Why is Indian public opinion so indifferent to Gazans and Palestinians?

We must avoid the temptation to see Indian indifference to Palestine as usual "enemy's (Muslim) enemy (Jew) is my friend". Reason is the changed reality of Islamic world & India's equation with it

Why is there so little sympathy in India for the Gazans specifically and the Palestinians in general? Why are there no protests, barring some fleeting ones after Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s killing, mostly in zones with significant Shia populations — the Kashmir Valley, and Lucknow?

No major political party — not even the Congress or even others who rely on the Muslim vote such as the Samajwadi Party or the Trinamool Congress — has spoken in anger, forget organising a protest. Some Left intellectual groups did hold a tiny solidarity meeting for Palestinians at Jantar Mantar earlier this week. But it was so small that I wouldn’t even call it a picture postcard protest. It was tinier than the postage stamp.

The “secular” parties that spoke out initially retreated into their shells shortly thereafter, confused and I’d suspect more than a bit wary, given what looks like the overwhelming pro-Israel mood among the majority in India.

The Congress waffled, as it often does, when it said something on X first, then others disowned this and followed with something more diplomatically nuanced. Only Priyanka Gandhi spoke in outrage. She also has to contest elections in Wayanad, where Muslims make up more than 40 per cent of the voters.

We can understand the wariness of the Opposition. They all want the Muslim vote, but wou­l­dn’t dare alienate the Hin­dus. Therefore, the larger question is: Why is the larger Indian public opinion so indifferent? Do human tragedies no longer move us? Or, like all great powers, have we also learnt to see all such situations through the prism of politics? Is it, then, just that the Hindus see th­is purely as an Israel-versus-Muslims issue? The argument could also be that it isn’t seen only fro­m a communal prism, but of the national interest.

This week, as Israelis and the global Jewish community hold solemn ceremonies to mark the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is a good time for us to examine these questions.

The easy temptation would be to link this to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). That in the Narendra Modi decade, Hindutva subsumes our political and strategic worldview and also sets our moral compass. And who’d dare to protest on a campus? The reality isn’t simplistic but simple. As it dawned on me, after weeks of reflecting when I watched Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif speak at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). He equated Palestinians and Kashmiris and demanded self-determination for both.

A quick search then showed that not only the Pakistanis but also their friends (Mahathir Mohamad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2019, for example) and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have been hyphenating Palestine and Kashmir. At the UNGA in 2016, Nawaz Sharif mentioned Palestine and Kashmir, and hailed Burhan Wani as a hero and leader of the Kashmiri “Intifada”.

You can search back on the UN website, and this has gone on forever. Just last month, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had personally tweeted equating the “plight” of Muslims in Myanmar (the Rohingya), Palestine, and Kashmir. You expect Indians to feel sorry for the Iranians and their proxies now being laid waste by the Israelis? The fact is, we used to be almost this stupid, but are no longer so. I will return to this later.

If the Palestinians care about Indian support, therefore, they first need to go down politely on their knees to Pakistan, Iran, its seasonal pals (Turkey and Malaysia no longer mention Kashmir) and the OIC and beg them to de-hyphenate them from Kashmir. Or why should India care?

This stupid Pakistani quest for building larger sympathy in the Islamic world by conflating Palestine and Kashmir has lost the former cause in India. All of India resents the Pakistanis harping on the Kashmir matter. In all of India outside the Kashmir Valley, the public opinion is: “What Kashmir issue?” Whatever there might have been was settled on August 5, 2019, and has now been sanctified by a 63.88 per cent turnout defeating the BJP. In the Valley, too, support for Pakistan’s view is diminishing even faster than its fading comprehensive national power (CNP).

The reason we said that we must avoid the temptation to see this as the usual enemy’s (Muslim) enemy (Jew) is my friend, is the changed reality of what is called the Islamic world and India’s equation with it. Israel is probably the most popular country in India since, of course, the disappearance of the Soviet Union.

Check out India-Israel relations on the Ministry of External Affairs website. It begins by stating that we are strategic partners. Then look at the list of India’s other comprehensive and strategic partnerships. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, among the most powerful Islamic and Arab states, are all Israel’s neighbours. They’ve been intercepting Iranian proxies’ missiles aimed at Israel.

As we have said often, including in this column, national interest always trumps pan-Islamism. Their shared strategic threat is Iran, its Shia base, and links with the Muslim Brotherhood. The so-called Muslim world has stopped seeing Palestine as an Islamic issue.

The West Asian strategic and political picture is much more layered and cluttered than some simple Jewish-Muslim or even Sunni-Shia binary. There is no one factor binding it: Religion, ethnicity or Third-Worldism. Nationalism rules.

This isn’t a post-Cold War phenomenon. In 1981, Jordan and Saudi Arabia helped Israeli aircraft reach and bomb Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Arab nations feared Soviet-supported Saddam’s Iraq, its exportable Baathism. Countries act in their own national interest, not for somebody’s cause. Either ideological, religious or moral.

The reason we even debate this in India is because our own West Asia and Israel policy was fully determined by Cold War considerations and we took too long to change. The Arabs were seen to be trouble, western stooges, and patrons of Pakistan. I do not know what else would explain an Indian Prime Minister not going to the UAE for 34 years until Mr Modi’s first visit in 2015.

If you read up on the flip-flops over the creation of Israel, it is a story of grand hypocrisy and great compulsions. India voted against the “Partition of Palestine” in 1947, and in his reply to a four-page letter from Albert Einstein, Jawaharlal Nehru justified it by saying leaders had to “unfortunately pursue policies that are essentially selfish”.

On September 17, 1950, however, India recognised Israel. You want to see hypocrisy? Here’s how Nehru justified it. He said India would have recognised Israel long earlier, because it was after all a reality, but “we refrained because of our desire not to offend our Arab friends”.

India, however, watched in dismay as the decades of conflict arrived, especially in the 1960s, when the Islamic world — particularly the Arab states — sided with Pakistan. In the 1971 war, Jordan loaned some of its F-104 fighters to Pakistan and the Shah’s Iran offered the PAF sanctuaries in 1965.

All these decades, Israel helped quietly when asked. Indians were watching this and adoring Israel even more. Later in Kargil, aerial bombing became effective only when the Israelis transferred laser guidance kits. It was with bombs rigged with these that IAF Mirage-2000s started hitting the precise targets. Meanwhile, the Arab world and Israel also formally warmed up, the Abraham Accords came, I2U2 (India, Israel, UAE and US) and the IMEEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor).

With such a convergence of strategic interests, the isolation of Iran and the Palestinian belligerents as its proxies, you don’t expect Indians to make the mistakes of the Cold War past. If we used the term “stupid” for this, it was only because there was a long period when our foreign policy was aligned with every anti-Western “ism”. This is the era of policy determined only by the national interest. Public opinion only takes its cue accordingly.

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