De-hyphenation as Grand Strategy: Evolution and Limits of India's Multi-Alignment in West Asia Under Modi

Abstract

Since 2014, Indian foreign policy toward West Asia has been organized around the doctrine of “de-hyphenation”: the deliberate decoupling of India's bilateral relationships with regional actors — most visibly Israel and Palestine, but also Iran and the Gulf Arab states — from one another, so that each may be pursued on its own transactional merits. This paper traces the doctrine's intellectual and historical lineage from Nehruvian non-alignment through the 1991 recalibration and the Manmohan Singh-era “Look West” policy, before examining its operationalization under Narendra Modi across three parallel tracks: Israel, Iran, and the Gulf Cooperation Council states. It then subjects the doctrine to two acid tests — the Israel-Hamas war that began in October 2023 and the far more disruptive 2026 Iran War — to assess whether de-hyphenation constitutes a durable grand strategy or merely a euphemism for asymmetric alignment with Israel and the United States (US) dressed in the language of strategic autonomy. Situating the empirical record within the broader theoretical literature on hedging and multi-alignment, the paper argues that de-hyphenation has been a materially successful but normatively costly strategy: it has allowed India to accumulate defense, energy, diaspora, and connectivity dividends across a fractured region, but at the price of diminishing moral credibility on Palestine, growing vulnerability to great-power sanctions regimes, and a widening gap between the rhetoric of sovereign choice and the reality of constrained maneuver when regional crises escalate to the level of direct US-Iran-Israel confrontation.