| Event Title: | ISAS-MEI Joint Seminar |
| Topic: | India and the Gulf: Modi turns West |
| Date/Time: | 14 August 2018 | 15:00 - 13:50 |
| Venue: | ISAS Board Room, Level 9, 29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace |
| Speaker/s: | Prof P R Kumaraswamy |
| Description: | The Joint ISAS-MEI Seminar: "India and the Gulf: Modi turns West" by Prof P R Kumaraswamy was held on 14 August 2018. The session discussed how India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been trying to enhance Indo-Gulf relations through an economy-development centric approach. The speaker shared that India has generally neglected the Gulf even though the region is its largest trading partner, remittance contributor and home to the largest population of its migrants in the world. He attributed India’s lack of a regional policy towards the Middle-East to its view of the region through the Pakistani prism and the absence of expertise on the region in India. He posited that the Modi government is abandoning India’s traditional transactional attitude and forging closer strategic partnership with Gulf countries, especially with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He made particular mention of the potential of UAE to be a regional power and how Indian could utilise this and anchor its engagements with the small nation in shared interests. Additionally, he touched on existing intra-regional tensions and differences i.e. the Arab-Iran rivalry, India-Pak tensions, China’s increasing footprint in the region and so forth, and mentioned how it’s important to carefully circumvent problematic issues and work on mutually beneficial matters. He also highlighted the necessity for India to build capacity to actualise Modi’s imagination of the relationship he wants to forge with the Gulf. |