163interference, India avoided making any direct or indirect statement that
might be construed as Indian prescription for the upheaval. Far from
being indifferent, it has been adopting a “studied silence” towards the
Arab Spring (Kumaraswamy 2012 ).
Even seven years after Bouazizi’s death, the Arab world is muddling
along a host of crises, upheavals, tensions and uncertainties. While the
process of regime change has been halted after Yemen, the journey towards
democratization has been sliding back and leaders who came to power
squandered the initial gains of these protests. Oil-rich monarchies settled
for their time-tested option of co-opting their citizenry through economic
largesse. For example, Saudi Arabia, which witnessed some demonstra-
tions mainly in the Shia-majority Eastern Province, had distributed
US$100 billion to its citizens since 2011 to ward off protests.
The third wave of democracy which Samuel Huntington visualized
(Huntington 1991 ) continues to skip the Arab world or would take a
longer time to manifest. The Arab world requires a non-intrusive but
understanding partnership which would enable them to meet the aspira-
tions of their citizens without societal turmoil.
Marginalization of Arab-Israeli Conflict While the Palestinian stateless
continues to dominate international discourses on anti- colonialism, its
resonance in the Middle East politics has dwindled in recent years. The
Madrid peace conference and Oslo process which began at the end of the
Cold War generated worldwide euphoria over a possible and honourable
political settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Palestinian
issue. There was a genuine and substantial popular sentiment for the two-
state solution through respect and accommodation. Things, however, did
not work out the way both peoples have hoped for. The removal of prin-
cipal players, Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by assassination, Yasser
Arafat in November 2004 because of illness and the electoral debacle of
Shimon Peres in 1996, had derailed the process. Furthermore, unlike
Rabin, Ehud Barak could not make the general-to- diplomat transition and
the failure of the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 spurred the
al-Aqsa intifada and buried the Oslo process.
Since then, the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been dithering,
only to be marked by a cycle of violence, often in the form of Israeli mili-
tary actions against the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilat-
eral disengagement from the Gaza Strip had lessened the Israeli problem
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