Ved Shinde
From diplomacy in the Middle East to security ties with the Persian Gulf, the key to understanding India’s expanding role on the international stage lies in the strategic vision and geopolitical thinking of the British Raj.India and the Campaigns of the Middle East'. Map by the Gresham Publishing Company Ltd, London, c. 1920. Credit: The Print Collector
‘Every nerve a man may strain, every energy he may put forward, cannot be devoted to a nobler purpose than keeping tight the cords that hold India to ourselves,’ argued Lord Curzon, one of the few British viceroys in India to develop a lasting emotional attachment to the country. Curzon possessed a perceptive grasp of history and geography. It was geopolitics, for Curzon, that held the key to keeping India under British control.
In particular, having travelled across the larger Middle East in his formative years, Curzon understood the importance of the Persian Gulf for India’s westward security. Following in the footsteps of the Portuguese general Albuquerque, Curzon believed that a permanent British base in the Gulf could serve as a bridgehead to Bombay. The Persian Gulf is landlocked in all directions except the southeast. Mastery over the Gulf of Oman and the larger western Arabian Sea translated into control of the Persian Gulf. Geographically, Muscat is closer to Mumbai than Kolkata. If British ships could control the waterways of the Gulf, a seamless maritime highway would connect London’s interests in the larger Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. After all, other European powers had penetrated the East through the oceans. By the early twentieth century, when Curzon served in India as the Queen’s viceroy, Pax Britannica was writ large over the Persian Gulf. The cords of commerce connected the destinies of the Gulf sheikhdoms with the Indian subcontinent.
While contemporary India is no sea-spanning empire with extractive tendencies, implicit echoes of British policy inform India’s policy towards the Gulf. Delhi’s strategy radiates a strategic legacy of the Raj – a geopolitical imperative that informed the seasoned hands of the British Indian Foreign Office. Clinical calculation is back. In a departure from its post-independence past, Delhi now refers to the Gulf as its ‘extended neighbourhood’.
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