Shalom Modi: India and Israel look to deepen ties following victory of the Hindu right

[Jefferson23]

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the party of the Hindu Right – has won the Indian election with a decisive mandate. The victory itself has everything to do with domestic policy, notably the growth-led strategy by the Congress government that drove inequality upwards and that fostered corruption in business life. The BJP began its career as a party with a programmatic hatred of minorities – mainly the 120 million Indian Muslims – but has since smartly camouflaged that odium behind the rhetoric of good governance. But the anti-minority sentiment is not absent; it was simply well-handled, with the BJP’s leader, Narendra Modi, winking toward that part of his party’s beliefs but speaking fulsomely about the need for economic growth. It is the latter that catapulted his party to its major victory.

The BJP is the electoral heir to a long-tradition of Hindu nationalism that has roots in the 19th century and was consolidated in the 20th century around the ideology of Hindutva (Hinduness). Hindutva intellectuals looked around the planet for examples of other religious nationalisms for inspiration, and, naturally, a few eyes settled on Israel after its defeat of the Arab armies in 1967. In Organiser, the periodical of the RSS – the brain center of the Hindutva movement – Chitragupta asked in 1967 why the Israelis and the Hindus fared better in their struggle against the Arabs and the Pakistanis respectively. He had in mind India’s defeat of the Pakistani armies in the 1965 war, as well as Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six Day War. The problem, Chitragupta argued, is not in armaments but in the civilizational advantages enjoyed by Hindus and Jews. “The Islamic world is not destitute of genius, or ability,” he wrote, “but it has not been given a dog’s chance because it is under the benumbing control of a rigid theology and petrified dogma.”

This dismissal of Islam came alongside the combined praise of Judaism and Hinduism for “their devotion to the pursuit of truth without blinders.” It is this kind of civilizational connection that roots Hindutva’s very strong pro-Israeli sentiment. Hindutva and Zionism shared a muscular nationalism that developed – because of their context – a programmatic apathy to Islam and Muslims.

Namaste Sharon

In 2003, I wrote a book called Namaste Sharon – it was about the visit of Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to India. Sharon was the first Israeli leader to come to India. Between 1948 and 1991, India did not have diplomatic ties with Israel. It placed itself firmly in the Palestinian camp. When the Congress government decided to abandon its national development economic policies in 1991, it jettisoned large parts of its non-aligned foreign policy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Third World project drew elites across the world to seek a new rapprochement with the United States. Congress leaders quite openly said to me that the highway to Washington, DC, would best go through Tel Aviv. Indeed, that was the reason for India’s shift of policy in 1991. It took a decade to cement ties, and then in 2003, Ariel Sharon walked to New Delhi on the new bridge that the two countries had built.

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/05/shalom-following-victory.html