Eight meetings between two foreign ministers in one year during peacetime is rare in the annals of diplomacy.
The last meeting between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates, in New Delhi on November 22 was the eighth structured, in-person meeting between the two ministers in the last 12 months.
No other foreign minister has engaged with India as much as Sheikh Abdullah in the past one year.
In the previous calendar year, Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Trade, was the most frequent official visitor from abroad to India.
Al Zeyoudi’s visits and return visits by India’s Minister for Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal led to the signing of a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between the two sides at lightning speed this February. Bilateral trade in goods is targeted to go up to $100 billion within five years—from $73 billion now—and trade in services by another $15 billion because of the CEPA.
The outcome of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s path-breaking outreach to the Gulf following his first visit to the UAE in August 2015 has been an intense and all-round engagement between the two sides, having no parallel in Indian diplomacy in the last eight years. The last prime minister to visit the UAE before Modi was Indira Gandhi in 1981.
In 2019, Sultan bin Ahmad Al Jaber of the UAE was the only minister from any foreign country who made the most number of trips to New Delhi, his visits often lasting no more than a few hours.
More important for India than Al Jaber’s current portfolio as Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, is his role as Managing Director and Group CEO of the national oil conglomerate, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). India’s vigorous engagement with Al Jaber transformed its energy relationship with the UAE from that of a buyer-seller nature to energy security partner.
Today, oil from ADNOC is stored in all of India’s strategic petroleum reserves, and for the first time, Indian companies are drilling for oil in Abu Dhabi under mutually agreed concession agreements. In terms of concrete results, often understated in India’s public discourse, the UAE constitutes India’s biggest success story in external affairs since a nuclear deal was signed with the United States of America.
Abu Dhabi has committed to invest $75 billion in India’s infrastructure sector, and inflows through this commitment are ongoing, making the UAE the seventh biggest investor in India in terms of foreign direct investment. The two countries have strategised on food security at a time when food availability is a major concern worldwide, with such anxiety having been deepened by the conflict in Ukraine. Under this strategy, entities in the UAE have announced that up to $7 billion will be invested in India’s food sector in the next three years.
The most significant diplomatic achievement of Modi’s regular dialogue with UAE president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was an invitation to former External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to be the “guest of honour” at a plenary of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Abu Dhabi in 2019. The invitation brought closure to a festering insult to India since 1969, when senior cabinet minister and later president—Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed—was disinvited to the founding Islamic summit of the OIC after he arrived in Morocco to attend the conclave.
The crowning moment in the all-encompassing India-UAE engagement was when Modi was granted the UAE’s highest civilian award, the “Order of Zayed” by then president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, three years ago. The current UAE president was chief guest at India’s Republic Day in 2017.
What then is the next frontier for the India-UAE collaboration?
The two countries are currently working to overcome the inherent limitations of geography and market asymmetry by upgrading their bilateral engagement to trilateral and plurilateral levels. Two years after signing the Abraham Accords between the UAE and Israel, India has moved to harness Israel’s state-of-the-art, advanced technology for this country’s huge market with the UAE’s resources—financial and logistical. One example is the decision last year by an Israeli company, Eccopia, to manufacture autonomous, water-free robots in India to be deployed in the UAE for solar cleaning at projects in the Emirates. More such trilateral initiatives are in the pipeline.
In September, when leaders from all over the world gathered in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, India utilised a meeting of Sherpas of the newbie I2U2 group—India, Israel, UAE, USA—to speed up a project in hybrid renewable energy in Gujarat, consisting of 300 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar capacity complemented by a battery energy storage system.
Israel is a world leader in solar technology, and the feasibility study for the Gujarat project is being done by the United States Trade and Development Agency as part of an I2U2 process. The International Federation of the Indo-Israel Chambers of Commerce is a new, unique tripartite initiative: its Founder-Chairman Merzi Sodawaterwala says it is the only two-nation business organisation to be located in a third country, the UAE.
Third-country initiatives between the UAE and India have identified Sub-Saharan Africa for joint action focusing on capacity-building, collaboration in trade and technology, and joint projects aimed at supporting the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
There are large Indian business communities across Africa which will be tapped with the UAE’s financial resources for this ambitious goal. On the sidelines of the 77th General Assembly, the first ministerial meeting bringing together India, France and the UAE for trilateral initiatives in the Indo-Pacific was held in New York in September. This initiative will explore triangular cooperation in maritime security, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, connectivity, and supply chain resilience.
Trilateralism is the watchword for India-UAE cooperation in the next phase of what Modi started seven years ago.
K P Nayar
Strategic analyst