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During much of the period, the Middle Eastern region was looked after
by Minister of State E. Ahamed, who represented the Indian Union
Muslim League in the UPA coalition. Because of electoral consideration,
he pursued a policy that eschewed any formal contacts with Israel even
though India has formal and robust military ties with it. Moreover, because
of his junior protocol status, he was not able to meet or establish contacts
with senior leaders and officials of the region.
The decisive popular mandate removed this uncertainty, and initial
media speculations about tensions between Prime Minister Modi and
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj proved to be unfounded and they
have found a way to work in tandem as manifested by a spate of foreign
visits undertaken by both the leaders. Between May 2014 and December
2017, for example, Swaraj has made 47 overseas tours, including 7 coun-
tries in the Middle East.
crisis And opportunities
The dawn of the twenty-first century proved to be ominous for the
turbulence- ridden Middle East. If the al-Aqsa intifada which broke out
in September 2000 marked the end of the Oslo peace process, the terror
attacks in the US a year later constrained public space in the West and
unleashed an adverse reaction against some of the Islamic countries in
the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and the faith itself. Indeed,
some of the negative stereotypes against Islam and the Islamophobia can
be directly linked to the September 11 terror attacks. The Bush
Administration opted for War of Terror (Rajwade 2006 ; Cady 2008 ) as
its response and launched a military campaign against Afghanistan
(October 2001) and later Iraq (March 2003). These, in turn, plunged
the entire region into an endless spiral of violence and the after effects
are still reverberating even after the US pulled out its military from these
two countries.
Since then some of the older issues were rekindled and new ones sur-
faced making the region extremely unpredictable, unstable and fearful. A
century after the Sykes-Picot cartography, the Westphalian order is erod-
ing and the state system is collapsing in many parts of the Middle East.
Even in the best of times, some post-Ottoman states had not accepted the
finality of the colonial boundaries and have sought to subvert them by
invoking ‘historic’ and ‘natural’ claims over their immediate neighbours or
P. R. KUMARASWAMY AND MD. M. QUAMAR