As elections loom, India ingratiates itself further with Israel at UN arms vote
The Indian government couldn’t care less for the plight of its workers in Israel. It has bigger fish to fry.
At an April 5 United Nations Human Rights Council resolution to impose ban on arms sale to the genocidal Israelis, India abstained. Of the 47 members of the council, 28 voted in favour, six opposed, and 13 — including India — abstained.
Those voting against the resolution were the usual suspects led by the United States and its various vassals. Mostly Western or Wester-allied states were among those abstaining. However, most of the Global South voted in favour of the resolution, with the notable exception of India. Given its history of aligning itself with causes that benefit the Asian and African countries, as one of the leading players in the Non-Aligned Movement, India’s stance on issues concerning Israel since October 7 has been deplorable.
It has taken a lead in helping the Zionist entity in every way possible. After the Israelis imposed a ban on Palestinian workers in the aftermath of October 7 resistance action, India has been sending labourers to lend the Zionists a helping hand as their economy collapses. The first batch of 60 workers made their way to Tel Aviv earlier tis month. Thousands more will likely follow, as one article put it:
On Thursday [April 11], an official Israeli government statement had announced that more than 6,000 Indian workers would reach Israel during April and May, with the government approving ticketed chartered flights for the workers.
Even the death of an Indian worker and injuries to two more haven’t put off India’s plan of facilitating Palestinian genocide. The aforementioned article continues:
The MEA [Indian Ministry of External Affairs] had also been helping facilitate the process, despite an earlier advisory issued by the Indian Embassy in Israel regarding the safety of workers, after an Indian was killed and two injured in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Israel’s northern boundary.
The Israeli arms industry has partnered with its Indian counterparts to manufacture incendiary weapons wreaking havoc on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The result of that partnership saw India recently send Hermes 900 drones to the Zionists as they have extensively used these death machines to surveil and slaughter Palestinians from the skies.
The Hindu supremacist government in power in New Delhi enjoys massive support from the Hindu-majority Indian populace, which is increasingly taking perverse pleasure in beating, humiliating, and lynching Muslims at every opportunity for absolutely no reason other than the fact that their victims are Muslims and hence not worthy of residency and citizenship in a country whose leadership believes the Indian Constitution needs to be revised and Hinduism made the state religion. Some of the more rabid ones are also revanchist, openly declaring plans to bring the sovereign republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh within the Indian fold.
In the decade that Narendra Modi has been in power propped up by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mothership of his political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he has only burnished his reputation as — what the most hardcore of the Hindu right wing thugs call — the Hindu Hriday Samrat (the Emperor of Hindu Hearts). Among his big decisions have included the removal of autonomy from Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state and the construction of a Hindu temple at the site of the destruction of a centuries-old mosque built by the first Mughal emperor, Babar. Incidentally, a reference to Babar — “Babar ki aulaad” (descendants of Babar) — is used by fanatic Hindus as a slur for Indian Muslims.
The January opening of the temple was presided over by Modi in a garish spectacle that invoked a priest-king from Indian antiquity. It is sure to garner Modi and his party many more gratuitous votes in the upcoming national elections — which he is anyway expected to win by a landslide. Nevertheless, the political animal that he and his closest acolytes are, they are not leaving any stone unturned ahead of the parliamentary elections that will span seven phases and take roughly six weeks between April 19 and June 1.
In the lead up to the polls and with their intent to squeeze every last Hindu vote in their favour, Modi’s party revived the spectre of the inherently exclusionary Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a law that came into effect in late 2019, prompting widespread Muslim-led protests across all parts of India that only stopped after the draconian Covid-19 lockdowns in March 2020. The law, which expedites Indian citizenship applications for people of all faiths except Islam from India’s neighbouring states, wasn’t implemented despite coming into effect in late 2019. But that changed last month.
The CAA taken in conjunction with a National Register of Citizens (NRC), which will demand citizenship papers that go back decades in a country where documentation has always been sketchy, promises to be a nightmare for Indian Muslims who fear being rendered stateless for the lack of adequate antiquated paperwork. Since Home Minister Amit Shah, who plied his trade as an extortionist — which included a stint in jail —before mainstream national politics, declared ominously that NRC will follow the implementation of the CAA in a speech now infamous for his insistence on driving home the chronology of the two events. Back in 2019, he had declared: “First we will pass the Citizenship Amendment bill and ensure that all the refugees from the neighbouring nations get the Indian citizenship. After that NRC will be made and we will detect and deport every infiltrator from our motherland.” Infiltrator is the Hindu nationalist euphemism for Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims, who are seen as outsiders belonging to Bangladesh.
A local NRC exercise in Assam, an eastern Indian state bordering Bangladesh, rendered countless stateless. Interestingly, and much to the chagrin of the Hindu zealots, a significant majority of the stateless were Hindus.
But that debacle hasn’t deterred the Hindu nationalists in power in New Delhi from implementing the plan nationally. They see the prospect of suffering Muslims as raw meat for their hungry voter base, which loves nothing more than Muslims being put in their rightful place: under the boots of the Hindus. It is, in their fantastical reading of history, a correction of historic wrongs committed against Hindus during the centuries of rule by Muslims over vast swathes of India. Needless to say, no historian worth his salt buys into this fanciful Hindu supremacist reading of medieval Indian history.
But the Hindu hatred of Muslims knows no geographical borders. They despise Muslims everywhere with the same passion with which they despise Indian Muslims, whom a government-appointed committee in 2006 described among India’s most deprived lot — from the report: “While there is considerable variation in the conditions of Muslims across states, the Community exhibits deficits and deprivation in practically all dimensions of development” — despite majoritarian canards about them being a pampered lot among Indian minorities. The situation hasn’t changed in the 18 years since the report’s publication and its sundry recommendations.
As the long-winded Indian national elections unfold over the coming weeks, you will hear the hackneyed phrase “dance of democracy” and encounter images of donkeys carrying voting machines to remote corners of India as the world’s largest “democracy” gives its citizenry a chance to exercise their precious democratic right, no matter how isolated their residence. But the democracy charade couldn’t be farther from the truth. A recent Supreme Court verdict set into motion events that revealed corporatocracy at its obscene best. Through a legislative move in 2017, the BJP had ensured that anyone could donate to political parties with complete opacity. What thus resulted was Modi’s BJP cornering a lion’s share of donations as well as an informal legalisation of quid pro quo. Anytime a firm ran into trouble it could simply make a sufficient enough donation to the BJP and its sins would be washed away — the modern equivalent of Indulgences, if you will, and equally corrupt.
Awash with money and letting loose various arms of the state on the opposition, the BJP has ensured there will be no meaningful opposition to it in the national election. In some of the most egregious cases, prominent politicians have been hounded by many state apparatuses and coerced into relinquishing their parties for the BJP. Once they change their party, all their sins get washed away, like a magical laundromat of reputations. The Indian “dance of democracy” has less integrity than a striptease at a seedy Thai club.
While India has been amping up repression at home, its foreign policy is equally headless. Sample this: India has been participating in the US-led Quad group — whose aim is to counter China — while simultaneously being part of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as well as the BRICS. To break it down: India is simultaneously part of a grouping whose express aim is to advance Western hegemony as well as a group that purports to work towards multipolarity. Talk about muddled thinking. Drunk drivers have better clarity of thought.
New Delhi has a litany of acts that should qualify it as the Trojan Horse of the Global South. However, among those acts, the most deplorable has been its facilitation of the Gaza genocide with arms and labour exports and its egregious voting at the UN. Contrasted with other Global South countries like South Africa (which has dragged Israel to the International Court of Justice on a genocide charge) and Nicaragua (which has taken Germany to the ICJ for the facilitation of the said genocide), India’s stands vis a vis Israel seems even more egregious.
While eager Indians have been keen to flock to the shores of Tel Aviv to grab their blood-soaked shekels, one such Indian recently got a stark reality check.
Not realising Israel’s reputation as one of the most racist countries in the world, or perhaps thinking that Israeli racism is only reserved for the Arabs, or perhaps — and most likely — believing that the Indian Hindus’ shared animosity towards Muslims will allow him to mingle with the genocidal Israeli public with ease, the Indian visitor tried hard to get into a pub. However, he was refused entry at one pub after another despite clear vacancies at the watering holes.
As the Israeli economy struggles and tensions on its borders as well as in the occupied territories escalate, Indian workers can — unfortunately — expect even more overt forms of racism during their Israel assignments. The Indian government, however, couldn’t care less for their plight, as evidenced by its indifference to its dead and injured workers in Israel. It has bigger fish to fry, namely the Indian Muslims and the occupied Palestinians for the perverse pleasure of its voters.
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India's ruling class has always sucked up to the Anglo-American-Zionist Empire. I know them. They are proud of it. The top ones have British accents. The Bank of England was built on gold from India. One of them is the British PM. Ever wonder why?
India has dementia in forgetting the genocide committed against them from the British East India Company and more recently Anglo-American supremacist Winston Churchill.