It has grown harder for India to maintain a discreet silence over the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which was unveiled at last year’s G20 summit in New Delhi, but with West Asia on the verge of erupting into a possibly wider war, the case for discretion has grown stronger too.
On Sunday, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar made a rare public reference to this planned trade route. “[Monday] marks exactly a year since the terrorist attacks on Israel, and as a result, the focus we expected on the IMEC has not materialized,” he said, “However, this does not mean that the IMEC is dead, discarded or even shelved.”
Related projects with the UAE were underway, he added, while feasibility studies had been initiated with Saudi Arabia. Seen as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the IMEC proposes to link our Western seaports with those in friendly Arab countries in the Gulf, from where cargo would be taken overland via high-speed railway tracks to the Israeli port of Haifa for onward shipment to European markets.
Such an option would lessen Indian reliance on the Red Sea (and the worry of a choked Suez Canal) to brighten our prospects of supply-chain integration with the West. As with anything that involves volatile geopolitics with high stakes, though, nasty surprises cannot be ruled out.
Whether Iran was privy to what the Gaza-based militia Hamas had in store for Israel last October is unknown, but violence erupted within a month of the IMEC’s announcement.
Till then, ironically, India’s own counter to China’s Pakistan-linking BRI was a planned trade pathway to Central Asia and beyond through Iran’s Chabahar port, for which Tehran has New Delhi as its partner.
The fraught geopolitical dynamics of this decade, however, have seen both Tehran and Beijing make common cause with Moscow against the US-led West, especially after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The world’s rupture has widened, pushing us into a delicate spot.
On 27 September, just hours before Israel launched its blitz on Lebanon to neutralize Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militia, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had held up two placards during his speech at the United Nations.
The first was labelled “The curse” and had a map showing Iran’s shadow across Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, what he called an “arc of terror.” The other was titled “The blessing” and had a two-way arrow marked from Gujarat to Europe via the Arabian peninsula and Israel. He pitched this as the world’s choice for “peace and prosperity.”
Just as India does not condone terror, New Delhi should reject a black-and-white view of West Asia’s crisis that would place us squarely on the US-Israeli side.
The argument that our trade prospects must be placed above concerns like Palestinian statehood, a peace formula long resisted by Tel Aviv (at least under rightist rule), fails to admit the risks of perpetual instability in the region.
While the Abraham Accords signed by Tel Aviv with some Arab states under US auspices did offer hope of stability, Israel’s military might may not be able to underpin the IMEC’s safety in perpetuity. The region’s principal rift goes way back in history, could outlast US-allied regimes and is too complex for any reductionist resolution.
Waiting for the IMEC to boost our economy could thus be an endless wait—unless a real effort is made to save Palestinians from their plight. True, India could plausibly play the role of peacemaker. But even for that, we must stay credibly neutral in this conflict.