151Kuwait crisis resulted in Prime Minister I. K. Gujral not being able to visit
any countries along the Persian Gulf but he did visit Egypt in 1997. Atal
Bihari Vajpayee visited Iran (2001) Syria (2003), Morocco (1999), Turkey
(2000 and 2003) and Oman (1998). During his decade-long tenure,
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Saudi Arabia (2010), Oman and
Qatar (2008), Egypt (2009) and Iran (2012). In addition to these state
visits, Indian leaders attended multilateral forums and meetings hosted by
the Middle East countries, such as NAM summits.
There has been a quantum jump in foreign travels by Indian leaders
after Modi was elected. Since becoming prime minister on 26 May 2014,
he undertook 9 foreign visits in the same year, 29 in 2015, 19 in 2016 and
14 in 2017 and thus by early 2018, he became the most widely travelled
Indian leader since independence. His maiden visit to the Middle East,
however, had to wait more than 15 months after he assumed office.
A couple of days after his second Independence Day address, he embarked
on a two-day visit to the UAE, India’s largest trading partner in the world
after China. Given the regional tension and rivalry, the Emirates was the
least controversial and most appropriate destination for his maiden visit.
Since then, however, he has visited eight countries, and out of them, he
undertook four standalone visits to Saudi Arabia (April), Iran (May) and
Qatar (June) in 2016 and Israel in July 2017. In early 2018 he visited
Palestine, the UAE and Oman. He went to Turkey in November 2015 for
the G-20 summit in Antalya.
Before discussing the pattern and contours of Modi’s Middle Eastern
journeys, it is essential to examine the recent trends in Indian visits to the
region. Though the political contacts were minimal, the Arab Spring pro-
tests sparked off a distinct pattern. In December 2010, a marginalized
Tunisian vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi unintentionally sparked off
popular protest which soon spread to other Arab countries and came to be
known as Arab Spring (Dabashi 2012 ; Haseeb 2014 ; Kamrava 2014 ;
Bayat 2017 ). Just days before this, in the last week of November, President
Pratibha Patil undertook a visit to the UAE and Syria. Between then and
until the arrival of Modi, senior Indian leaders only visited non-Arab
Islamic countries, namely, Iran and Turkey, and skipped the entire Arab
world. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attended the 16th NAM summit
hosted by Tehran in August 2012 and this was converted into a state visit
and he met and interacted with senior Iranian officials, including Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
(Ashwarya 2016 ; Ningthoujam 2013 ). Vice-President M. Hamid Ansari
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