Chintan Girish Modi
INDIA REGULARLY SENDS aid to Palestine through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. According to a press release issued by India’s Ministry of External Affairs, when Narendra Modi met the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, on the sidelines of the Summit of the Future in New York in September 2024, the Indian prime minister “expressed deep concern at the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza and the deteriorating security situation in the region and reaffirmed India’s unwavering support to the people of Palestine, including continued humanitarian assistance.”
In June 2024, the prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority, Mouhammad Mustafa, highlighted that India could play a role in Israel–Palestine relations amid the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. After Modi’s election to a third term, Mustafa wrote to him saying, “As a global leader and a nation that values human rights and peace, India holds a significant role in bringing an end to the genocide in Gaza. It is imperative for India to utilize all diplomatic channels to call for an immediate ceasefire, increase humanitarian aid to Gaza to help alleviate the suffering.” The previous month, India had backed Palestine’s admission to the United Nations as a full member, voting in favour of a draft UN General Assembly resolution to this end. The gesture was consistent with India’s long-standing recognition of Palestinian statehood and support for a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict, acknowledging both Israel and Palestine’s right to exist side by side.
This month, after the announcement of a deal for a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages held by Hamas, the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi released a statement welcoming the development and noting that India has “consistently called for release of all hostages, ceasefire, and return to a path of dialogue and diplomacy.”
Yet, amid all of this, India’s growing closeness to Israel is no secret. Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World gives us some shocking numbers. Loewenstein writes, “Between 2015 and 2020, Israel’s leading weapons export market was India, at 43 percent of total sales, and in 2020 India was Israel’s largest purchaser of weaponry.”
News reports show that, more recently, India has been supplying drones, rockets and explosives to Israel, and Indian conglomerates like the Adani Group and Tata Group have been called out for their dealings with the Israeli military, the prime actor in the genocide in Gaza and in Israel’s apartheid regime across Palestinian territories.
This raises questions as to whether India can really claim to care about Palestine and Palestinian lives when its economic ties with Israel directly harm them. India, which presents itself as a voice of the Global South, has not spoken out against the Gaza genocide. The driving force behind India’s Israel–Palestine policy right now is Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but the long-term trajectory of India’s engagement on the issue shows that the Indian state may not untangle itself from Israel anytime soon – and Indian public opinion, even when it has sympathised with Palestine, has never really been able to override New Delhi’s cynical strategic calculations.
THE INDIAN AUTHOR Arundhati Roy, while accepting a prize from the writers’ organisation PEN International in October 2024, spoke out against Israel’s apartheid regime and brutal war, urged the United States to stop backing Israel, and donated her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. “A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased,” she said. “All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers. There is no daylight between these countries and Israel.” The same month, 300 Indian mental-health practitioners, highlighting the effects of trauma across generations, called for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza conflict and end of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the region.”
In August, the former Indian diplomat Ashok Sharma rubbished the argument that India must reciprocate Israel’s support for the country during the Kargil War by overlooking the genocide in Gaza. “How can anyone compare what is happening in Gaza with the Kargil War?” he asked. “During the war, we were defending our territory and ousting intruders from our own land.” The lawyer Prashant Bhushan cited India’s responsibility as a signatory to the Genocide Convention to uphold international law and therefore refrain from exporting arms to be used by Israel in Gaza.
In July, Dhananjay Balakrishnan, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, used his speech at the institute’s convocation ceremony to draw attention to “mass genocide” in Palestine. He said, “Inaction is complicity and I hope that you and I and all of us can take action to make the right decisions however hard they might be.” Instead of appealing to the Indian government to take a pro-Palestine stance, Dhananjay chose to take personal responsibility as a member of the community of “engineers graduating into the real world,” emphasising that they must be aware of the consequences of their work. In February 2024, the Water Transport Workers Federation of India, which represents workers at 11 government-owned ports, put out a statement communicating its members’ refusal to load or unload cargo with weapons headed to Israel for the “war in Palestine”.
These diverse public acts of solidarity with Palestine reaffirm the fact that many Indians continue to care about Palestinians’ fate even amid the suppression of voices in support of Palestine within India. That suppression has been evident, for instance, in the mainstream Indian media’s amplification of pro-Israel commentators and exclusion of pro-Palestine ones; and in incidents like the police action against pro-Palestine protests led by the All India Students Association in October 2023, or the sacking of Parveen Shaikh, a school principal in Mumbai, for “liking” pro-Palestine tweets.
The recent expressions of moral outrage in support of the Palestinian cause join a long and well-respected tradition of Indians speaking up for Palestinians, which is documented in the 2014 title From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity, edited by Githa Hariharan.
The book opens with epigraphs by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi said in 1938, “The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract.” In 1946, as Jewish settlers continued to flood into Palestine, he said, “In my opinion, they have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of naked terrorism.”
The scholar A K Ramakrishnan, in his essay in the book, points out that Gandhi was staunchly opposed to the cultural and religious nationalism of Zionists. “Gandhi’s views on the Zionist doctrine, and his firm commitment to the Palestinian cause starting from the 1930s, obviously influenced the design of independent India’s position on the Palestine issue,” he adds.
Nayantara Sahgal, a prominent writer and Nehru’s niece, argues in her contribution to the book that the persecution of Jews in Europe, which has been deployed to justify the creation of Israel, involved crimes committed by Europeans against fellow Europeans. “The guilt was Europe’s,” she writes. “Why not, then, a homeland for the Jews on European soil?” Locating Israel as a Jewish homeland on Biblical terrain was a geopolitical move, she says, and “had less to do with sympathy for Zionist sentiments than Britain’s need for a European ally in West Asia to safeguard the Suez Canal route to India.”
In 1947, the year of Partition, Sahgal’s mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was the Indian representative to the UN’s Special Committee on Palestine. Speaking on behalf of the Indian government, she said that “Palestine should be an Arab state in which Jews would be allowed wide powers of autonomy. Palestine should be given independence.” In 1974, India became the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the representative of the Palestinian people. And, in 1988, India was also one of the first countries to recognise the Palestinian state.
HOW DID INDIA, which did not even recognise Israel until 1950, more than two years after its founding, become such a dependable ally to the country? In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein points out that the relationship began to change after the Oslo Peace Accords in the 1990s. India, a country that “saw itself as a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement, identifying its own struggle for identity in ideological affinity with Palestine” grew interested in buying drones, weapons and electronic fences from Israel.
The book recalls the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to India in 2003, when the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister. This was the first visit ever by an Israeli prime minister to India, and the two leaders signed the Delhi Statement on Friendship and Cooperation between India and Israel, pledging to be partners in the “battle against this [terrorist] scourge.” Loewenstein points out that, in 2014, India and Israel also signed an agreement to cooperate on “public and homeland security.” As a result, Indian officers, pilots, commandos and special forces personnel visited Israel for training in counterinsurgency.
In Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel, Rhys Machold shows how public pressure to modernise India’s “homeland security” – a fallout of the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008 – “solidified the notion that India had become a victim of ‘global’ terrorism.” Israeli state officials smelled an opportunity. Citing similarities between India and Israel’s experience with terrorism, they “proposed Israeli homeland security expertise and technologies as a solution to India’s lack of modern security preparedness.”
Machold also examines how “Israel’s long-standing claims about its exceptionality as the global innovator in counterterrorism and homeland security” were reinforced by the Indian media. He writes, “Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise.”
The India–Israel relationship needs to be understood within this historical trajectory, and not seen only through the lens of the ruling BJP with its rampant nationalism, Islamophobia and Hindutva–Zionism nexus. The editor and activist Prabir Purkayastha, in his essay for From India to Palestine, cautions against pinning the blame for India’s shift towards Israel entirely on Modi. Purkayastha implicates the Indian National Congress in addition to the BJP. He believes that “the Congress has adopted major elements of the BJP strategic position” and draws attention to the pro-United States sympathies of the Congress government under Manmohan Singh, the prime minister before Modi took over the position in 2014. The pro-United States tilt, of course, also meant a friendlier stance to Israel in line with US foreign policy. Purkayastha shows that the shift in Indian foreign policy was informed by changes in the country’s economic policy, especially with liberalisation in the 1990s. “The only difference is that while the BJP government was happy to broadcast its position from the nearest rooftop,” he writes, “the Congress articulation has been relatively muted and more implicit.”
While Modi and the BJP show off the strong India–Israel relationship, the normalisation of bilateral ties and the acceleration of defence cooperation happened, respectively, under Congress rule in the 1990s and 2000s.
Machold writes that “significant strides” in India–Israel ties were made during the tenure as prime minister of the Congress’s P V Narasimha Rao, with the countries establishing formal diplomatic relations and opening embassies in each other’s capitals in 1992. He adds, “That year, Indian Minister of Defence Sharad Pawar also acknowledged the existence of bilateral counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries. Since then, Israel and India have continued to forge a close bilateral alliance, which has been founded on weapons sales and India’s retreat from its historic pro-Palestinian stance.”
Israel–India ties have strengthened under the current leadership of Modi and the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Loewenstein recalls that Israel had granted arms dealers a travel exemption during a Covid-19 lockdown in early 2021 because several Israelis wanted to attend Aero India, one of the world’s biggest weapon fairs. Defence companies were able to organise a chartered flight to bring these Israelis to the event.
In November 2024, Modi reportedly spoke to Netanyahu urging de-escalation in Gaza. One wonders if the BJP’s allies played a role in this. K C Tyagi, a spokesperson of the Janata Dal (United), a key coalition partner of the BJP in the ruling government, had earlier raised the matter. Tyagi is a member of the League of Parliamentarians for Al-Quds, a pro-Palestine body. “I have been associated with the Palestinian cause since 1978 and met with Palestinian Liberation Organisation chief Yasser Arafat at that time,” he said in a recent news report. “Supporting Vietnam and Palestine in their struggles was part of a spirit of anti-colonial mindset that was prevalent then. I am afraid to say that much of that spirit of struggling against imperialism and colonialism is no longer there.”
SPEECHES, SOLIDARITY STATEMENTS and student protests contribute towards sensitising the Indian public to the genocide in and occupation of Palestine, but these efforts receive very little attention or amplification in the Indian media. Nor, for that matter, do Palestinian views. As a result, Palestinians remain faceless and distant for the majority of Indians, who, unless they are part of activist networks or actively follow anti-Zionist accounts on social media, are instead exposed only to the Israeli narrative prevalent in Western and mainstream Indian media.
One counter to this are interpersonal interactions between Indians and Palestinians. In From India to Palestine, the scholar Sunaina Maira offers a tender first-person account of her experience as an Indian visiting Palestine. Maira, who was born in Delhi and grew up in Pune, got involved in Palestine solidarity activism while teaching in the United States. When she visited Palestine in 2004, she met Palestinians whose relatives had studied in India. She knew of the rampant human rights violations by Israeli forces in Palestine because of her reading, but she had not “anticipated … the closeness I felt to the Palestinian people.” She writes, “I was struck that Palestine was also a place on the cultural map that was so close to India and South Asia.”
During her childhood, Maira had seen a photograph of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat embracing the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi. This was much before hordes of Israelis “began to arrive on the beaches of Goa or the hills of Manali after completing their military service, looking to escape the horrors of the occupation they had just helped enforce.” Both Maira and Hariharan recall that, when they were children, their Indian passports stated that they were not allowed to travel to Israel and South Africa because of India’s position against Israel’s occupation of Palestine and apartheid in South Africa.
Hariharan, who edited the book on behalf of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in India, states, “All those ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, our legacies from the Indian freedom movement, seem to have been put in cold storage.” She points out that “cooperation with educational institutions in Israel in the field of science and technology is tantamount to collusion with the war machinery of Israel.” And she is of the opinion, writing in 2014, that Indians must challenge their government “to end the deepening ‘strategic’ relationship between India and Israel.” Of course things have only escalated since then.
In 2015, the Delhi-based theatre group Jana Natya Manch, better known as Janam, hosted an eight-member team from The Freedom Theatre (TFT) in Jenin, Palestine. Together, they created a joint production that toured 11 Indian cities. In 2016, the Indian group travelled to the West Bank in a reciprocal gesture and was hosted by TFT. The actor and director Sudhanva Deshpande describes this collaboration at length in an essay titled “Solidarity is Not a One-Way Street”, which is part of Ola Johansson and Johanna Wallin’s insightful 2018 anthology The Freedom Theatre: Performing Cultural Resistance in Palestine.
Deshpande writes, “For a majority of our Indian audiences, our guests were the first Palestinians they ever saw and met in the flesh. That these were young, talented, artistically inclined, beautiful individuals full of life and humour was completely contrary to the Islamophobic stereotype our media is full of.” The performances in India were followed by discussions that also gave Indians an opportunity to learn about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that targets companies and institutions that support the Israeli occupation.
“One of the key issues we wanted to highlight through the Janam-TFT collaboration was precisely that, as Indian citizens, we should be concerned about where and how our tax money is used,” Deshpande continues. He also reminds readers that, during the Indira Gandhi years, before India and Israel grew close, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had an office in Delhi and was “treated as a government in exile.” Arafat had the same diplomatic status as a head of state.
In December 2023, two months into the war in Gaza, Priyanka Gandhi, the Congress general secretary, called on Indians to participate in a global strike demanding a ceasefire. She said that, as a member of the international community, India must stand up for what is right and advocate for a ceasefire.
The Congress and other Indian parties – including the Janata Dal (United), which resumed its alliance with the BJP at the start of 2024 – have loudly challenged Modi’s position on Israel, making common cause with the intellectuals and students who have also been protesting of late. But the shift in India’s stance is down to much more than just Modi’s growing proximity with Netanyahu or any ideological affinity between Hindutva and Zionist forces. It remains to be seen whether the Congress will take up the issue of Palestine again in parliament, or whether it will be joined in this by the All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader Asaduddin Owaisi, who raised the slogan “Jai Palestine” while taking his oath as a member of parliament in June 2024. When members of the BJP objected to this slogan, Owaisi said, “Read what Mahatma Gandhi said about Palestine.” Perhaps all Indians should, because the histories of India and Palestine in relation to the British Empire are closely intertwined.
In the introduction to their 2023 book The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition, Victor Kattan and Amit Ranjan draw attention to the “divide and rule policies” that were “a hallmark of British imperialism” everywhere, and also to the unsatisfactory nature of the “boundary arrangements” that were reached under British influence. Arabs in Palestine who were “opposed to any form of partition that resulted in the establishment of a Jewish state at their expense” did not get to have their say. As for India and Pakistan, leaders of the Muslim League as well as the Congress “did not desire partition in the form that it took—a motheaten subcontinent that entailed the vivisection of the Punjab and Bengal.”
The historian Penny Sinanoglou’s afterword in the book unravels the threads connecting India and Palestine despite the “particular circumstances and unique politics” surrounding the partitions in Southasia and West Asia, which occurred within a few months of each other. She writes, “The armed conflict and intercommunal violence that both precipitated and resulted from partition or its attempt created millions of refugees in the Indian subcontinent and in the Middle East. Each partition was unfinished and is ongoing in its own way, but what they have in common is that they caused immense dislocation and bloodshed in the short term, and continue to resonate politically, economically, socially and culturally through to the present.”
It seems that India has forgotten this shared history of being at the receiving end of Britain’s imperial designs – a shared history that once shaped its solidarity with Palestine. India’s strategic concerns have been pushing the country towards Israel, with historical and moral solidarities set aside. Despite the material support India has provided to Palestine, the new normal across ruling governments in India seems to be cynically paying lip service to Palestine while keeping the security relationship with Israel open.
source : himalmag