Israel-Palestine and Myanmar: How PV Narasimha Rao’s cold realpolitik eroded India’s moral diplomacy

Former Indian Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao is best known for opening up the Indian economy to a liberal market regime after he took charge in 1991. But what is not so well known is that Rao engineered a subtle yet decisive shift in Indian foreign policy from “idealism” to “pragmatism”.

Aided by Rao’s own ideological impulses and the broader geopolitical shifts triggered by the end of the Cold War, this change immediately reflected in India’s relations with two countries – Myanmar and Israel.

The policy tweaks were so critical that they continue to colour India’s approach to the two countries more than three decades later, despite the fact that the world today looks very little like the early 1990s.

In that sense, Rao’s calculative and arguably self-serving realpolitik – which foreign policy scholars often like to effusively paint as “pragmatism” – became a leitmotif of an India that struggled to adapt to a new global political and economic order.

A U-turn

Before Rao’s tenure began, Myanmar had been all but deadlocked in a seemingly unending civil war between a brutal regime led by the military autocrat, General Ne Win, and various ethnic armies.

In 1988, when the junta cracked down on nonviolent protesters in Rangoon and other parts of Myanmar, thousands fled across the border to North East India.

The Rajiv Gandhi-led government, then in power, welcomed the exiles with open arms. The Indian embassy in Rangoon set up a makeshift shelter for the wounded and veteran socialist leader, and later defence minister, George Fernandes hosted some refugees at his private residence in New Delhi.

But Rao’s government saw that policy as a strategic mistake and scrambled all assets to break the ice with the military regime next door. In August 1992, one year after Rao took over, New Delhi welcomed an inter-ministerial delegation from the newly-established Burmese junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, for an official visit. Next year, Indian Foreign Secretary JN Dixit, led his own delegation to Rangoon. A raft of bilateral security and economic agreements between New Delhi and the State Law and Order Restoration Council followed.

This was done under the ambit of what Rao’s government called the “Look East Policy” – a new initiative aimed at opening up Indian markets to Southeast Asia, building cross-border strategic synergies and balancing China’s influence in the neighbourhood.

From then on, India continued to publicly engage with the Myanmar military, arming and funding it, while relegating ties with the pro-democracy side to a bare minimum. This changed only when a quasi-civilian government took charge in Myanmar in 2010 and opened up the mainstream political space for the democratic opposition.

Rao led a similar turn-of-policy on Palestine.

On December 16, 1991, the same month the Soviet Union collapsed, India voted in favour of repealing a United Nations General Assembly resolution from 1975 that characterised Zionism as racism.

Back then, New Delhi’s representative at the United Nations, Rikhi Jaipal, had delivered a scathing indictment of Zionism in his explanatory remarks. “To condone the evil effects of Zionism could be giving green light to various other forms of racism endemic in human societies,” he said.

Save for the occasional outreach to Israel for strategic support, Jaipal’s statement reflected India’s anti-occupation, pro-Arab position on Palestine. This was a legacy of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s fierce insistence on the inviolability of Palestinian rights.

But, Rao, like in the case of Myanmar, felt that such a position was discordant with India’s strategic interests. He believed India had no choice but to expand ties with Israel in the face of the rising unipolar dominance of its prime backer, the United States, and the growing threat from Pakistan, which Tel Aviv was willing to help New Delhi counter through military collaboration.

Two days after the Rao government voted at the UN to overturn the 1975 resolution affirming Zionism as racism, Yasser Arafat, the Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, requested New Delhi for an official visit. But the Rao government kept stalling.

Academic Shamir Hasan noted in a 2008 article that Arafat, who once visited India “more frequently than any other world leader”, was surprised by New Delhi’s frosty response.

He was finally able to visit Delhi in 1992, but by then, India’s recalibrated position on Palestine had become all too clear to the revolutionary leader. Arafat had little choice but to accept it. His statement after the visit showed what Hasan called “a sense of resignation”.

The Burmese revolutionaries back then felt similarly about India’s volte face, which many of them saw as a betrayal. This was despite the Rao government maintaining contacts with the pro-democracy opposition through informal channels.

On Palestine, too, New Delhi tried to square off its renewed outreach to Israel with notional support for the Palestinian nationalist movement, including those who were killed in the “First Intifada” – the Palestinian pushback against Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank from 1987 to 1993.

The Rao government framed this, Hasan points out, as a balance between the “heart” and the “mind”: where the heart rested with Palestine, but the mind leant towards Israel. On Myanmar, India bared its “heart” in 1992 by awarding the Jawaharlal Nehru Prize for International Understanding to Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democracy movement who had been placed under house arrest in 1989. This annoyed the Burmese junta, but to fix that, Rao dispatched his foreign secretary to Rangoon the very next year.

Pragmatic policy

Rao’s realpolitik balancing act on Palestine and Myanmar has left a deep imprint on Indian foreign policy since, aiding a so-called “paradigm shift”.

Choosing interest-driven pragmatism over moral idealism might historically fit better into the core worldview of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its predecessor, the Jan Sangh. Yet, successive Congress-led governments in the last three decades, too, have abidingly followed Rao’s realpolitik doctrine, creating a bipartisan consensus on how India should deal with Palestine and Myanmar.

Heads turned, for instance, when newly-appointed Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, instead of going himself, dispatched his foreign and railway ministers to represent India at Arafat’s widely-attended funeral in Cairo in 2004. The cold-shoulder shrug was a far cry from the Nehruvian Congress’s warm, almost familial, embrace of the Palestinian resistance.

An outcome of this “balancing” has been a repeated disregard for state violence against civilians even when undertaken at a mass scale. India’s dull response to Israel’s unmitigated aggression against Palestinians during the Second Intifada from 2000-2005 and the brutal military operations in Gaza since 2008 was as glaring as its silence on the Myanmar military’s bloody crackdown on peacefully dissenting Buddhist monks during the Saffron Revolution of 2007.

As a nation bearing the rich Gandhian legacy of non-violence and the Nehruvian tradition of standing with all oppressed people of the world, this apathy towards civilian suffering at the hands of brutal regimes looks jarringly out-of-line.

Equally conspicuous is India’s silence on the military regime’s brutal violence against unarmed civilians in Myanmar since the coup in February 2021 and Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza since October 2023.

The head seems to have won over the heart and Rao over Nehru. But, at what cost?

Angshuman Choudhury is a former Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. He works on North East India, Myanmar, armed conflict and foreign policy.