Counting India as being “among our extremely important friends and neighbours”, a top official of the United Arab Emirates lamented, however, that the country “was being consumed by its own politics”.
Addressing an international gathering of journalists on the eve of UAE’s 41st National Day, minister of state for foreign affairs Dr Anwar Gargash said India was a bigger trading partner for his country than all of the Arab world taken together. But he noted that it was “very difficult to engage India, as all those who have done so realise, because it is like a continent”.
In a frank overview of the foreign policy of UAE, which now commands the second largest economy of the Arab world after Saudi Arabia in GDP terms, Dr Gargash spoke positively of the “people-to-people and company-to-company contacts” developed between India and the UAE. In a separate media engagement, UAE’s minister of foreign trade, Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, said that outside the oil sector, India was her country’s largest trading partner. The two-way trade between the two stood at $253 billion last year, with China coming a distant second, she observed. She said gold accounted for 50 per cent of UAE’s exports to India. Dr Gargash counted “Al Qaeda and jihadism” among the principal foreign policy challenges facing his country. “We have seen our religion hijacked,” he said. He spoke of “our children (in the Muslim world) being brainwashed and ending up in Afghanistan”. “So, we took the education back (from preachers of extremism), and made it modern and future-oriented.” The UAE has mounted an enviable effort on the education front, with 20 per cent of the national budget allotted to it, the highest in the world. Dr Gargash said his country “always had very good relations with Pakistan on which we can see the effect of the Afghan crisis”. Answering a question from a Pakistani journalist on the situation in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Western forces in 2014, the influential foreign affairs official said the situation was difficult. In the end it would depend on keeping the security and development commitments the world makes, and the approach that is adopted. Dr Gargash spoke of the desirability of political reconciliation in Afghanistan, but said this would need to take into account the “social and economic achievements made in that country”. “Afghanistan can’t return to status quo ante,” he added. He said foreign military intervention had not brought peace there “but there have been achievements”. The Indian position on political reconciliation in Afghanistan is similar. New Delhi speaks of reconciliation with all those who agree to uphold human rights, and the current position of women in Afghanistan in keeping with its Constitution.