India and the Moral Question of Palestine

Partho Sarothi Ray

News abounds from India of police repression on protesters expressing solidarity for Palestine and opposition to the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. From recent manhandling and arrests of activists protesting in front of the Israeli embassy and at JantarMantar in New Delhi, to repression on protesters in Frazer Town in Bengaluru to the banning of Palestine flags and pro-Palestine posters in Muharram processions in Srinagar in Kashmir, the suppression of solidarity with Palestine seems to be an India-wide phenomenon. Earlier, in 2024, at least seven states in India, ruled both by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress and their allies, had filed 17 FIRs against 51 people under sections of the IPC, BNS, and UAPA for organising Palestine solidarity demonstrations or expressing support for Palestine on social media. This level of state repression and silencing of voices on an issue which involves foreign states, and does not appear to have a direct bearing on the situation in India, is unprecedented. This, together with India’s ambivalent positions in multiple UN General Assembly resolutions on the Israeli genocide in Gaza while the global South has been united in opposing it, and the virulent pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian content flooding social media by pro-Hindutva Indian accounts is raising a serious question in the minds of the world’s people about India’s and Indians’ stand on Palestine.

But this was not always like this. Besides the well-known historical stand of India in support of the Palestinian cause, it is important to remember today that Palestine was an important moral question in front of the leaders and thinkers who led India’s national struggle against the British Empire. And they took a stand in support of the Palestinian people based on morality, humanism, and the international solidarity between oppressed peoples, even though many of them also sympathised with the aspirations of the Jewish people.

One of the first persons to express his support for the right of the Arabs to self-determination was Kazi Nazrul Islam, the famous “rebel poet” and one of the foremost proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity in India. Nazrul had joined the British Indian Army during the 1st World War and while being posted in Karachi, had been exposed to the happenings in West Asia, where the Turkish Ottoman Empire was collapsing and the British were establishing their own rule in Palestine, while the Arab inhabitants aspired for freedom and self-determination. Nazrul expressed his support for the freedom of the Arabs from both British and Ottoman rule, and even opposed the Khilafat movement in India as it demanded the reestablishment of the rule of the Ottoman Sultan as the Khalif. It was during the 1st World War that the British government, through the “Balfour Declaration” in November 1917, announced its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority of Jewish population. This led to the Zionist project of the settlement of European Jews in Palestine under the British Mandate and the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948.

Another person who expressed a deeply humanistic and, in hindsight, a prophetic view of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict was Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath deeply sympathised with the Jewish people, and even expressed his admiration for the constructive and egalitarian aspects of the Zionist project. However, he also recognised that Zionism was deeply influenced by European nationalism. In his discussions with the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, he had mentioned that the Jewish people, who bore a rich heritage of world humanism and spiritualism, in their efforts towards self-determination and organising themselves in one place (i.e., Palestine), were in danger of trapping themselves into Western sectarian nationalism and conscienceless technocracy. This sounds prophetic today. Furthermore, he clearly recognised that the Zionist project in Palestine could only succeed if it extended a hand of cooperation to the Palestinian Arabs. In an interview given to the Jewish Standard in November 1930, Rabindranath said, “The Palestine problem cannot be solved in London by any negotiations between the British government and the Zionist leaders. The success of Zionism depends entirely upon Arab –Jewish cooperation. This can be obtained in Palestine only by means of a direct understanding between the Arabs and the Jews. If the Zionist leadership will insist on separating Jewish political and economic interests in Palestine from those of the Arabs, ugly eruptions will occur in the holy land”. In Rabindranath’s imagination, the only peaceful future for the Holy Land was an Arab-Jewish “Palestine Commonwealth”, where Arabs and Jews would live side by side, and both would be Palestinian. Unfortunately, with the Zionist leaders deciding to dominate and expel the Arabs from Palestine, the history of the Holy Land ultimately became that of the “ugly eruptions” that the world is witnessing today.

The political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle in India had a similarly moral and humanistic view of the Palestinian situation. Gandhi, who also sympathised with the plight of the Jews, was clear in opposing the imposition of the Jews on Arabs in Palestine as a colonial project. In an article published in the “Harijan” in 1938, Gandhi wrote, “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.” Similar to Tagore, Gandhi’s advice to the Jews was, “And now a word to the Jews in Palestine. I have no doubt that they are going about it in the wrong way. The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. They should seek to convert the Arab heart.”

Jawaharlal Nehru, in an essay published in 1933 that is a part of the “Glimpses of World History,” clearly identified the Palestine problem as a creation of British colonialism and the Zionist project of Israel as a tool of imperialism in Asia. He wrote, “The story of Palestine ever since has been one of conflict between Arabs and Jews, with the British government siding with one or the other as occasion demanded, but generally supporting the Jews. The country has been treated as a British colony with no self-government. The Arabs, supported by the Christians and other non-Jewish peoples, have demanded self-determination and complete freedom…. As Jewish immigrants have poured in, their fear and anger have increased. They have declared that Zionism had been an accomplice of British imperialism. Zionist leaders had constantly urged that a strong Jewish national home would be to the English in guarding the road to India, just because it was a counteracting force to Arab national aspirations. How India crops up in odd places!”

Guided by this principled stand of the leaders of the national movement, and recognising the continuity of colonialism in the emergence of the state of Israel, independent India took a strong stand in favour of the freedom of the Palestinian people. In 1947, India voted in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) against the plan to partition Palestine, in 1949, voted against Israel’s admission to the UN, and in 1975, voted for the UNGA resolution that categorised Zionism as racism. India was also among the first countries to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974 and was also one of the first countries to recognise the state of Palestine in 1988. There were close ties of the Indian government with the PLO and popular support for the struggle of the Palestinians, especially among the Left parties, as a major anti-colonial struggle for freedom and self-determination.

Things started changing from 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Narasimha Rao-led Congress government at the centre taking a distinct pro-American stand. The sense in New Delhi was that the way to win the hearts in Washington, D.C was through Tel Aviv. India voted in 1991 to repeal the UNGA Resolution that categorised Zionism as racism and formally established diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992. From then onwards, close governmental and trade ties grew with Israel, which were accelerated with the coming of the first NDA government led by AtalBihari Vajpayee to power in 1998. These ties were underscored by a strong “security” cooperation between Israel and India, which closely tied in with the America-led so-called “war on terror” or what was seen both in Indian and Israeli government circles as “Islamic terrorism”.

These ties took a quantum leap with the coming to power of the Modi government in 2014, and the India-Israel relationship has now taken a distinct ideological basis. Besides the strong security ties, purchase of weapons and malware such as Pegasus from Israel, which was purportedly deployed by the Indian government against domestic critics and opponents, and the business ventures of the Indian government’s favourite industrialist, Gautam Adani, in Israel, what underscores these ties are the common bonds between the ideologies of Zionism and Hindutvawad. Because, for the Hindutva ecosystem, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the dream model of how they would want to treat the Muslim minority in India. It is a paradox that Hinduvtawadis, who have historically expressed their admiration for Nazism and its treatment of what it considers as “racial minorities” such as Jews, are also ardent admirers of Zionism. This is because Hindutvawad, Zionism, and Nazism all share the common ideological basis of ethno-nationalism, racial superiority, and a narrative of historical victimhood. This makes them find another ethnic group to victimise, which has been Jews in the case of Nazism, Palestinian Arabs in the case of Zionism, and Indian Muslims in the case of Hindutva. Therefore, whereas RSS leader “Guru” Golwalkar described Germany’s “purging the country of the Semitic races–the Jews” as the highest manifestation of race pride, another Hindutva ideologue “Veer” Savarkar wrote in the 1920s that “If the Zionists’ dreams are ever realised–if Palestine becomes a Jewish state–it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” Therefore, in contrast to the nationalist and communist streams which led the anti-colonial struggle in India, the Hindutvawadi leadership never recognised the colonial nature of the Zionist project in Palestine and instead commended it as another ethno-nationalist project like “Hindu Rashtra”.

Starting with a shared ideology of ethno-nationalism, the common bond that ties Zionism and Hindutva today is clearly Islamophobia. The Hindutva supporters in India who have flooded social media with messages extolling Israel clearly think that Israel’s legal treatment of Palestinians in Israel as second-class citizens, and in the occupied territories as less than human, is the way Muslims should be treated in India. This has made them not only completely blind to the moral depravity of a genocide currently happening around Gaza, but they are even cheering it on. With the BJP being in power, this has created the social environment in which people are not seeing in India the large scale and continuous street protests against the genocide in Gaza being witnessed all over the world, people are not seeing the massive student protests in the universities which have shaken the USA and Europe and people are not seeing India participating at the government level in the global South initiatives such as the Hague Group, which are condemning Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Instead, here people are witnessing the repression and silencing of whatever protests that are taking place. While some actions, such as the Mumbai dock workers’ refusal in 2024 to load ships carrying weapons destined for Israel provide a golden lining around this cloud, India as a country should learn from the leaders and thinkers of its own anti-colonial struggle to reset its moral compass on the question of Palestine.

[This piece is dedicated to my friend Biswajit (Madhu) Roy, journalist par excellence and a democrat in the real sense of the term, who passed away recently and whom I could not bid farewell to. Biswajit and I worked together closely, with other colleagues, for the rejuvenation of Frontier and other projects. Biswajit spent his last few months in Santiniketan, researching and writing on Rabindranath Tagore’s valuable thoughts on nationalism, including the question of Palestine. Partho Sarothi Ray is a scientist and democratic rights activist.]

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 8, Aug 17 - 23, 2025