Of ties, old and new

New Indian Express

6 days ago

The book starts with how Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru drew a direct connection between the Indian freedom struggle and the Palestinian cause; independent India's foreign policy in the formative years was also based on this connection. In the next four decades, this relationship started changing—a notable example, according to the author, was the Indo-China war, when Nehru wrote to the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and sought help. The author claimed that Nehru took the decision of buying arms from Israel, but later stopped the purchase as it made Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, and Nehru's close partner in the Non-Aligned Movement 'unhappy'.
The Modi era
The author also traces an ideological connection between Hindutva and Zionism. In 2015, a year after the BJP government came to power, India abstained from voting against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council. Essa also writes about Savarkar's conception of the Hindu Rashtra being similar to the idea of the Jewish state. Modi, in fact, carries forward Atal Bihari Vajpayee's legacy in this regard. 'It was under Vajpayee's government that Delhi first hosted an Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon in 2003. So, Vajpayee was involved in taking the relationship with Israel forward. When Modi came to power in 2014, he wanted to build a Hindu state, in which Hindus would have more privileges than others. And Israel had already built that state, a so-called Jewish democratic state in which Jews had more rights than Palestinians, be they Muslims or Christians. Modi also sees Israel as a strong militaristic state, with an outsized influence over the world, and Modi wants to replicate that, too,' Essa tells TMS.