Bedrock of a strategic partnership analysis
By Harsh V. Pant & Ambuj Sahu
Bilateral relations between India and Israel today stand at a unique juncture. The paradigm shift occurred two years ago, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2017 became the first Indian PM to embark on a state visit to Israel and the two countries elevated their ties to a strategic partnership. In January 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated the signal with a visit to New Delhi.
It is clear that both New Delhi and Tel Aviv are according priority to strengthening bilateral ties, a pillar of which is defence. This is driven by their respective national interestsi.e., India’s long-sought goals of military modernisation, and Israel’s comparative advantage in commercialising its arms industries. India was the largest arms customer of Israel in 2017 with sales worth US$715 million.
To be sure, the ambit of India-Israel defence cooperation has widened to include other domains like space, counter-terrorism, and cyber security; however, the cornerstone remains Israeli arms sales to India. This brief surveys the arms trade between the two countries over the last decade (2009-2018), explains the specifications of the imported defence technology from Israel, and examines their applicability to India.
The first section summarises the origins of arms sales from Israel against the backdrop of wider crests and troughs in India-Israel relations. The brief then looks into the defence imports data of India over the last two decades (1999-2018) and scrutinises the trends vis-à-vis the country’s arms trade with Israel.
The third part analyses the defence technologies imported by India from Israel in the past ten years (2009-18) and highlights their relevance. The penultimate section explores the reasons for Israel’s emergence as a key arms supplier to India. The brief concludes by making specific policy recommendations for taking the strategic partnership between the two countries beyond arms transfers.
India-Israel relations: a tortuous course
Israel has always been an outlier in India’s foreign policy. Both India and Israel emerged as independent states around the same time, in August 1947 and May 1948, respectively. Although India recognised Israel in 1950, it took both countries a long time to establish formal diplomatic ties.
In India’s pursuit to mobilise the support of Arab states after independence, it voted against UN membership of Israel in 1949. Relations between the two countries have vacillated for years, primarily because of India linking its ties with Israel to the question of Palestine.
For the next four decades, three broad factors would shape India’s Israel policy. First, successive Indian governments were wary of establishing links with the Jewish state because of the country’s having a large Muslim population, which has implications on its domestic politics. Second, it may be said that any early potential of India-Israel ties, was sacrificed on the altar of Cold War politics.
The Jewish lobby in France and the United States (US) supported Israel in its mission of defence modernisation, which was crucial for the state to survive in a hostile neighbourhood. New Delhi’s commitment to the non-aligned cause implied freezing relations with Israel that was increasingly seen as leaning towards the Western bloc.
Third, India’s dependence on Arab states for oil imports led to a pro-Arab tilt in its West Asia Policy, further constraining the country’s options in the region. The Palestinian question had also played an important role, and it was hardly surprising that India began normalising its relations only when Israel-Palestine peace negotiations showed progress (eventually culminating in the Oslo Accords of 1993).
Blarel has underscored two main motivations for India seeking to normalise relations with Israel in January 1992 First, the goal of self-reliance in producing military equipment was essential to achieve strategic autonomy in Indian foreign policy. Israel was an embodiment of a state that managed to nurture an indigenous military-industrial complex from scratch using state-of-the-art technology.
It had a singular reputation in the defence sector and was keen on its commercial expansion to other countries. Israel was a ripe market for buying new weapons, transferring technology and upgrading the existing machinery. Second, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, India was devoid of a benevolent great power acting as a strategic partner.
Since the signing of the Treaty of Friendship with the USSR in 1971 up until its dissolution in 1991, it was India’s largest arms supplier and contributed to 72.46 percent of the Trend Indicator Values (TIV) of total arms imported. As the Cold War ended, New Delhi recognised the need to diversify its sources of arms imports.
It also sought partners for developing joint research and development (R&D) projects to indigenise the defence sector. For the first time in many decades, India’s outlook towards Israel was being shaped by pragmatism rather than ideology, leading to a thaw in their bilateral ties.
Defence relations between India and Israel are longstanding. The strategic communication between the two countries began during the Sino-India War of 1962 when PM Jawaharlal Nehru wrote his Israeli counterpart David Ben-Gurion for shipments of arms and ammunition.
In 1965, Israel supplied M-58 160-mm mortar ammunition to India in the war against Pakistan. It was one of the few countries that chose not to condemn India’s Pokhran nuclear tests in 1998. It continued its arms trade with India at a steadily increasing rate even after the sanctions and international isolation that followed the nuclear tests.
For India, the credibility of Israel as a reliable defence partner was reinforced during the Kargil War of 1999 when it supplied the Indian Air Force (IAF) with the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) ‘Searcher’ and surveillance systems for Jaguar and Mirage squadrons. It also upgraded the MiG-21 combat aircraft for the IAF. The Indian Army also received Laser Guided Bombs (LGB) and 160-mm mortar ammunition.
In the 2000s, the India-Israel arms trade mostly involved surveillance and intelligence-related equipment notably Super Dvora-class patrol vessels and the airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system EL/M-2075 Phalcon.
India also purchased 98 Searcher and 50 Heron UAVs. Israel supplied Barak surface-to-air missile system with the Vertical Launching System (VLS) module for the modernisation of the Indian Navy during the period 2003-2006.
India’s defence imports (1999-2018): key trends
India has been the world’s largest arms importer for decades now; its top suppliers are Russia, the US, Israel, the United Kingdom (UK) and France. Figure 1 summarises the country-wise distribution of arms imported by India in the two decades of 1999-2008 and 2009-2018, respectively. Despite having diversified its arm imports after the Cold War, India still buys the most volumes of arms from Russia.
Overall, in the last decade, Russian share in the Indian defence market was 68.28 percent. It was followed by the US at 9.66 percent, which showed a steep rise from the last decade’s 1.13 percent. This can be attributed to increasing strategic proximity between the two countries in the last few years, especially as Washington started viewing India as integral to the changing balance of power in the Asian region.
Israel has remained among the top arms suppliers to India in the past two decades. Figure 2 shows the TIV values of the arms exported from Israel to India between 1999 and 2018. This is the period when, as briefly discussed earlier, Israel established its reliability following the Kargil War in 1999.
The arms trade between Israel and India was brisk despite US sanctions following the Pokhran nuclear tests. This is evident in the increasing trend in Fig.2 throughout the years 1998-2003, after which the US lifted most of its sanctions on India. Israeli arms exports saw a sharp fall after 2006, when India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a corruption case against Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems in relation to the procurement of Barak missiles.
Both companies were placed under restricted procurement categories and debarred from filing tenders except in extraordinary circumstances such as during a threat to national security. The Modi Government lifted the ban on both the companies in April 2018.
Source: Observer Research Foundation.