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Foreign Office Wrong Move Reveals A Shift in India's Arab Policy
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Indian made-in-Israel spy plane downed by Pakistan |
By
IOL South Asia Correspondent
NEW
DELHI, July 10 (IslamOnline)- Even before India got its independence
from the British Empire in 1947, its top leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, openly backed the Afro-Asian and Arab causes.
They made their wariness of British manipulations in the Middle East
known to the public. They also clearly stated their support to the
Palestinian cause.
This
policy continued through the decades during Indira Gandhi's and
Rajiv's regimes (as well as that of others) till the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) began to lead the ruling coalition at the Center in 1999.
BJP had been openly and unashamedly pro-Israel.
The
shift in its policy was evident when four Arab ambassadors were
summoned by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) last month to
explain why they had been to a meeting in the southern city of
Hyderabad, reported the Indian Asian Age newspaper. The meeting was
called by the local Indo-Arab League to express solidarity with
Palestinians under siege by Israeli troops.
The
MEA alleged that the meeting had, in its resolution, equated the
anti-Muslim violence in the western province of Gujarat to Israeli
violence against Palestinians. The ambassadors in question --
Algerian, Palestinian, Iraqi and Arab League -- reportedly protested
against the manner in which they had been summoned and called it a
"demarche". To that the MEA official assured them that it
was merely a "friendly" enquiry.
The
ambassadors later managed to get a copy of the resolution passed at
the meeting, which did not contain a single line about Gujarat's
anti-Muslim pogrom. The MEA apologized for the
"inconvenience."
Indian
Political Observers find two important implications in the incident:
first, that the pro-Israeli propensity of BJP makes the present
administration suspicious of all Muslims, including Arab diplomats.
Secondly,
the central government is extremely averse to any discourse on
Gujarat, despite the fact that two dozen independent enquiries have
clearly laid the blame on BJP government in Gujarat for the pogroms
and BJP-led central government for looking the other way. Even the
official National Human Rights Commission and National Commission for
Minorities have drawn similar conclusions.
Yet,
when the British High Commission in India leaked its findings of
official complicity to a section of the press, a controversy was
stirred. The British had lost a couple of their own citizens in the
pogrom.
Treating
Muslims as the "other," the MEA accused the British of
playing to the Muslim electorate back in Britain. However, it had
nothing to refute the charge with.
The
MEA also reacted to the European Union in a similar manner for saying
what everybody else has been saying all over the world. Gujarat has
become a raw nerve, so raw that the MEA reacts even if one does not
touch it. Like the Arab envoys found to their dismay.
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