India’s Middle East policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is often seen as both successful and perplexing. The governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Modi belongs, has a nationalist Hindu-right bent, yet India’s outreach toward the Persian Gulf region under the current government, particularly to the Arab world, has been a defining success over the past decade.
The latest war between Israel and Hamas, sparked by the latter’s audacious attack on Oct. 7, has brought under the spotlight New Delhi’s diplomatic balance between a “new” Middle East and its traditional support for the “old.” The new is defined by New Delhi’s increasingly close proximity to the security ecosystem of the United States, while the old is highlighted by a visible shift away from the idea of nonalignment. India’s participation in new tools of economic diplomacy—such as the I2U2 minilateral between India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, as well as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC), announced on the sidelines of the G-20 summit last September—is evidence of these not-so-subtle changes in posture, led by a burgeoning consensus between New Delhi and Washington to push back against an
