BETWEEN ENERGY PACTS AND DEFENCE NEEDS, INDIA STRATEGICALLY WARMED TO ISRAEL: A TIMELINE
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2016 BY INDIANDEFENSE NEWS
by Ramananda Sengupta
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comparison of India’s surgical strikes with covert operations carried out by Israel comes at a time when defense cooperation and diplomatic ties between the two countries are at a high. Here’s a look at how the bilateral relationship evolved and improved over time.
Why can’t we deal with terrorists the way Israelis do? That question is often raised in social and other media whenever there is a terrorist strike in India. Which perhaps explains why Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a parallel between the special forces of the Indian Army and their counterparts in the Israeli Defense Forces while praising the surgical strikes across the LoC to avenge Uri. It also comes at a time when Indo-Israeli cooperation, particularly in defense, is at an all time high, and growing each day. The bilateral relationship with Israel, however, was not always this rosy.
Even before Independence, the tone was set by the father of the Indian freedom movement, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who clearly articulated his opposition to the idea of Israel in an editorial in the November 11, 1938 issue of Harijan, a widely circulated weekly. “My sympathies are with the Jews ... but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me ... Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.”
Here’s a quick timeline of Indo-Israeli relations to put things into perspective:
August 15, 1947: India gets Independence from British colonial rule
May 14, 1948: Israel is born, following the UN decision to partition British Mandate Palestine. India opposes this decision.
May 1949: India votes — in vain — against admission of Israel to the UN.
September 1950: India reluctantly and partially recognizes Israel, allows it to set up ‘immigration office’ in Mumbai. India’s main concern, apart from its endorsement of the Palestinian cause, was the fear that any overt relationship with Israel would alienate not just the Arab nations—India’s main source of oil and gas, and where a large number of Indians work—but also the Muslim population in India.
1961 Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM is born, with India, Yugoslavia and Egypt as founder members. Prime Minister Nehru’s relationship with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and other Arab states, and the fact that Israel was clearly aligned with the United States, made it difficult for Nehru to formally reach out to Israel. However, the intelligence agencies of both nations started meeting discreetly to build a strategic relationship.
1962: Israel secretly ships artillery shells and other munitions to India after the latter’s border war with China, which ended when the Chinese unilaterally withdrew.
1965: Israel reportedly helps India with a modest cache of weapons, ammunition and intelligence during the war with Pakistan.
1971: Just before the brief war with Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi okays a proposal by the Research and Analysis Wing, led by RN Kao, to initiate a discreet bid to secure Israeli weapons and training. These are eventually routed to India through Liechtenstein. When Bangladesh is born with Indian help, Israel is the first nation to recognize it.
August 1977: Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan pays a secret visit to New Delhi (some say Kathmandu) to meet Indian officials, and shares intelligence about Pakistan’s secret nuclear plant in Kahuta. But both RAW and Israeli intelligence officials are startled when Prime Minister Morarji Desai calls up Zia ul Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, and tells him that he knows about Kahuta, courtesy RAW. Their concern is their sources would be compromised.
October 1985: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi officially meets Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at the UNGA in New York, the first such formal meeting.
June 1991: Insurgents, backed by Pakistan’s ISI, attack Israeli tourists in Kashmir, suspecting them to be military and intelligence officers aiding counter-insurgency operations in the state. One is killed, another abducted. A week later, under intense US and UN pressure, the kidnapped Israeli is released. Several senior Israeli officials visit India during the negotiations for his release.
1992: Prime Minister Narasimha Rao formally announced full diplomatic relations with Israel, after reassuring Arab nations that this did not mean a dilution of Indian support for Palestine. In return, Rao wants the powerful Jewish lobby in the US to pressure Washington to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Earlier in the year, Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao tells visiting Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that it would help Palestine’s cause if India establishes ties with Israel, and then uses its influence to push for a change in Israeli policy. Arafat agrees.
India also becomes increasingly aware of the fact that despite India’s support for the Arab cause, the Organisation of Islamic Conference constantly endorsed the Pakistani position on Kashmir. Israel, on the other hand, steadfastly endorsed the Indian position that the 1972 Shimla agreement between India and Pakistan was the only basis for a final settlement of the Kashmir issue.
December 1995: Ezer Weizmann, who served in Bangalore as part of the Royal Air Force in 1944, becomes the first Israeli president to visit India.
May 1999: Israel rushes military aid — including shells for the Bofors gun — as well as intelligence inputs to India during the Kargil war.
June 2000: Home Minister LK Advani visits Israel. Other visiting Indian leaders included West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, and Najma Heptullah, senior Congress leader and deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha.
July 2000: Jaswant Singh became the first Indian Foreign Minister to visit Israel.
January 2003: Israel’s arch rival Iran’s president Mohammed Khatami is the chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations.
September 2003: Ariel Sharon becomes the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit India, but cuts short his visit due to a terrorist strike back home. The “very reason that brought us to India is responsible for the cutting short of the visit: Terror,” Deputy Prime Minister Yosef Lapid told journalists in Delhi.
India announces the purchase of three Phalcon AWACS, to be fitted with Israeli radar equipment, on Russian IL-76 transport aircraft. This comes only after India assuages Israeli fears of transfer of defence technology to Iran.
2004: UPA government comes to power, and the relationship is taken underground again for a decade, mainly because the government believed overt ties with the country would alienate the domestic Muslim community. But intelligence, economic and defence cooperation continues discreetly.
2008: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh politely rejects Israel’s offer to send special forces to tackle the 26/11 attack on Mumbai.
2012: Minister of External Affairs S M Krishna visits Israel, but stresses on cooperation in science, technology, agriculture and commerce. However, he also quietly meets counter-terror and defense officials during the visit.
2010: President Prathibha Patil visits Damascus, and causes a stir in Israel when she reiterated India’s support for the full return of the Golan Heights to Syria, two-thirds of which it had lost to Israel in the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967.
2014: Within months of becoming Prime Minister, Narendra Modi meets his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UNGA in September. In October, India and Israel sign a $519 million deal to buy 8,356 Spike anti-tank guided missiles and 321 missile launchers. According to the Jewish virtual library, “Between Modi’s election in May 2014 and November 2014, Israel exported $662 million worth of Israeli weapons and defense items to India. This export number is greater than the total Israeli exports to India during the previous three years combined.”
2015: Moshe Ya’alon becomes the first Israeli Defense Minister to visit India. However, keeping the domestic implications in mind, New Delhi continues to express its support to the Palestinian cause, and PM Modi meets Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in September 2015 in New York.
October 2015: President Pranab Mukherjee visits Palestine and Israel. Reports of Indo-Israeli military exercises surface, but without specifics.
January 2016: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visits Israel, and declares that the full development of positive Israel-India ties is of “the highest importance” to New Delhi. The visit was seen as a precursor to a visit by Prime Minister later in the year. However, that has now been tentatively scheduled for 2017.
Today, although there are several critical agreements in agriculture and other sectors, India is Israel’s largest defense market, and Israeli intelligence inputs have helped prevent several terrorist attacks planned in Pakistan. More importantly, the government has no qualms about going public with the relationship.
http://www.indiandefensenews.in/2016/10/between-energy-pacts-and-defence-needs.html
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2016 BY INDIANDEFENSE NEWS
by Ramananda Sengupta
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s comparison of India’s surgical strikes with covert operations carried out by Israel comes at a time when defense cooperation and diplomatic ties between the two countries are at a high. Here’s a look at how the bilateral relationship evolved and improved over time.
Why can’t we deal with terrorists the way Israelis do? That question is often raised in social and other media whenever there is a terrorist strike in India. Which perhaps explains why Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a parallel between the special forces of the Indian Army and their counterparts in the Israeli Defense Forces while praising the surgical strikes across the LoC to avenge Uri. It also comes at a time when Indo-Israeli cooperation, particularly in defense, is at an all time high, and growing each day. The bilateral relationship with Israel, however, was not always this rosy.
Even before Independence, the tone was set by the father of the Indian freedom movement, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who clearly articulated his opposition to the idea of Israel in an editorial in the November 11, 1938 issue of Harijan, a widely circulated weekly. “My sympathies are with the Jews ... but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me ... Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.”
Here’s a quick timeline of Indo-Israeli relations to put things into perspective:
August 15, 1947: India gets Independence from British colonial rule
May 14, 1948: Israel is born, following the UN decision to partition British Mandate Palestine. India opposes this decision.
May 1949: India votes — in vain — against admission of Israel to the UN.
September 1950: India reluctantly and partially recognizes Israel, allows it to set up ‘immigration office’ in Mumbai. India’s main concern, apart from its endorsement of the Palestinian cause, was the fear that any overt relationship with Israel would alienate not just the Arab nations—India’s main source of oil and gas, and where a large number of Indians work—but also the Muslim population in India.
1961 Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM is born, with India, Yugoslavia and Egypt as founder members. Prime Minister Nehru’s relationship with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and other Arab states, and the fact that Israel was clearly aligned with the United States, made it difficult for Nehru to formally reach out to Israel. However, the intelligence agencies of both nations started meeting discreetly to build a strategic relationship.
1962: Israel secretly ships artillery shells and other munitions to India after the latter’s border war with China, which ended when the Chinese unilaterally withdrew.
1965: Israel reportedly helps India with a modest cache of weapons, ammunition and intelligence during the war with Pakistan.
1971: Just before the brief war with Pakistan, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi okays a proposal by the Research and Analysis Wing, led by RN Kao, to initiate a discreet bid to secure Israeli weapons and training. These are eventually routed to India through Liechtenstein. When Bangladesh is born with Indian help, Israel is the first nation to recognize it.
August 1977: Israeli foreign minister Moshe Dayan pays a secret visit to New Delhi (some say Kathmandu) to meet Indian officials, and shares intelligence about Pakistan’s secret nuclear plant in Kahuta. But both RAW and Israeli intelligence officials are startled when Prime Minister Morarji Desai calls up Zia ul Haq, Pakistan’s military ruler at the time, and tells him that he knows about Kahuta, courtesy RAW. Their concern is their sources would be compromised.
October 1985: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi officially meets Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at the UNGA in New York, the first such formal meeting.
June 1991: Insurgents, backed by Pakistan’s ISI, attack Israeli tourists in Kashmir, suspecting them to be military and intelligence officers aiding counter-insurgency operations in the state. One is killed, another abducted. A week later, under intense US and UN pressure, the kidnapped Israeli is released. Several senior Israeli officials visit India during the negotiations for his release.
1992: Prime Minister Narasimha Rao formally announced full diplomatic relations with Israel, after reassuring Arab nations that this did not mean a dilution of Indian support for Palestine. In return, Rao wants the powerful Jewish lobby in the US to pressure Washington to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. Earlier in the year, Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao tells visiting Palestinian President Yasser Arafat that it would help Palestine’s cause if India establishes ties with Israel, and then uses its influence to push for a change in Israeli policy. Arafat agrees.
India also becomes increasingly aware of the fact that despite India’s support for the Arab cause, the Organisation of Islamic Conference constantly endorsed the Pakistani position on Kashmir. Israel, on the other hand, steadfastly endorsed the Indian position that the 1972 Shimla agreement between India and Pakistan was the only basis for a final settlement of the Kashmir issue.
December 1995: Ezer Weizmann, who served in Bangalore as part of the Royal Air Force in 1944, becomes the first Israeli president to visit India.
May 1999: Israel rushes military aid — including shells for the Bofors gun — as well as intelligence inputs to India during the Kargil war.
June 2000: Home Minister LK Advani visits Israel. Other visiting Indian leaders included West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, and Najma Heptullah, senior Congress leader and deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha.
July 2000: Jaswant Singh became the first Indian Foreign Minister to visit Israel.
January 2003: Israel’s arch rival Iran’s president Mohammed Khatami is the chief guest at India’s Republic Day celebrations.
September 2003: Ariel Sharon becomes the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit India, but cuts short his visit due to a terrorist strike back home. The “very reason that brought us to India is responsible for the cutting short of the visit: Terror,” Deputy Prime Minister Yosef Lapid told journalists in Delhi.
India announces the purchase of three Phalcon AWACS, to be fitted with Israeli radar equipment, on Russian IL-76 transport aircraft. This comes only after India assuages Israeli fears of transfer of defence technology to Iran.
2004: UPA government comes to power, and the relationship is taken underground again for a decade, mainly because the government believed overt ties with the country would alienate the domestic Muslim community. But intelligence, economic and defence cooperation continues discreetly.
2008: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh politely rejects Israel’s offer to send special forces to tackle the 26/11 attack on Mumbai.
2012: Minister of External Affairs S M Krishna visits Israel, but stresses on cooperation in science, technology, agriculture and commerce. However, he also quietly meets counter-terror and defense officials during the visit.
2010: President Prathibha Patil visits Damascus, and causes a stir in Israel when she reiterated India’s support for the full return of the Golan Heights to Syria, two-thirds of which it had lost to Israel in the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967.
2014: Within months of becoming Prime Minister, Narendra Modi meets his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UNGA in September. In October, India and Israel sign a $519 million deal to buy 8,356 Spike anti-tank guided missiles and 321 missile launchers. According to the Jewish virtual library, “Between Modi’s election in May 2014 and November 2014, Israel exported $662 million worth of Israeli weapons and defense items to India. This export number is greater than the total Israeli exports to India during the previous three years combined.”
2015: Moshe Ya’alon becomes the first Israeli Defense Minister to visit India. However, keeping the domestic implications in mind, New Delhi continues to express its support to the Palestinian cause, and PM Modi meets Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in September 2015 in New York.
October 2015: President Pranab Mukherjee visits Palestine and Israel. Reports of Indo-Israeli military exercises surface, but without specifics.
January 2016: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visits Israel, and declares that the full development of positive Israel-India ties is of “the highest importance” to New Delhi. The visit was seen as a precursor to a visit by Prime Minister later in the year. However, that has now been tentatively scheduled for 2017.
Today, although there are several critical agreements in agriculture and other sectors, India is Israel’s largest defense market, and Israeli intelligence inputs have helped prevent several terrorist attacks planned in Pakistan. More importantly, the government has no qualms about going public with the relationship.
http://www.indiandefensenews.in/2016/10/between-energy-pacts-and-defence-needs.html
