Courting Tel Aviv
Ariel Sharon, the embattled, pugnacious prime minister of Israel, is reportedly weighing a state visit to India, perhaps as early as June. If the visit happens, it would be the first by an Israeli head of government to New Delhi (Israeli head of state Ezer Weizman made a ceremonial visit in January 1997), and would cement the 180-degree turn in relations between India and Israel since they gained statehood within months of each other in 1947-48.
Despite the emigration to Israel of thousands of Indian Jews, Indian-Israeli diplomacy during the cold war remained a cold affair, at least publicly. New Delhi refused to engage in full diplomatic relations with Israel, though it did allow Tel Aviv to establish a trade office in Bombay in 1950, which became a consulate three years later. Over time, cooperation grew slowly between the two states, primarily in security affairs. In January 1963, a few months after suffering an embarrassing defeat in the Sino-Indian border war, New Delhi invited senior Israeli military leaders, including the chiefs of army staff and military intelligence, for consultations. Israeli labour minister Yigal Along visited India in 1965, as did foreign ministers Moshe Dayan in 1977 and Shimon Peres in 1993.
A year before the Peres visit, Indian-Israeli diplomacy reached a milestone with the establishment of full diplomatic relations, an outcome of Narasimha Rao's non-ideological, post-cold war foreign policy. This decade of engagement focussed primarily on military contacts, with Israel emerging as India's second largest military supplier, following only Russia. Today, Israel provides India with military assistance in its combat aircraft, weapons, tank, missile and naval programmes, and is slated to train 3000 Indian jawans in anti-insurgency tactics. Israel supports New Delhi's stand on Kashmir and refused to condemn the Pokhran II nuclear tests of May 1998. And India, while not completely reversing itself, has toned down its traditional support for the Palestinian cause.
According to Nehru biographer BN Pandey, India's first prime minister "had no feeling of animosity towards Israel and would have hated to see the Jewish state wiped out of existence or even crippled by the Arab nationalists. The reason for his refusal to have diplomatic relations with Israel was tactical; it was his fear that India might lose the friendship of the Arab world", important partners in the non-aligned stance. After Nehru's death in 1964, and before Rao's arrival as prime minister in 1991, Congress governments resisted making public overtures to Israel for fear that they would alienate Muslim voters in India and jeopardise India's access to West Asian oil.