Revisiting Damascus

As the Middle East is reshaped, Delhi must engage with the trends coming to the fore

As the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria heads for the bitter but probably inevitable end, the many traditional assumptions in India's political discourse on the Middle East are becoming unsustainable.

For example, "secularists versus Islamists" has long been an important framing device in India's policy debates on the Middle East. Delhi's political classes were far more comfortable with the Arab nationalists, who shared India's vocabulary on modernisation and anti-colonialism, than either the conservative monarchies or the radical Islamic republics.

Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Syria's Assad and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak did not view relations with Delhi through the prism of Islamist internationalism, make provocative noises on Jammu and Kashmir, or acquiesce to Pakistan's anti-India propaganda in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

No wonder India has been so reluctant to see them go. The Indian establishment was among those sceptical of the Arab Spring and concerned about the rise of Islamist parties to power.

But Hussein and Mubarak are gone; and Assad's future is on the line. Iraq is now run by a newly empowered Shia majority; the Muslim Brotherhood has won the presidential elections in Egypt and moderate Islamists have come to power in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began last year. In Syria too, after Assad's fall, it is likely that Islamists of one kind or another might gain much political ground.

Proving right, of course, does not make Delhi's challenges in dealing with the changing Middle East any better. Nor does the clear hindsight that it is the secular but autocratic rulers who have prepared the ground for the Islamist resurgence in the region.

Second, the crisis in Syria also complicates India's identification of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the principal political faultline in the region. While the disputes between the two sides are real and important, they have taken a back seat amidst the current turbulence in the region.

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