Indian Hindu and Israeli Jewish supremacists: A match made in Islamophobic hell
Indian Hindu and Israeli Jewish supremacists: A match made in Islamophobic hell
Modi and Netanyahu's policies find a common ground in hatred of Muslims.
Israel banned Palestinian workers from its territory in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Nearly 18,000 Gazans worked in sectors such as agriculture and construction in Israel on work permits issued by the apartheid state. Tens of thousands of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank also found employment in Israel either legally or illegally; some estimates put the total number of Palestinian workers in Israel as high as 150,000. They are now barred from working in the country. To fill the critical labour shortage, the Israelis are now exclusively looking abroad, and India is eager to help the settler colonial state with its labour resources. The northern Indian state of Haryana recently put out an advertisement for 10,000 skilled workers in construction, carpentry, tiling, plastering, and iron bending — the kind of work Palestinians were doing until recently — for employment in Israel. To be sure, before October 7, not just Palestinians but also foreign workers, including from India, worked in Israel.
The latest Indian overture towards the apartheid state is a continuation of its right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been at the helm since the summer of 2014. Modi, whose political stock rose considerably in the wake of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms he oversaw as the head of the Gujarat state, became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel in 2017. In a further departure from convention, he didn’t go to Palestine during the trip. Images splattered across Indian media at the time showed him being chummy with Netanyahu as the two walked on an occupied beach — the ever-tasteless and never-imaginative Indian media dubbed their bonhomie “bromance.”
India was among the first countries to condemn Palestinian resistance after the October 7 attacks. Hours after the Hamas-led incursion on Israeli-occupied territory began, Modi took to Twitter (now X) to express his deep shock “by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel.” During Modi’s tenure — now in its tenth year — India has become Israel’s biggest market for arms. Modi’s crony capitalists have lined their pockets as a result of the Israeli windfall: Adani Group, run by Modi’s friend Gautam Adani — who funded Modi’s chartered plane rides for campaigns leading up to the 2014 parliamentary elections — has acquired a lease for the Haifa port, one of the largest in Israel, for $1.2 billion.
India’s growing proximity to Israel is a deviation from its historic ties with the apartheid state. In 1947, a newly independent India, under its first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, voted against the United Nations’ partition plan for Palestine. Two years later, it voted against Israel’s admission to the United Nations. It ultimately recognised the state of Israel in 1950. Still, it maintained a fair distance from the country diplomatically, not allowing it to open its embassy in the capital, New Delhi, until 1992, when full diplomatic relations were established. Moreover, India was among the first countries to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people, and PLO’s head, Yasser Arafat, had close ties with the Indian leadership. However, with the Indian economy opening up — dubbed liberalisation — in the early 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalist considerations saw it change course in favour of the Western economies.
Ideological affinity
Capitalism, however, wasn’t the only consideration guiding India’s closeness with Israel. The Hindu supremacist ideology that drives Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), took more than just inspiration from Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists. The BJP is the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the RSS, which roughly translates to the National Volunteer Organisation. The early leaders of the RSS were in thrall of the Nazis and Fascists, and one of its co-founders, BS Moonje, met Benito Mussolini in 1931 in Italy to learn and indoctrinate his Indian cadres with Fascist pedagogical practices. MS Golwalkar, who headed the RSS from 1940 until he died in 1973, was appreciative of Hitler’s treatment of Jews and saw it as a model for India. He made no bones about it, writing in his book, We or Our Nationhood Defined: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races — the Jews.” He added: “Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan [India] to learn and profit by.”
Golwalkar harboured dreams of becoming a Hindu fuhrer in post-colonial India. However, the power transfer from the British to the Congress didn’t help his ambitions. Nevertheless, the ostensibly secular Indian constitution of India — a country with many minorities, Muslims being the largest — is highly confessional. The lower caste Hindus, for example, when they convert to Christianity or Islam, lose reservation benefits. Muslims don’t get special constituencies, unlike lower castes. Moreover, constituencies with a sizeable Muslim population invariably end up getting reserved for lower castes — which are supposedly, but not actually, worse off than they. For these reasons, historian Perry Anderson notes that “Indian secularism is Hindu confessionalism by another name.”
One of the manifestations of this Hindu confessionalism has been the state’s tolerance — if not tacit approval — of anti-Muslim violence, which has been a constant feature of modern Indian history. The late historian Paul R. Brass, a foremost authority on post-independence anti-Muslim violence in India, concluded that “incidents are provoked, processions are taken out, mass mobilizations are organized deliberately to offend the sensibilities of the other community’s members. Economic and political advantages are gained both from the tension and from the violence that sometimes follows such actions.” The sporadic bursts of violence have forced Muslims into ghettos and have been ruinous for their economic prospects in the country.
Such violence against Muslims has become routine since Modi took power. Hate crimes against Muslims have escalated to an alarming degree. Muslims have been lynched with impunity for reasons as frivolous as allegations of possessing beef to occupying train seats. The home minister of the country has called the Muslims “termites.” At the same time, Prime Minister Modi told his supporters that those “creating violence” could be “identified by their clothes,” in a not-so-subtle insinuation to Muslims as troublemakers. The leader of another state used the Indian version of Reagan’s “welfare queens” diatribe to imply that Muslims gobble down all the state subsidies.
Hateful rhetoric has reached such a level that a BJP leader abused a Muslim colleague inside the Parliament with vile communal slurs. Not unlike the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich telling Arab MPs in the Knesset, “You’re here by mistake. It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”
Such hateful abuses from the Indian executive have manifested into hate crimes on the streets. There have been hate gatherings and hate marches openly calling for the genocide of Muslims with zero repercussions. RSS-affiliated militias have been emboldened to commit violence at will. The state turns a blind eye. The courts drag cases before acquitting the accused for lack of evidence, even when the perpetrators themselves film their criminal acts. Vigilante violence has become commonplace. No Muslim is safe.
This violence in India has close parallels to the settler violence in Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank. Just the way the Israeli army joins the settlers when they go on their rampages against Palestinians and their property, the police forces and the Indian army play a similar role in India. The police invariably join the violent Hindus in their crimes instead of doing their duty and protecting the victims. Scholar Omar Khalidi diagnosed the problem in his book Khaki and Ethnic Violence in India, writing: “A docile and loyal police, acting on behalf of a corrupt and unscrupulous civilian authority, adds up to both no citizen protection at all and to the basic ingredients of a police state.”
Zionists and the Nazis
In the Israeli context, the Zionist leadership wasn’t averse to collaborating with the Nazis either. In a break from the international boycott against the Nazi regime, the Zionists signed the transfer agreement (Ha’avara) with the Nazis in 1933. As Columbia Professor Joseph Massad has noted, the intimacy between the Nazis and Zionists was extended well beyond the transfer agreement: “In 1935, the German Zionist branch was the only political force that supported the Nazi Nuremberg Laws in the country, and was the only party still allowed to publish its own newspaper the Rundschau until after Kristallnacht in 1938. Nazi officials would visit Palestine as guests of the Zionists in 1934 and in 1937. In the latter year, it was none other than Adolf Eichmann and Herbert Hagen who arrived in the country. The two were taken by the Zionist envoy Feivel Polkes to Mount Carmel to visit a Jewish colonial-settlement.”
Notably, Avraham Stern of the eponymous Zionist terrorist organisation in Mandate Palestine, Stern Gang, was eager to make deals with the Nazis, and his terrorists would openly celebrate Nazi victories during the Second World War. Stern, while at another terrorist militia named Irgun, wrote: “The NMO [National Military Organization, i.e., Irgun] is closely related to the totalitarian movements in Europe in its ideology and structure.”
Theological justifications for barbarity
If Jews consider themselves to be the God’s chosen people and the only ones deserving of his favours, the Hindu ideologues haven’t been far behind in positing Hinduism as the one true religion. Professor Irfan Ahmad remarks that the Hindu philosopher Swami Vivekananda saw the Hindus as superior to people of other faiths. Ahmad writes: “Taking Hindus as an ‘older race than either the Hebrew or the Arab,’ he [Vivekananda] suggested a synthesis between ‘Vedanta brain and Islam body.’ It is amply clear how this supposed synthesis is not only hierarchical in that brain is superior to bare skeleton but also how Vivekananda definitionally monopolizes Hinduism as the only truth discovered well before Moses, Christ, Mohammad or others did.”
Hindu seers and politicians alike use the supposed old age of their civilisation as proof of its infallibility. This notion of superiority has seen them make remarks that would draw guffaws on a stand-up stage, but they speak with a convert’s conviction and a zealot’s zeal. Here’s Modi: “We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.” And here’s a then-chief minister of a state from Modi’s BJP: “We had internet and a satellite communication system. It is not like internet or media wasn’t available in the age of Mahabharata.”
The anti-Muslim rhetoric in India isn’t too different from those employed by Israeli politicians. The Hindutva ideologues see Islam as a religion foreign to India and Indian Muslims as demons from Hindu mythology. They assert that Muslims should either convert to Hinduism or migrate to any of the numerous Muslim-majority countries and leave India exclusively for the Hindus. They are told to “go to Pakistan” with an alarming frequency.
Their rhetoric closely mirrors that of the Israeli Zionists, who assert that Palestine — in fact, all the land between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq — was promised to them by God. Netanyahu has called the Palestinians “Amalek,” while his Defence Minister has labelled them “human animals.” In this politics of otherisation, they are merely continuing the long history of Israelis referring to Palestinians by sundry dehumanising names, such as “beasts walking on two legs,” “drugged roaches in a bottle,” and “cancer.”
Like Hindu nationalists, Israelis, too, want to get rid of the Muslims — and Christians — in their midst and have made no qualms about publicly declaring a desire to see them leave not just for Muslim-majority lands but to regions as far away and as disconnected from the Palestinian society as the Congo. In their generosity, they even want to fund their “voluntary migration” after having explicitly declared plans to make their enclave unlivable for humans.
The Israeli public is fully behind its government’s genocide. In a poll conducted a month into the Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza, less than 2% of the respondents in Israel felt that their government was bombing the concentration camp too much. Nearly 60% believed that Gaza wasn’t being bombed enough.
Indian Hindus take similar delight in the killing of Muslims. The deaths of Muslims are celebrated, and concerted campaigns are run in support of their killers, who are then garlanded by ministers; ruling party politicians join marches advocating for the release of child rapists, as long as the victims are Muslims.
Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, is the world’s most militarised zone. Kashmiri Muslims have been subjected to routine humiliation from the Indian military personnel. They have to pass through intrusive checkpoints for daily activities — akin to the Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank. In 2019, the Indian government removed constitutional safeguards that protected Kashmir’s demographic and wants to settle Hindus from other parts of India in the heart of Muslim localities in Kashmir. They can always look to Israel for help with such projects of colonisation and dispossession of the natives. And they are. An Israeli delegation visited Kashmir in 2017 for what an Indian defence spokesman called “enhanced cooperation between both countries.”
Earlier that year, an Indian army major tied a Kashmiri youth to the bumper of his car to use him as a human shield against protesters. The major was later commended for his efforts. It’s a practice taken straight from the Israeli playbook, notorious for using Palestinians as human shields against all rules of war and decency. 2017 was also the first time when India participated in a joint military exercise with Israel. In another leaf out of the Israeli book, Indian authorities are now unlawfully bulldozing the homes of Muslims on trumped-up charges and even for political dissent.
For the sake of temples
One of the seismic events of modern Indian history was the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid with the tacit approval of the state. The mosque, built by the Mughal ruler Babar (after whom it was named) in the eastern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, was brought down by a frenzied Hindu mob on December 6, 1992. The Hindus claimed with extremely tenuous evidence that the mosque was built following the destruction of a Hindu temple at the exact place of birth of the Hindu deity, Ram.
After court cases that ran for nearly 3 decades, the Supreme Court of India held that the 1949 desecration and the 1992 demolition of the mosque was unlawful. However, in a verdict based on “faith and belief” and in defiance of all logic, law, and propriety, it ruled that a Ram temple be constructed in place of the mosque. Perhaps to shield its shame, but only with the most transparent fabric, it gave Muslims land to build their mosque elsewhere. Furthermore, everyone in the mosque demolition case was acquitted.
The Hindus of India have accomplished what the Jews of Israel want. Israeli Jews routinely desecrate the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex under the full protection of the state. They beat Muslim worshippers, fire teargas shells, burn trees in the mosque courtyard, and conduct Jewish religious rituals on the mosque grounds, all with the ultimate aim of bringing down Islam’s third-holiest site and building the Third Temple in its stead.
These ideological affinities and the shared hatred of Muslims have animated a vast number of Indians to express their support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Every time a tragedy inflicts a Muslim land, Indian social media gets abuzz in celebration; even the earthquake in Turkey early last year caused them delight. Needless to say, the destruction in Gaza has been the veritable manna from heaven for the extremist Hindus on Twitter, making the most reprehensible memes using pictures of suffering children and mothers from Israel’s ongoing annihilation of Gaza.
A 2022 study by the Islamic Council of Victoria showed that over 55% of Islamophobic tweets originated in India. Together, India, the US, and the UK accounted for 86% of the Islamophobic content on the platform. Israel ranked number 10. Research by Hatem Bazian, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, found that “70% of the funding for the Islamophobic industry, meaning organisations, groups, and individuals that demonise Islam and Muslims, comes from pro-Israel sources.”
The Indian regime-friendly “journalists” have proven equal to the task, amplifying the most libelous of Israeli atrocity propaganda like there’s no tomorrow. In a neat encapsulation of Indian “journalists” reporting from Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks, a “reporter” got so hyper in his coverage of the war that an Israeli soldier had to ask him to tone it down.
Indian voting at the United Nations has increasingly veered in favour of Israel. In an October 26 UN resolution for a humanitarian truce in Gaza, India abstained. In 2019, it voted in favour of an Israeli resolution at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) that objected to granting consultative status to Palestinian NGOs. In 2021, it abstained from voting for a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution calling on Israel to provide a Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People. In 2022, India abstained from a UNGA resolution, asking the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) opinion on the “violation” of Palestinian rights.
Its vote for a ceasefire in a December 12 ceasefire resolution notwithstanding, the Indian government’s pro-Israel stance marks a clear departure from its historic stand on the Palestinian issue. With the tightening grip of the RSS on all apparatuses of the Indian state, the hyper-nationalist regime doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, elections or not. The unholy tryst between Indian Hindu and Israeli Jewish supremacists, solemnised in an Islamophobic hell, is here to stay.
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