LAHORE : India’s medicated stance of merely “expressing concern” over Israeli strikes in Doha has laid bare the hollowness of its diplomacy, said Brig (Retd) Wajahat Hussain while talking to The News.
According to him, far from demonstrating solidarity with Arab states, New Delhi continues to favour caution over principle, balancing rhetoric with silence while quietly aligning itself with Tel Aviv’s most aggressive policies. This duality exposes India not as a dependable partner, but as an opportunistic actor willing to undermine Gulf security to advance its own strategic ambitions, he said.
By 2025, India and Israel’s relationship has transformed into a full-spectrum alliance, stretching across defence cooperation, intelligence collaboration, trade expansion, and technological exchange, he added. What binds this partnership most tightly is not public diplomacy but covert operations. At the centre of this lies India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), which has steadily expanded its influence in the Gulf. RAW uses the vast Indian diaspora, diplomatic missions, and embedded media networks to conduct espionage, manipulate narratives, and provide support for Israeli military operations, said Wajahat.
He shared that Qatar in particular has witnessed multiple espionage scandals involving Indian nationals. In 2017, a spy network was dismantled after operatives were found leaking classified naval and defence information to India and Israel. In 2022, the arrest of eight Indian naval officers on charges of passing details of Qatari submarine projects to Israeli intelligence further highlighted the scale of the operations. The controversy resurfaced in 2025 with the detention of Amit Gupta, a senior executive of Tech Mahindra, who was accused in Doha of involvement in a sensitive data theft case. Another high-profile episode was the Dahra Global Technologies scandal, in which Indian employees were accused of funneling critical naval information to Israel through financial and business channels.