‘Another IDF with Indian volunteers’: Why India is actively participating in the Gaza genocide
‘Another IDF with Indian volunteers’: Why India is actively participating in the Gaza genocide
India has been an active participant in Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault in Gaza.
Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev last Tuesday revealed a new route for goods bound for Israel as Yemen’s Ansarullah have turned the Red Sea waters perilous for the genocidal Zionist regime. Several ships carrying goods for the genocidal state now go to a port in Mundra in the West Indian state of Gujarat, from where they make their way to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) before being transported to the Zionist entity via a recently created land route that encompasses Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan before terminating in Israel.
The new route has been devised due to Ansrarullah’s principled anti-genocide stand, which has manifested in their attack on ships bound for Israeli ports. India’s stand is in stark contrast to Yemen’s. The Hindu supremacist government in India has grown ever closer to its Jewish supremacist counterparts in Israel over the past ten years that it has been in power.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rabid anti-minorities government at the helm appears to be doing everything it can to cushion the blow to the Zionists and help them continue their genocide in Gaza as long as they want. The Mundra port-Israel shipping route is just the latest in a long trend of pro-Israel moves that began soon after the Palestinian attack on October 7. Modi was one of the first heads of state to label the Gaza ghetto uprising as “terrorist attacks.” With the same swiftness, state governments led by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) started recruiting labourers to work in the Zionist state to make up for the labour shortfall following the ban on Palestinian workers from the pre-1948 Palestine territories. Thousands lined up for a chance to serve the genocidal state.
More importantly, India is directly contributing to the Gaza genocide by supplying the Zionist entity with drones. Elbit Systems — a Zionist state enterprise that manufactures 85 percent of Israel’s drones — in collaboration with Adani Defence and Aerospace (which is run by a dear friend of Modi’s), set up a joint enterprise for manufacturing its weapons of mass murder in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad in 2018. Fruits of that collaboration are Hermes 800 drones that are being transported to Israel as it rains terror on a helpless Gaza, where the death toll after more than four months of intense and indiscriminate bombardments now stands at over 30,000, more than 12,000 of whom are infants and children.
The Hindu supremacist regime ruling India since 2014 makes no bones about the ideology it adheres to and the direction in which it is taking the country. India is home to the world’s second-largest Muslim population as well as significant numbers of Christians, Sikhs, and numerous other minorities, all of whom have faced increased persecution at the hands of the state and armed Hindu paramilitary groups which enjoy tacit approval of the state.
India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman referred to the 2022 annual budget as the first of the “Amrit Kaal,” echoing Modi’s sentiments expressed months earlier in an Independence Day address. “Amrit Kaal” comes from Hindu mythology and can be loosely translated as the golden age where utopia reigns. Such pronouncements, despite millions being pushed into poverty due to extreme Covid-19 measures and sluggish employment numbers, speak of hubris typified by a narcissist Prime Minister with a penchant for making outlandish claims and displaying garish showmanship.
In an ostensibly secular nation, Modi has taken public religiosity to a whole new level. He inaugurated the new parliament building last May with a number of Hindu saints and seers in a ceremony that could be mistaken for a temple opening. Last month, he did his best impression of a Hindu king of yore at the opening of a temple built after the destruction of a centuries-old historic mosque.
In 1992, long before Modi became a person of any significance, the prominent Indian psychologist Ashis Nandy, after interviewing him among others of his ilk to gain an understanding of the psyche of the Hindu nationalists, came away with the impression of having met a textbook fascist.
Nandy wrote: “It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits and motivational patterns contextualising the ideology.” He added: “I came out of the interview shaken and told [fellow interviewer Achyut] Yagnik that, for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.”
Nandy has been proven correct. In 2002, Modi, the then-Chief Minister of Gujarat, oversaw a state-sponsored pogrom against Muslims that resulted in the death of over 2,000 men, women, and children. He remains unrepentant. When questioned about it in 2007, he left a televised interview midway. While making a run for India’s premiership in 2014, he proudly proclaimed himself a “Hindu nationalist” and equated the deliberate killing of 2,000 Muslims to a puppy being run over by a car.
Since the time he has taken the highest seat of power in India, pogroms against minorities have accelerated considerably. Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and even Hindus from lower castes have been repeatedly targetted.
Like all fascists, and drawing a huge leaf from the Zionist playbook during their ethnic cleansing of 1948 Palestine, the Modi regime has been on a history-altering spree. His government has steadily changed the names of public places with erstwhile Muslim names in an attempt to efface the country of its Islamic past. And these attempts at changing history haven’t been limited to renaming. Historic sites have been razed. Just this month, a 600-year mosque in the historic capital city of New Delhi was brought down without prior notice after ridiculously being deemed as an illegal structure. The destruction of the mosque came close on the heels of the bulldozing of over 300 Muslim-owned homes and businesses in the only Muslim-majority district in the northern Indian state of Haryana.
In 2019, India’s consul general in New York was recorded advocating for the “Israeli model,” referring to the establishment of Hindu settlements in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state.
Hindu nationalists take perverse pleasure in shedding Muslim blood, as evidenced by the long history of anti-Muslim pogroms that flare up routinely all over the vast country. A 2014 study by Yale University showed that anti-Muslim riots often led to better poll numbers for the extremist Hindu parties. They exploit this grotesque poll tactic wholeheartedly, as the late American researcher Paul R. Brass laid out in his book, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. He wrote: “Riots, therefore, first and foremost persist because they are unacknowledged and illegitimate but well-known and accepted transgressions of routine political behavior in India.” There is no better way of winning elections in India than killing Muslims. Modi’s BJP has perfected this art.
Perversely, in their lust for Muslim blood, Indian Hindus — with precisely zero ties to the land or its people — are even willing to volunteer for the Israeli occupation forces to fight the Palestinian resistance. Last October, Israel’s Ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, remarked that he could even start an army with willing Indians. “Look at the social media of the [Israel] embassy. It’s amazing. I could have another IDF with [Indian] volunteers. Everyone is telling me I want to volunteer and I want to go and fight for Israel...this strong support is unprecedented for me.”
He added: “India and Israel, the closeness is something I cannot explain.” The explanation is rather simple: the visceral hatred of Muslims that a significant majority in both Indian and Israeli societies carry in their hearts.
Indeed, the sympathy for the genocidal Israelis isn’t just a top-down phenomenon. India is the most Zionist nation in the world, bar none. It has more sympathisers for the Zionists than the United States. A 2009 survey revealed that 58 percent of the respondents were sympathetic to the Zionist cause (56 percent in the US) — this was five years before Modi became the Prime Minister. These numbers would have seen a significant uptick since then. Israelis return the favor. They hold a higher favourability of India than any country in the world, including the United States — whose funds and protection at international fora enable their excesses against Palestinians and neighbouring states.
In another example of drawing from Hindu mythology, the adherents of Hindutva (Hindu supremacy) see India as “vishwaguru” (the teacher of the world). But if there’s one non-Middle Eastern state that’s showing what leadership in the face of genocide looks like, it is South Africa. Led by its incredibly eloquent and morally upstanding Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor and a bevy of exceptional lawyers, they dragged Israel to the International Court of Justice to draw a verdict of “plausible genocide” last month. Furthermore, they went to the court again for additional measures to stop the impending slaughter in Rafah, where the majority of displaced Palestinians have now gathered, but it didn’t prove successful. The court deemed the six provisional measures it asked Israel to implement in its January 26 ruling sufficient.
But the mere fact that South Africa is trying all legal measures it can to stop the genocide shows true leadership from its political brass. In contrast, India’s actions tell the rest of the Global South that they can’t rely on it to act as one of their own. It is working in cahoots with the West, pushing Western interests and narratives, most significantly, in aiding genocide in Gaza. Having honed their skills at killing innocent minorities in India, the Hindutva thugs want to go international. They carried out an assassination in Canada last year and had similar plans in the United States foiled.
The aspiring “vishwagurus” haven’t specified what lessons they intend to teach, but it is increasingly clear that the rest of the world is better off rejecting in its entirety its classes in aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide.
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Modi was linked to a pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat when he was chief minister or governor or something there. He's always been a fanatical Hindu nationalist, a real Crusader. I wouldn't be surprised if he was jealous of the Israelis for killing more Muslims than he has been able to do.
This is why I have strong reservations about Indian-Americans who have nothing but love for Modi, such as Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard.
Never did think much of Modi. BRICS would be wise to watch him like a hawk.