Why Zionism rules the hearts of Hindutva acolytes

The far right in India has always supported Israel. Decades of hate strengthen the Modi-Netanyahu bear hugs, giving licence to dangerous vitriol.

Management committee members of the Shri Durgiana Mandir burn effigies and Palestine flags at a protest in Amritsar on November 3. | Photo Credit: PTI

On November 12, the lives of 39 premature babies at Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, hung in the balance—the hospital’s electricity, oxygen and water were all running out. By the time help arrived a week later, eight of the babies had died.

On the same day, author and curator Ranjit Hoskote resigned from the Finding Committee for the upcoming edition of Documenta, an arts festival held annually in Kassel, Germany. He had been accused of anti-Semitism for having signed a statement circulated by the India chapter of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2019, one which was also signed by artists and activists such as Anand Patwardhan, Ram Rahman, and Vivan Sundaram. Hoskote later said he did not agree with the BDS position.

Over the years, Israel has to a large degree succeeded in criminalising BDS, a Palestinian-led global movement that demands the international community sanction the country and boycott its goods as a mark of protest. Hoskote is just one of a legion of artists, academics, students, and employees across nations who have had to pay for expressing any sympathy for the Palestinian people, a sympathy that is closely monitored and labelled as “hate against Jews”.

The 2019 event that the BDS movement was protesting was one where BJP member and then-Rajya Sabha MP Subramaniam Swamy was to take the stage at Mumbai University’s Convocation Hall with Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Organised by the Consulate General of Israel and the Indo-Israel Friendship Association, the invitation advertised a talk titled “Leaders’ Ideas of Nations in the Context of Zionism & Hindutva”. The poster made clear who the “leaders” were—Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism. Equating Herzl and Savarkar was meant to promote the much-desired alliance between Zionism and Hindutva.

Gaudi Taub (left), a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then-BJP Rajya Sabha MP Subramaniam Swamy speak during the talk “Leaders’ Ideas of Nations in the Context of Zionism & Hindutva” at the University of Mumbai on August 26, 2019. | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

The same fear and loathing

Many thinkers have pointed at the irony inherent in comparing Savarkar and Herzl, considering that the former was a known admirer of Hitler and openly expressed admiration for the Nazi ideology and methods. In a 1938 speech Savarkar said, “Who are we to dictate to Germany, Japan or Russia or Italy to choose a particular form of policy of government simply because we woo it out of academical attraction? Surely Hitler knows better than Pandit Nehru does what suits Germany best?” That ringing defence of Hitler, however, tells only half the story.

By the 1920s, the ideas that Herzl put forward in his 1896 book The Jewish State had become popular. With the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the British government had made public its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. Savarkar said he favoured such a solution: “If the Zionists’ dreams are ever realised—if Palestine becomes a Jewish state—it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.”

In 1956, Savarkar told the Hindu Mahasabha, “If tomorrow there breaks out a war between Pakistan and Bharat, almost all Muslims will be arrayed on the side of Pakistan in opposition to us, and their enemy Israel will be our only friend. Therefore, I say that Bharat should give unequivocal recognition to Israel.”

Savarkar had coined the term “Hindutva” in 1922. He saw in Zionism an ethnonationalist cousin whose ideology was built on foundations he found familiar: notions of race supremacy, the politicisation of religion, and the idea that a nation can be built on one identity. Zionism once had several strands—political, practical, revisionist, religious, et al—but over time, these sub-groups all agreed that Israel must use all its force to ensure that Jews remain a majority in the country. Zionists often employed Islamophobia to justify Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pays tribute to V.D. Savarkar in New Delhi on May 28, 2023. | Photo Credit: PTI

Hindutva acolytes, too, have used a similar playbook. M.S. Golwalkar was the second Sarsanghchalak of the RSS. He wrote that “rehabitating [sic] Palestine with its ancient population of the Jews” would “revitalise the practically dead Hebrew National Life”. Even more famously, he said, “India is pre-eminently a Hindu nation, Hindusthan. The non-Hindu people in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, not even the citizen’s rights.”

Israel sets the example

Hate speech has exacerbated the violence Indian Muslims suffer, but it was the Citizenship (Amendment) Act that seemed to legitimise such discrimination. Passed by Parliament in December 2019, the CAA cleared the pathway to Indian citizenship for religious minorities who had been persecuted in three neighbouring Muslim-majority countries—Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Accused of favouring Hindus, the legislation was reminiscent of Israel’s Law of Return which allowed Jews from anywhere in the world to settle in Israel and seek citizenship. Dana Kursh, Consul General of Israel for South India, said in January 2020, “India, as a sovereign nation, has the right to be enacting the CAA. It is not for the European Parliament to decide what India should or not do.” Israel was more than an ally; it was also an example.

For the Sangh Parivar, Israel has consistently set precedents. In January 2016, Mohan Bhagwat cited the example of Israel, “a small nation” that had “stood tall” and won six wars in 30 years. India, the RSS chief told a gathering in Maharashtra, should take Israel’s lead: “The world will not even take note of wisdom if it is coming from a weak nation.” India, it has been argued, tried to emulate Israel with the Balakot airstrike in 2019, a bombing raid where Israeli-made Rafael Spice-2000 “smart bombs” were reportedly used against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has formalised and bolstered India’s defence procurement from Israel—for instance, weapon imports rose by 175 per cent between 2015 and 2019—but what glues this relationship more tightly are the parallels one can draw between Hindutva and Zionism, both dominant ideologies that fashion the attitudes and policies of governments in India and Israel, respectively. Hindutva and Zionism both claim to want to protect a superior age-old civilisation from harm and corruption. They are each vitalised by the threat of a common Muslim enemy. In August 2019, Subramaniam Swamy said at the University of Mumbai, “Zion is today under attack from Islamic extremists, and therefore both of us should come together to fight the Islamic terror forces.” The events of October 7 only redoubled the support India’s far right put on offer.

This revolution will be televised

In recent weeks, several Indian social media accounts have made viral fake stories of atrocities carried out by Palestinians and Hamas. As The Guardian makes clear, these accounts have used the Israel-Hamas conflict “to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power.” Anshul Saxena, for instance, captioned a video of Hamas militants with the line “Israel is under attack like 26/11 Mumbai attack in India.” His post was shared over 6,000 times on X (formerly Twitter). Diksha Choudhary, another X user, used the hashtag “#IStandWithIsrael” to say, “There is danger in India also, stones are being thrown by Muslims on every festival, but Hindus are still sleeping.”

Interestingly, Israel’s Ambassador to India, Naor Gilon, retweeted a post about a pro-Israel rally that the Hindu Forum Canada had organised in Toronto with a message that said, “Brotherhood has no borders. #Hindus and #Jews join forces in Canada against #Terror and in support of #Israel.” Gilon, who recently thanked India for its “100 per cent support”, has targeted Indian publications and intellectuals who stand against Israel’s repressive policies. He said that by interviewing Moussa Abu Marzouk, head of Hamas’ international relations office, Frontline gave stage to “an arch-terrorist from #HamasISIS”. It was again Gilon who wrote to C. Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor of O.P. Jindal Global University, protesting a November 1 lecture delivered by writer and retired Delhi University professor Achin Vanaik on its Sonipat campus, titled “The History and Politics of the Palestinian Present”. Gilon alleged the event “delegitimised the state of Israel”.

Some 470 intellectuals and academics—Nandini Sundar, Maya John, Apoorvanand, Vanaik, and others—recently signed a statement that condemned Gilon for his meddling: “We object to the Israeli Ambassador’s interference with academic freedom on Indian campuses. This disrespects the competence of Indian scholars to analyse historical and political situations for themselves. Defending the right to life and dignity of Palestinians, or pointing out the links between Zionism and Hindutva as supremacist ideologies, is not equivalent to antisemitism.” Right-leaning news channels, however, have amplified Gilon’s activism.

Israel’s Ambassador to India Naor Gilon meets Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut in New Delhi on October 25. | Photo Credit: TWITTER

Vanaik, who also signed the same BDS petition as Hoskote in 2019, was criticised by the Times Now channel for targeting “Hindu culture, Hinduism, Hindutva, RSS, BJP and [the] Indian Army”. The same channel also led a campaign against Sudhanva Deshpande. In a lecture he gave at IIT-Bombay on November 6, the theatre director and actor spoke of his 2015 meeting with Zakaria Zubeidi, former leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a coalition of armed Palestinian groups in the West Bank. The channel interviewed an IIT-B student who said Deshpande tried to “influence” the audience by saying Zubeidi, a reformed militant who had founded the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp, was a “legend”.

Republic TV’s editor-in-chief Arnab Goswami devoted much of one prime-time debate to Frontline’s interview with Marzouk. He said, “The same radical jihadist Islamist terrorist thinking that Israel is a victim of, we are a victim of as well […] Israel is fighting this war on behalf of all of us.”

Such anchors and channels are driving home a suggestion—that an attack on Israel is also an attack on India. This idea took root on social media in May 2021, when Israel was bombing Gaza in retaliation for rockets Hamas fired after Israeli forces stormed the al-Aqsa mosque. Twitter user Alakh Alok Srivastava had then posted, “What is happening with #Israel today, will happen with EVERY country in future which refuses to surrender before Radical Islamic Terrorism! India has suffered it a lot & that’s why we must #StandWithIsrael.”

Over the last decade, Israel has become a convenient lodestar and co-traveller in the Indian ecosystem of hate.

Friends in need

Several Hindutva supporters on X have added photos of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu to posts that express solidarity with Israel. The Modi-Bibi friendship is, of course, the stuff of legend. Recent events help gauge its depth. Narendra Modi was one of the first leaders to condemn the “terrorist strikes” of October 7. When the Israeli Prime Minister called Modi to give him an update, he was again assured that India stood in solidarity with Israel. Since they first met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2014, the two have stayed in close touch.

The affinity Netanyahu feels for Modi seems to exceed their common authoritarian impulse. When Modi became the first sitting Indian Prime Minister to visit Israel in July 2017, Netanyahu broke protocol to be by his side for almost the entire trip. He was with Modi when he paid homage at the grave of Zionist leader Theodor Herzl. Netanyahu also took Modi to meet Moshe Holtzberg, the boy whose parents were killed at Chabad House in the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai. With four Israelis amongst the 175 dead, the events of November 26, 2008, brought the nations closer.

On July 5, 2017, the second day of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel, he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were in Jerusalem to meet Moshe Holtzberg, an 11-year-old boy who was orphaned during the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai.  | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

India is reported to have bought all sorts of military hardware from Israel in the wake of 26/11—night goggles, surveillance and armed drones, 130mm M-46 guns—but Modi took this already lucrative relationship further. Four months after his visit, Israel and India military conducted joint military exercises for the first time as part of Israel’s biennial Blue Flag drill. A 45-member Indian contingent, one that included 16 Garud Commandos, participated in counter-terrorism training exercises with Israeli special forces. Enough had happened for Modi to also break protocol and receive Netanyahu and Moshe Holztberg in January 2018.

Evidence of the sometimes unsavoury nature of the “strategic partnership” became public when news of the Pegasus Project broke in 2021. The Modi government was accused of having bought Israeli-made spyware to infect the phones of opponents, rights activists, and journalists. The NSO Group, the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, is technically not a state actor, but as journalist Azad Essa notes in his 2022 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, “The NSO and Pegasus aren’t separate from the Israeli state. They are the state. Pegasus is not the only weapon Israel exports to illiberal nations, dictators and authoritarians. This is its business model. This is the military-industrial state”. When it comes to India, Essa warned, the nexus was “only getting started”.

Highlights

• Savarkar saw Zionism as aligning with his own ethnonationalist ideology, rooted in ideas of racial supremacy, religious politicisation, and building a nation on a singular identity.
• The Sangh Parivar has repeatedly referenced Israel as a model, citing its strength and military prowess. This admiration has drawn comparisons to the use of anti-Zionism as a gateway to anti-Semitism.
• Some NRI groups seek to portray any criticism of Hindutva as an attack on Hinduism itself, similar to the way anti-Zionism can be conflated with anti-Semitism. This tactic aims to silence dissent and shield Hindutva ideology from scrutiny.

Moving on from Nehru

Modi has, in part, been able to build on his relationship with Netanyahu by turning his back on Palestine. It took the External Affairs Ministry a few days after October 7 to mention India’s historic commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. The reticence was a departure. Earlier Indian governments have had a more balanced stance. While the P.V. Narasimha Rao government established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, Manmohan Singh’s UPA government was able to broker the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal only after it received commendations from the powerful Israel lobby. Nevertheless, both Prime Ministers stayed faithful to Muslim electorates by remaining “friends” of Palestine.

Modi, unsurprisingly, is free of such concerns. His unofficial dismissal of Palestine squarely challenges the views of India’s founding fathers—Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi wrote in 1938, “My sympathies are all with the Jews. But my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct.” For Nehru, Palestine became a means to express solidarity with anti-colonial movements of the world. In 1936, he said in Allahabad, “In a world view, this problem of Palestine has relatively little importance […] And yet it has an intrinsic importance. It throws a light on the working of imperialism we ourselves suffer.”

Nehru’s advocacy for the Palestinian cause did not stop him from writing to David Ben Gurion when India was at war with China in 1962. The Israeli Prime Minister sent weapons as help. India, writes Essa, also secretly traded in arms with Israel during its two wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. Under Indira Gandhi, India might have become the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1974, but Indira also authorised cooperation between RAW and Mossad. India’s recent abstention from a UN vote on October 27 calling for a humanitarian truce in Gaza came in the face of this history. It seems clear that in India’s foreign policy calculations, its partnership with Israel in the fields of defence, agriculture, technology, and water far outweigh its legacy as a leader of the deeply anti-colonial Non-Aligned Movement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries his hand on a traditional charkha (spinning wheel) as his wife Sara Netanyahu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi look on during their visit to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad on January 17, 2018. | Photo Credit: PTI

When three is company

Rajiv Gandhi understood that a door to Washington opens in Tel Aviv—he met Shimon Peres on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly meeting in 1985—but the relationship between the two nations really blossomed when Atal Behari Vajpayee became Prime Minister. Israel refused to condemn India’s nuclear tests in 1998. When Vajpayee needed help during the Kargil War, Israel helped with satellite imagery and ammunition drones. Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani became the first Indian minister to visit Israel in 2000, and in 2003, Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli Prime Minister to visit India. In May that year, National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra proposed that the US, India, and Israel form a trilateral alliance to fight terror. “Stronger India-US relations and India-Israel relations have a natural logic,” Mishra said.

India began gravitating toward the US and Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, but ties strengthened after 9/11. The Biden government’s support for the India-Israel alliance can be measured by trade and security pacts that have resulted from I2U2, a group that India, Israel, the US, and the UAE formed in July 2022. Six months after the inception of I2U2, or “West Asia Quad” as it is sometimes known, the Adani Group acquired the strategic Israeli port of Haifa for $1.2 billion. Appearing alongside Gautam Adani on January 31, Netanyahu said, “I think this is an enormous milestone. During the First World War, it was the brave Indian soldiers who helped liberate the city of Haifa, and today it is robust Indian investors who are helping liberate the port of Haifa.”

Adani Group chairman Gautam Adani and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Port of Haifa on January 31. | Photo Credit: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg

The Indian diaspora in the US, in groups such as the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) and the Hindu Swayamsevak Singh (the international arm of the RSS), look to American Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and AIPAC for both inspiration and help. According to a report in Jewish Currents, “These Jewish groups have trained a generation of Hindu lobbyists and advocates, offering strategies at joint summits and providing a steady stream of informal advice.” The report further stresses that the AJC and AIPAC have facilitated meetings between delegations of Indian Americans with Israeli government and military agents.

The Jewish Currents report also suggests that groups like the HAF have borrowed from their Israeli counterparts the logic of “hurt”. Similar to how anti-Zionism is converted into anti-Semitism, these NRI groups invest energies to prove that any criticism of Hindutva is an attack on Hinduism. Some of them got together at Rutgers to arrive at a definition of “Hinduphobia”: “A set of antagonistic, destructive, and derogatory attitudes and behaviours towards Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism) and Hindus that may manifest as prejudice, fear, or hatred.” Hinduphobic speech covers a gamut—everything from slurs like “cow-piss drinker” and “dothead” to criticisms of Modi and the BJP.

The idea of Hinduphobia rages on the Internet. Several Hindutva activists on X, for instance, pitch the idea that Hindus, like Jews, are in peril. They offer to fight in Israel against Palestinian Arabs, offers that are often insultingly rejected by hard-right Zionists. This does not seem to deter the Indian right wing. Hindutva works best when it can convince Hindus they are in danger, and identifying with Zionists against a common enemy, who is only incidentally Muslim, helps it bolster its case.