Pallab Bhattacharya

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi undertook a whirlwind three-day official visit to the UAE and Qatar from February 12-14, reflecting a qualitative transformation of India’s ties with the two key Persian Gulf countries.
India’s engagement with the Persian Gulf countries has undergone a big change in the last ten years. When Modi visited the UAE for the first time in 2015, he was the first Indian PM to do so since 1981.

The latest visit to the UAE was his seventh to that country. The statistics reflect the exchange of highest-level political engagement. For decades, India has confined itself to espousing the causes of the Arab world by framing it in terms of support for the Palestinians. But in the last ten years, New Delhi has gone beyond that as the Middle East scene has changed with a number of Arab and Gulf countries themselves enhancing their ties with Israel. So has India.

The last decade has also seen a shift in ties between India and the Gulf from buyer-seller of oil and gas to strategic engagement in a range of areas, including economic, technology and space as the energy-rich countries in the Arab world have sought to move beyond trade in fossil fuel.

The main impetus for this change has come from the increasing awareness worldwide about climate change caused by fossil fuels and the growing chorus for clean energy like LNG and the search for other engines of economic development. Countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are no longer willing to rely on petro-dollar economy but expand it to areas like real estate, green energy, sports, banking and digital technology among the new areas of cooperation with India.

During Modi’s latest visit to the UAE, the two countries signed eight agreements, including a MoU, on cooperation in the field of electricity connection and trade focusing on strengthening bilateral partnership in two crucial domains relating to energy security and energy trade. Clean energy trade is an important segment of the MoU which would focus on green hydrogen and also on energy storage.

The Persian Gulf has always been significant for India for ensuring the latter’s energy security and it has extended to energy transition from fossil fuel to clean energy, an area where the abundant financial withal of the Gulf countries have an attractive to invest in India, the world’s fifth largest economy raring to climb to the third position.

There was also an agreement on an intergovernmental framework concerning cooperation on the high-profile transcontinental India-Middle East Economic Corridor which was launched on the sidelines of the G20 Summit meeting in New Delhi last August. The main areas under this agreement are one, it relates to cooperation on logistics platforms, which is a crucial element of furthering the objectives of this particular corridor; two, the provision of supply chain services not limited to one or two things but to cover all types of general cargo, bulk containers and liquid bulk.

The third is the MoU between the Ministry of Investment of the UAE and the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, on cooperation on digital infrastructure projects with a focus on developing capabilities and sharing technical knowledge and expertise under this particular framework. Government agencies, as also the regulatory authorities, will look to forge partnerships in key areas of digital space.

India, the world’s third-biggest energy consumer, sees natural gas as a transition fuel for migrating to net zero carbon emissions by 2070. As part of this, the government is targeting to raise the share of natural gas in the country’s energy mix to 15% by 2030 from 6.3% at present.

One of the aims of Modi’s visit to Qatar was to thank the rulers of that country for saving the lives of eight former Indian Navy men whose death sentence was not only commuted in January but they were freed in February. This was unthinkable till the other day. Indian Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra attributed the major diplomatic gain for India to the concerted efforts of the Indian government and the personal supervision of Modi.

In December last year, on the margins of the COP28 Summit in Dubai, Modi engaged in discussions with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, focusing on the “well-being of the Indian community” in Qatar, a euphemism for the eight former Navy men.  Behind the scenes, India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval was also instrumental in facilitating the release of the Indian detainees in Qatar, making several visits to Doha to negotiate with Qatari officials.

Contributing to more than 48% of total imports, Qatar emerges as India’s foremost supplier of LNG critical to the latter’s bid for deeper greenhouse gas emission cuts. It may not have been entirely coincidental that the release of the former Indian Navy men came shortly after India and Qatar signed an agreement in the first week of February to extend their LNG supply agreement for an additional 20 years until 2048. It was a USD 78 billion deal at rates lower than current prices to buy 7.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for producing electricity, making fertilisers and converting it into CNG.
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The writer is a veteran Indian journalist