BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Ariel Sharon's visit to India last week, the first official one by an Israeli prime minister, represents another of the tectonic shifts in alliances since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
India recognized Israel in 1950, but it kept the Jewish state at arm's length for most of its history. That changed in 1992, when the two nations established diplomatic relations. It was one thing for India's Congress Party government to take that step. What the current government -- a coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and in power since 1998 -- has done goes much further and is far more consequential. It has chosen to form a strategic alignment with Israel.
The new partnership is at an early stage, but already the results are remarkable. Israel is now India's second-largest supplier of arms and military technology, after Russia. And India has surpassed China as the biggest buyer of Israeli armaments, accounting for 50% of Israel's total sales last year.
Beyond the sale of military hardware, the budding Indian-Israeli friendship promises to shift regional balances and involve the U.S. in a three-way alliance of sorts. Brajesh Mishra, India's national security advisor, proclaimed in a speech to the American Jewish Committee in May that, as democracies facing a common threat from Islamic terrorism, India, Israel and the United States had little choice but to cooperate. A similar refrain is voiced by Israeli leaders and neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration, who have been America's most vocal boosters of the entente between Tel Aviv and New Delhi.
India's embrace of Israel amounts to a sea change in its statecraft. Even as the country relied on the Soviet Union for most of its weapons during the Cold War, it worked doggedly within the Non-Aligned Movement to oppose alliances with either superpower. As part of that policy, it developed close ties with like-minded Arab nationalist regimes, particularly Gamal Abdel Nasser's in Egypt. Political sympathy for the Palestinian cause and the need to soften Arab support for Pakistan, India's nemesis, also precluded close ties with Israel.
