People's Democracy

Hindutva’s Special Relationship With Israel

The Impoverishment Of The Idea Of India

Sukumar

THE "old man" as he was fondly known among his disciples in the art and science of ethnic cleansing, put it best. David Ben-Gurion arrived in Palestine in 1906 and crowned a career in agitational politics and terrorism by hijacking another peoples’ land to establish a state that was putatively decreed in the scriptures. Reflecting on his tumultuous times in 1964, the founding prime minister of Israel repeatedly mentioned how disappointed he was that India had adopted a less than friendly attitude towards the Jewish state. "There are no Nazis in India, yet the Indian government shows no particular friendship for Israel", he said. Jawaharlal Nehru had wrought momentous changes in his country and rightly earned recognition as a role model for leaders of other emerging nations. But his indifference towards Israel remained an abiding disappointment. There was no evident explanation, except perhaps Nehru’s gullibility, and his willingness to be swayed by even the most feudal and dictatorial of Arab states.

Ben-Gurion set a durable template for Israel’s attitude towards the world. Any country that proved unfriendly towards Israel bore the stigma of anti-Semitism or at the very least, bore the onus of accounting for its freedom from Nazi elements. As a well-informed person, he could not have been unaware that India then had a political current, powerful in the margins, which made little secret of its admiration for the Nazis. For instance, a man revered as a "guru" within that tradition, expounded at length in 1939, on his ideas of a nation founded — as it must be — on racial pride. "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her (sic) purging the country of the semitic Races — the Jews," said M S Golwalkar: "Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Race and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by" (We, or Our Nationhood Defined, Bharat Publications I, 1939, page 35).

How ironic then, that the ideological heirs of this "guru" should be the authors of a special relationship with Israel. Odd again, that the day after the Israeli state terrorist apparatus commits the odious crime of assassinating Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, spiritual leader of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, Indian officials guided by heirs to the "guru" should engage their Israeli counterparts in a discussion on collaborative approaches to fighting terrorism.

Tapping the roots of Hindutva’s ideological inspiration would show how seemingly irreconcilable beliefs can coexist within the same worldview: the celebration of the Nazi persecution of Jews and an endorsement of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine. Here for example, is what the "guru" has to say about the Zionist mission of settling Palestine through terrorism and ethnic cleansing: "The Jews had maintained their race, religion, culture and language; all they wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality. The reconstruction of the Hebrew nation in Palestine is just an affirmation of the fact that Country, Race, Religion, Culture and Language must exist unavoidably together to form a full Nation idea" (Ibid, page 30).

Presumably then, the Arabs in Palestine were to endure the fate that had been specifically earmarked by the "guru" for Muslims and other religious minorities in India: "either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race". The Palestinians were to see their future in the "guru’s" prognosis of the status that the "foreign elements" in India would enjoy: "wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation; claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights" (Ibid, pages 47-8).

In comparison to the man called "guru" by the lunatic fringe that now threatens to engulf the nation, the man universally revered as the "Mahatma" had a very different perception. Where the "guru" had talked about the "rehabilitation" of the old Hebrew country of Palestine by the British, Mahatma Gandhi chided the Zionists for their imaginary construction of Palestine as a "geographical tract" and their effort to colonise Arab lands "under the shadow of the British gun". And the Mahatma’s summation of the rights and wrongs of the case was clear and unequivocal: "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. 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. The mandate (of the League of Nations for Palestine) has no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home" (Harijan, November 26, 1938).

As nation-states, India and Israel came into existence within nine months of each other. India represented a model of decolonisation and national liberation that was an inspiration to peoples all around the world, struggling to be free. Israel’s creation in contrast was part of the same cycle of colonialism, dispossession and ethnic cleansing that began in the 17th century. Bloodshed and partition marked the birth of both India and Israel. India decided after the trauma of its birth to work towards a secular society, where religious and ethnic differences would never be cause for political division and turmoil. Israel determined that its success lay in deepening ethnic divisions and continuing its policy of territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing into the indefinite future.

Today, the thuggish prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, announces his intention to see the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land sanctified by international law. The US concedes the case, rather incongruously dubbed a withdrawal plan from the Gaza, with obscene alacrity. As the Arab nations seethe in anger and Europe puts on record its reservations, India maintains an eloquent silence.

It was perhaps the darkest spot in independent India’s engagement with the world that the BJP-led government invited the brutish Sharon to visit just around the third anniversary of the latest phase in the Palestinian uprising for independence. That the man with a fifty-year record of large-scale and indiscriminate massacres—from Qibya in 1953 to Beirut in 1982 and Jenin in 2002 — should then have been invited to pay homage at Rajghat, was another sordid episode in the BJP’s abuse of all that has been valuable in the Indian freedom struggle.

Armed with a mandate from the US, Sharon has for long acted with impunity. The renewal of the mandate in the course of the recent meeting in Washington with US president Bush has come with a considerable enhancement of its scope. Sharon now enjoys untrammelled power to determine where the boundaries of the Jewish state should lie. The project he inaugurated two years back, of constructing a "separation wall" — more appropriately called "an apartheid wall" — around the state of Israel, was the first announcement of a land-grab unprecedented in modern history. And now, with the US having blessed his project to deal with the Palestinian people within the designated territory of Israel in any manner of his choosing, Sharon is preparing for a phase of ethnic cleansing that will make every great atrocity of the 20th century seem trivial in comparison.

That the BJP government has remained mute witness to all these crimes against humanity is sure signal that it has repudiated the entire legacy of India’s freedom struggle. With the assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantissi, the 58-year old pediatrician who succeeded Sheikh Yassin as leader of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza on April 17, the racist outlaw state of Israel has signalled that prior to evacuating its forces from Gaza, it intends to liquidate the entire leadership of Palestinian civil society. The purpose is very clearly, to foster a state of anarchy in Palestinian society, so that it is for the foreseeable future, locked in bloody internecine battles. But just as its effort, through the Oslo peace accords, to make the Palestinians accomplices in their own enslavement did not work; this strategic gambit by the racist outlaw state is doomed to certain failure.

Convinced of the righteousness of his cause, Ben-Gurion could not have perceived how fundamental differences in identity made any form of engagement between India and Israel impossible. It took a half-century for the devotees of the Nazis to ascend to a position of power and to begin an Indian special relationship with Israel. In seeking to foist the constructed identity of Hindutva on a nation of diverse faiths, plural beliefs and syncretist practices, followers of the "guru" have simply trampled upon all that is most essential about the Indian national identity. The grand idea of an inclusive nation that celebrates its differences stands impoverished, reduced in the construction of Hindutva, into a bigoted ethno-State of numbing homogeneity.