM was
one of the very few multilateral forums that retained Egypt as its mem-
ber while it was expelled from the Arab League and OIC. Those were the
punishments for making peace with Israel.^78
A more sympathetic view of the Desai government emerged after the
secret visit of the former Israeli general Moshe Dayan. There are diff er-
ent accounts about the timing of the incognito visit of the Israeli foreign
minister. In his memoirs, Dayan placed it in August 1977, or within
weeks after the Janata government came to power.^79 According to Desai,
however, the visit took place in early 1978.^80 During an election rally in
May 1980, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi claimed that Dayan had come
to India more than once.^81 External Aff airs Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao
went a step further and, intervening in a debate in the Lok Sabha in June
1980, he declared: “While we have complete information about Moshe
Dayan’s visit to Delhi in August 1977, the statements of the leaders of the
Janata and the BJP point to the possibility of more visits than one, namely,
one in 1977, another in 1978, and perhaps a third in 1979.”^82 Evidently,
the issue gave some po liti cal mileage to the Congress Party to belittle and
discredit the already trounced Janata Party.
Discussions, both inside and outside the parliament, indicate the fol-
lowing broad points:
- Despite the controversy surrounding the exact timing and fre-
quency, there was no doubt that Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan
came to India when Desai was prime minister. According to For-
eign Minister Rao, the visit took place on August 15, 1977, the day
India was celebrating its thirty- fi rst in de pen dence day; Dayan left
for Bombay the following day.^83
the years of hardened hostility, 1964–1984 219