Sputnik: What will be the overall aims of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to India?
Sanjay Seth: This trip should be seen I think as a development in a process that has been happening since the early 1990s. As you know, India was not an ally, in fact, it was an ardent critic of Israel. It didn’t even have formal diplomatic relations with Israel until the 1990’s.
Since then, for a variety of reasons, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-articulation that all countries underwent in their foreign policy since then, India’s been developing relations with Israel.
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Israel’s interest in India is, first of all, a very big market as part of their move into Asia. China has been another country they have developed trades with. So I think Netanyahu’s main concern is to develop economic relations and to keep India as a party, which on the Arab-Israeli conflict, is either neutral or softly pro-Arab rather than strongly or stridently so.
Sanjay Seth: I think what India is doing is a balancing act. India needs to preserve relations with Arab countries. India’s trade with Arab countries, although India’s trade with Israel has increased exponentially in the last few years, is far in excess of its trade with Israel.
For geopolitical reasons, as well as for its own energy needs, India can’t afford to have bad relations with the Arab countries. So I think India’s interest is in balancing, to what the Indian governments have been doing since the 1990’s and it's accelerated greatly under Modi, is to become closer to Israel without alienating the Arab world.
