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Mr. Pramit Pal Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Fellow, Ananta Aspen Centre, and Foreign Editor of the Hindustan Times, the primary newspaper of the Indian capital New Delhi. He has served as a delegate for a number of track-two strategic and economic dialogues on behalf of India’s largest chamber of commerce, the Confederation of Indian Industries, and the affiliated Aspen Institute of India. These include the CII-Aspen Strategy Group India-US strategic dialogue, the Aspen Institute of India-China Reform School dialogue and the CII’s trilateral India-US-Japan dialogue.
Among India’s most prominent commentators on the country’s political and economic relations with the rest of the world, Mr. Pal Chaudhuri combines this with extensive insight into the intricacies of the domestic situation in India. He writes a regular blog, Foreign Hand, and a column for his newspaper. In 2007-08 he was the Bernard Schwarz Fellow at the Asia Society in New York and a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the University of Maryland College Park in 1994-95. Pramit has also been a media fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, South Asia Fellow at the Henry Stimson Centre and Visiting Fellow at his alma mater Cornell University.
Think West to Go West: Origins and Implications of India’s West Asia Policy Under Modi (Part II)
The first part of this article outlined how the newly-elected Narendra Modi government had no sense of where West Asia, including the Persian Gulf, fit into its larger foreign policy. However, this view changed radically following overtures from the Abu Dhabi royal family and the August 2015 state visit by Prime Minister Modi to the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). This second part details how, since that visit, India’s relations with West Asia, and particularly with the Gulf monarchies and Iran, have evolved.
Think West to Go West: Origins and Implications of India’s West Asia Policy Under Modi (Part I)
Prime Minister Modi’s 2015 visit to the U.A.E. and subsequent events have seen India’s view of the region undergo a fundamental shift. This essay, the first of two parts, shows how New Delhi has come to regard the Gulf more as a source of investment and less as a source of energy and visas; and has begun to take a more strategic and military view of the region.
