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One chart that shows India is actually on pretty good terms with almost everyone in the Middle East
India isn't in love with many Middle Eastern countries but it doesn't hate them either.
The Middle East – officially known as West Asia in official Delhi circles – is a complicated place. Alliances are constantly shifting, so it's hard to keep up with the current state of affairs. Take the United States current conundrum with the Islamic State and Syria, for example.
The US hates Syria. but the US also hates IS. And those two hate each other. For some time the US was fighting the Syrian regime. Now it's working with the Syrian regime to fight IS. But it still hates Syria. And that whole paragraph features a player that isn't even in the Middle East, although the Americans loom large over the entire region.
The following chart from the Economist lays out just how complex the various alliances and enmities in this corner of the world are.
It attempts to simplify, of course, but the subject matter is so complex that it's hard to actually do so. Noted and always hilarious commentator Karl Sharro created a visualisation that told the story better from one quick glance.
Sharro's chart is a funny take on this wonderfully detailed but horribly complex dynamic chart from Information is Beautiful, which attempts to visualise each of the connections between the various players in West Asia. You can sort the chart by each country and figure out what their conenctions, are through a handy legend pointing to relationships which are filled with hate or love, or somewhat good or strained. The chart, based on Slate's Middle East Friendship Table and various other sources, isn't always accurate, especially because these are always in flux, but it's close enough. Naturally, a quick look suggests that everything is just too complex to pay attention to.
Click on India, though, and things become a little less complex. India has age-old civilisational and trade links with the region, and for the longest time the East India Company was in effect overseeing British interests in Middle East, meaning its policies were also travelling through Calcutta or New Delhi. And even after independence, Gen Nasser's Egypt was a crucial part of India's officially stated Non Alignment Doctrine.
Which is all to say that India maintains pretty good relations with almost every player in West Asia.
The only entities that India hates are, predictably, Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The only country that India has strained relations with is China. It may not love any country other than Bahrain, but it is on good terms with almost everyone else.
Compare that with Pakistan, which manages to have much stronger feelings about a number of players in the Middle East and also has strained relations with more than a few of them.
Still, a country like Israel has a much more complicated chart, with many more alliances to juggle.
And amidst all these complications, one entity ends up with a refereshingly easy chart: the Islamic State. They, basically, hate everyone.
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