Modi in Cairo: Pulling India–Egypt ties out of a deep freeze

Over the past two years, a steady increase in bilateral cooperation has been orchestrated between India and Egypt. With India’s foreign minister, defence minister, and military chiefs having laid the ground, Prime Minister Narendra Modi became the first Indian leader to visit Cairo this month since 1997. This is seen as another correction in India’s West Asia policy under the current government, which has prioritised the region from an economic, political, and diasporic vision. President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt was in India this past January as the chief guest at the Republic Day celebrations, and Egypt is also invited by India to attend the G20 summit in September. Both New Delhi and Cairo have shared historical ties from the era of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) under erstwhile Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. However, in subsequent decades, a gap between the two states had set in as political upheavals often marred Egypt and India’s foreign policy prioritised other areas post-Liberalization in the 1990s.

Egypt in West Asian geopolitics

One of the lesser-known points about the timing of this détente between India and Egypt is to do with Cairo’s relations with its neighbours and the Islamic world itself. Egypt became one of the main theatres of the Arab Spring in 2010, leading to the end of a 30-yearlong rule by President Hosni Mubarak. During this period, Egypt’s own political destiny was contested as the Muslim Brotherhood and its brand of political Islam became more and more prominent and powerful since the founding of the movement in 1928 by schoolteacher and Imam, Hassan al-Banna.

Under Sisi, the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, and Cairo has more streamlined relations with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh.

The post-Arab Spring Egypt intermittently looked towards a transition to some kind of electoral-democracy system. However, from a regional perspective, the 2012 Egyptian elections turned out to be unpalatable to many as Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi came out on top, making him the first Islamist leader of a state in the Arab world. This ideological choice, if you may, worried many. While ideological, this was far from preferred in New Delhi. Morsi did visit India in March 2013, just three months before being ousted in a military coup despite the fact that India largely views all forms of political Islam from the lens of extremism and as a manifestation of “terrorism”. Pluralism, interestingly, was a top agenda for this one-day-long visit. India’s then Joint Secretary for West Asia and North Africa at the Ministry of External Affairs, Rajeev Shahare, had said“ This (pluralism) is an important issue that Egypt is looking at”. While India could discuss this from a distance, for Egypt’s immediate neighbours, a power push for the Brotherhood was unacceptable. Under Sisi, the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, and Cairo has more streamlined relations with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. This intra-regional geopolitical reality offers fertile ground for the likes of New Delhi to take advantage of and rekindle the atrophying ties with Cairo.

Looking forward 

Sisi’s visit to India earlier this year and Modi’s reciprocal visit, indeed, offer a strong platform to build a relationship for a new era. Even as Egypt goes through an economic crisis, the opportunities for collaboration using mutually beneficial and liberalised economic and trade regimes and setting up of fundamental architectures to enable such agendas should prominently feature as deliverables in the near future. Agriculture, technology, defence, green finance, South-to-South cooperation, countering terrorism and violent extremism, and other areas of convergence are readily available, only awaiting political intent and resources. However, the agendas set by both states should also be realistic. India’s over-marketed push for selling domestically manufactured HAL Tejas fell short of what it was aiming for, a big-ticket defence deal where a domestic win was being chased over realistic expectations. While this does not mean such a deal is not possible in the future but developing defence ties in a staggered manner with achievable targets in areas such as non-armed tools, technologies, IT solutions, and even small arms and military logistics would be more ideal to build trust and acceptance within the Egyptian military, which has historically relied on American military aid and continues to chase American defence technologies, such as the F-15 fighter aircraft. This does not mean that Cairo has not sought a level of diversification, which includes Russian and Chinese weapons, giving a good chance to Indian companies in the future.

India’s over-marketed push for selling domestically manufactured HAL Tejas fell short of what it was aiming for, a big-ticket defence deal where a domestic win was being chased over realistic expectations.

Finally, both India and Egypt are entering a world where some of their interests align, such as maintaining safe spaces in an upcoming bipolar global tussle between the United States and China and securing national interests amidst Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. This is also easier said than done, for if India in South Asia is looking to be a pole in a multipolar order, at some levels so are the likes of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Many of these newer bilateral and multilateral relations are steeped in alignment today in order to hedge against big power competition. This will eventually also have an undercurrent of competition amongst each other as well within the global order. Contrary to some opinions, this is a healthy hypothesis and not a detrimental one.

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Kabir Taneja is a Fellow with the Strategic Studies programme at the Observer Research Foundation

• International Affairs
• Africa
• India
• The Pacific, East and Southeast Asia
• BILATERAL COOPERATION
• Chinese weapons
• defence ties
• economic crisis
• Egyptian military
• Multipolar Order
• Russian weapons

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