India and its diaspora no longer suffer ‘Israel envy’. Here’s why
The other day The Economist’s Indian-origin defence correspondent, Shashank Joshi, posted a newsletter that made mention of “India’s ‘Israel envy’.” He described this as follows: “The idea that India should be more like Israel in dealing with its enemies, particularly those seen to be terrorists”. In other words, for India to be tougher, perhaps even rougher.
The post was on a broader theme — India’s growing confidence on the global stage. As Mr Joshi noted, this is increasingly apparent. Not only have Indian warships been battling pirates in the Middle East, India “is buying boatloads of Russian oil and waving away Western criticism”, he wrote. And then there are the allegations that “India’s Research & Analysis Wing (RAW), its external spy agency, attempted to kill Sikh separatists in America and Canada”.
Clearly, India is getting tougher, a la Israel.
In some ways though, it may be a sign of another development. That India’s alleged “Israel envy” is abating because it is anyway becoming more like Israel in different aspects.
Particularly as seen in the behaviour of its diaspora.
This point is worth considering in light of the Indian diaspora’s increasing embrace of Hindu nationalism as the only authentic narrative about 21st century India. It is a phenomenon that’s very similar to the behaviour of the American Jewish community with respect to Israel over the past several decades, as former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy recently pointed out in a brilliant piece on Gaza.
Mr Levy’s piece, titled Seeing Gaza Clearly, fairly shines with moral clarity. He describes the “genuine sense of disorientation” currently being felt by American Jews over both Israel’s conduct towards Gaza and the US administration’s enabling of it. He starts with the straightforward stating of facts: “There is a fairly easy story to tell here. Atrocities are being committed in a foreign land. US taxpayer dollars are arming and funding those atrocities”.
And then he notes the attempt to stare down protests over the mass atrocities against Palestinians as anti-Semitism.
This sounds a bit like what happens with people of Indian origin in many parts of the world, not least the US and UK when India’s Hindu nationalist government’s actions or inaction come under scrutiny. If there is commentary or criticism, there are loud, sometimes aggressive attempts to shut it all down by calling out the so-called “colonial”, “colonised”, “woke”, “slave-of-West” mindset etc.
Back to Mr Levy’s piece. He writes: “Over decades, Israel was embedded into almost every nook and cranny of American Jewish life. The documentary Israelism (predating the events of recent months), captures this phenomenon. Ironically, the main articulation of this effort began in the early 1990’s against the backdrop not of threats to Israel, but of alarm-inducing studies around the specter of Jewish American assimilation and establishment fears for Jewish continuity. Rather than invest in cultural or educational programming at home, Israel emerged as the Disneyland experience to fill the vacuum of belonging. That’s where the free trips to Israel Birthright program derives”.
He goes on, in what I feel is the most significant parallel with the gradual change sweeping the Indian diaspora in the West: “As Israel lurched further to the right, inevitably this programming followed suit — along with attempts to redefine antisemitism in increasingly Israel-centric terms. This was more about the needs of Israeli statecraft and PR (Hasbara), than about the experiences of American Jews…”
Something similar may be seen to be happening with overseas Indians as India’s politics has lurched to the right, to muscular Hindu nationalism. As with the characterisation of anti-Gaza war protests as anti-Semitism and the refusal to see Israel’s actions through a moral prism, some overseas Indians are decidedly reluctant to see the Hindu nationalist government’s actions as they are. (The lynching of Muslims in India is just one case in point.)
It’s worth noting that Mr Levy is supremely qualified to speak on such matters. A British-Israeli, he is currently president of the US/Middle East Project, a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians at Taba under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and at Oslo under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He is also one of the founders of J Street, a US-based liberal advocacy group that aims to end Arab–Israeli and Israeli–Palestinian conflict peacefully. Mr Levy has said that J Street was meant for “this very large constituency of Jewish Americans who do care about Israel and who are cool identifying themselves as pro-Israel. But their pro-Israelness is about the need for Israel to be at peace with its neighbours to gain security, not by being an ongoing expansionist presence. In fact, that endangers Israel.”
In this context, Mr Levy’s main point is worth noting. That the rise of “Zionist hegemony” is in itself “an a-historic thing in Jewish terms” because it tries to “suggest that Jews are a monolith, to suppress argument and debate inside Jewish circles”. He says it “is deeply un-Jewish” and he quotes Naomi Klein to say “Jews have fallen prey to worshipping the ‘false idol of Zionism’.”
As someone born and bred in a pluralistic Hindu family, I would argue that the rise of political Hinduism as the only acceptable narrative strand of 21st century Indianness is also an a-historic thing in Hindu (and Indian terms). This, because it wants to suggest that Hindus are a monolith. (They are not, as illustrated by the new divisions thrown up by the BJP’s religio-political hardline between Hindus in south and north India.)
Along the lines of J Street, overseas Indians could do with an I Street.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
