Bulldozers and Brotherhood

In 1983, Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi discovered she had a new Palestinian sibling, as Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, declared her his sister during a diplomatic visit to New Delhi. In 2021, by contrast, the current Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi found he had Israeli relatives, as Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu described his friendship with Modi as a “marriage made in heaven.” The shifting familiar relationships of Indian premiers mirrors a broader transformation in India’s overall outlook towards Palestine. While India was once the first non-Arab nation to recognize a State of Palestine in 1988, its government now states that it “[stands] in solidarity with Israel” during the Israeli genocide in Gaza and is exporting missiles and killer drones for the IDF’s use there. This change is not confined to the state: Indian actors, journalists, religious leaders, and countless others have lined up to cheer the mass slaughter. Thousands of Indian workers volunteered to replace Palestinian guest workers in Israel, ensuring that the Israeli economy continues running smoothly during the war. Why has a nation with a history of anti-colonial struggle and solidarity with Palestine chosen to fall so far from the days when it stood up for the rights of the oppressed?

India’s support for Israel is inextricably bound up with the rise of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, to dominance in the past thirty years. In many ways, the core tenets of Hindutva and Zionism mirror each other. Succinctly stated, Hindutva holds that the Hindus of India form a coherent ethnic “nation,” and that the land of India deserves to be “for” the Hindus. Hindutva has always seen itself as following in the footsteps of Zionist conceptions of ethno-religious nationalism; V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva’s most notable theorist, said, “No people in the world can more justly claim to get recognized as a racial unit than the Hindus and perhaps the Jews.” Further, Savarkar believed that the establishment of Israel would be a boon for the Hindu nationalist project, saying that “if Palestine becomes a Jewish state – it will gladden us…”

But in reality, India and Palestine are kaleidoscopes of religious diversity; India has never been a Hindu nation alone, and neither has Palestine ever been a nation only for Jews. India contains the world’s third-largest Muslim population, including the occupied Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, and sizable groups of adherents to every other major religion. Meanwhile, even excluding those forced to flee to refugee camps elsewhere, historic Palestine contains millions of Palestinians who contradict Zionism’s vision for the land by their very existence. As long as these people continue to exist, Hindutva and Zionism’s visions — of India for Hindus and Palestine for Jews — cannot ever come to fruition. Thus, Hindutva and Zionism are not descriptions of India and Palestine as they are, but rather visions of cleansed nations in which minorities are no longer present.

While Hindutva dates back to the waning days of British colonialism in India, it has rapidly catapulted to power since the 1990s. The current prime minister Narendra Modi’s election in 2014 marked the ideology’s dominance in the Indian political landscape, and he has begun to transform India’s foreign policy to match. The country’s commitment to the Third World solidarity of colonized peoples has gradually shifted to become a union of genocidaires that seek to eliminate those that do not fit into the national project. India is now the largest purchaser of Israeli weapons in the world, and even collaborates with Israel on the production of Elbit drones and AI targeting systems.

Nor is their cooperation limited to simply arms — tactics also flow freely between New Delhi and Tel Aviv. Both regularly demolish houses and entire villages with the flimsy justification that they are “illegal” as part of their longer-term plan of displacement, even using the same brand of bulldozer. In June 2024, an Indian far-right commentator called for the Indian state to enact what he described as the “Israel Model” upon the Indian-occupied Muslim-majority region of Kashmir. In this “Israel Model," India would construct settlements patterned on those in the West Bank throughout the Kashmir Valley in an attempt to ultimately ethnically cleanse the region and suppress dissent.

The connections are clear: India and Israel work hand in hand to oppress and commit genocide. While their conjunction is powerful, it also means that a blow struck against Hindutva is a blow against Zionism, and vice versa. When we resist tendrils of the Israeli war machine like Elbit, that resistance means that those drones will never surveil people in Kashmir. Likewise, defeating Hindutva politics in India means that a major pillar of foreign support to Israel falls. The fight for justice in both South Asia and Palestine will not be over until both are free.