Indian prime minister Nahendra Modi won a
resounding victory in national elections held this past
spring, with his coalition gaining a majority of the seats in
India’s lower house.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on
the other hand, faces the voters this coming Sept. 17,
following an inconclusive election last April, when he failed
to form a governing coalition.
The two have much in common ideologically. Both
men are nationalists and therefore political allies, as the
ties between their two countries grow.
Israel governs the overwhelmingly Muslim
Palestinian West Bank, while India has just abolished the
special status of Jammu and Kashmir state, its only
Muslim-majority entity. The disputed territory has sparked
wars between India and Pakistan.
Less than 30 years ago, the very thought of a
prominent Indian openly admiring Israel would have been
unthinkable.
India recognized Israel in 1950, but kept its
diplomatic relations restricted to a single consular office in
Mumbai. In 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to
recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with a PLO
office set up in Delhi.
All of this was due to the ruling Congress
Party’s left-wing secularism, which viewed Zionism as a form of
ethnic nationalism.
But things are different now, with the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power.
Since Modi became India’s leader five years
ago, Delhi’s diplomatic policies have shifted dramatically in
Israel’s favor.
Modi became the first Indian prime minister
to visit Israel. In July 2017 he and Netanyahu signed
cooperative deals on water, space technology, and agriculture.
But the biggest and most significant deals
have centered on defence. Israel’s specialization in high-tech
weaponry, from drones to guided missiles, have transformed the
Jewish state into a desirable international partner.
According to the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018 India accounted for
46 per cent of all Israeli weapons sales, not including small
arms. In 2018, Reuters reported that India buys around one
billion dollars in weapons from Israel every year.
And it’s not just a question of weaponry:
police and soldiers from around India have trained in Israel or
have been trained by Israeli soldiers in Delhi.
Ideological affinities fuel this partnership.
India’s Hindu nationalist right wing takes inspiration from
Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism. Both Modi and Netanyahu have
campaigned domestically with great success as opponents of
“Muslim extremism,” in the one case in Kashmir, in the other in
the Palestinian territories.
The BJP is the political arm of the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological and cultural crucible
of Hindu nationalism.
Their defining text is Vinayak Damodar
Savarkar’s 1923 book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, which defines
the Indian nation as necessarily belonging to a “Hindu race.”
Savarkar saw a parallel in the Jewish story,
and expressed his support for Zionism, writing that “if the
Zionists’ dreams are ever realized” it would “gladden us almost
as much as our Jewish friends.”
When Netanyahu greeted Modi in 2017, he
proclaimed that the relationship between India and Israel is “so
natural that we could ask what took so long for to blossom.”
Given the perceived threat both face from
their immediate neighbours, that is bound to grow.
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