India's Hindutva admire Israel and Zionism: Genocidal Groups have a lot in common
The
results are in for India’s general election. The country’s prime minister,
Narendra Modi, has won enough seats to stay in charge for a third consecutive
term. But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has suffered big setbacks, and is
gearing up for coalition talks having failed to win an outright majority for
the first time in ten years.
The BJP is premised on
Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist ideology. Devised in the early 20th century, the politics of
Hindutva insist that the country’s national identity be built
around those who consider only India’s geography sacred. Muslims and
Christians, whose holy sites lay in the Middle East, were therefore considered
second-class citizens.
Modi
foregrounded Hindutva in his election campaign. He falsely accused the
main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, of basing their manifesto
on the ideology of the Muslim League,
the party that championed the partition of India in 1947. And he weaponised
demographic anxieties around marginally higher Muslim fertility rates to claim that
the opposition planned to redistribute wealth to “infiltrators” who “have more
children”.
But
Hindutva doesn’t stop at India’s borders. Hindu nationalists have used the ongoing
conflict in Gaza to vilify other Muslims globally. BJP troll farms have spread
disinformation and anti-Palestinian hatred online, and Hindu
nationalist groups in India have organised pro-Israel
marches.
Where does this curious
Hindutva-Zionist solidarity spring from? One origin is from the earliest Hindu
nationalists who modelled their Hindu state on Zionism.
Hindutva’s
founder, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, supported majoritarian nationalism and the
rooting out of all disintegrating forces. These included Muslims who supported
electoral quotas for their community and left-wing internationalists.
As a
result, he even condoned the Nazis’ antisemitic legislation in two speeches in
1938 because, as he saw it: “a nation is formed by a majority living therein”.
Yet Savarkar was not antisemitic himself. He often spoke
favourably of the tiny Jewish-Indian minority because he
considered it too insignificant to threaten Hindu cohesion.
In
fact, Savarkar praised Zionism as the perfection of ethno-nationalist thinking.
The way Zionism seamlessly blended ethnic attachment to a motherland and
religious attachment to a holy land was precisely what Savarkar wanted for the
Hindus. This double attachment was far more powerful to his mind than the
European model of “blood and soil” nationalism without sacred space.
Today,
Hindu nationalists perpetuate this legacy and still look to Zionism as a
uniquely attractive political ideology. To Hindu nationalists, some Zionists
were engaged in a project to reclaim their holy land from a Muslim population
whose religious roots in the region were not as ancient as their own.
In a
similar way, Hindutva’s supporters saw it as engaged with a Muslim population
that it vastly outnumbered, but which had significant cultural power. This
power came through the Mughal dynasty that
ruled much of India from 1526 to the establishment of the British Raj in the
19th century.
This
idea was further popularised by Savarkar’s ideological successor, Madhav
Sadashivrao Golwalkar. In 1947, Golwalkar wrote that
Zionism was the “attempt at rehabilitating Palestine with its ancient
population of the Jews … to reconstruct the broken edifice and revitalise the
practically dead Hebrew national life”.
Delegitimising Muslim citizens
Just
as the Palestinians had to make way for those whose claims of ancient sacred
space took primacy, so too, in Golwalkar’s view,
did “non-Hindu people of Hindusthan” have to be “wholly subordinated to the
Hindu nation”. Part of this process today has been redefining citizenship.
In
2018, Israel passed a law that rebranded the
country as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” and delegitimised its
non-Jewish citizens. Similarly, India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act
in 2019 eased paths to citizenship for immigrants from several religious
groups, but not Muslims.
Coupled
with rhetoric associating millions of Indian Muslims with illegal immigration,
human rights groups argue that this law could be used to
strip many Muslims of their Indian citizenship.
Read more: India
election: how Narendra Modi's BJP uses and abuses religious minorities for
political purposes
Hindu
nationalists have also stoked a culture war to consolidate “Hindu civilisation”
and sweep away symbols of Islam. This is very much in keeping with the wish of
Israel’s far right to rebuild Solomon’s Temple on the site of the holy Temple
Mount in Jerusalem, where al-Aqsa mosque compound currently sits.
In
1969, a Zionist extremist burned the
south wing of al-Aqsa. And in 1980, the fundamentalist group Jewish
Underground plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic
shrine at the centre of the compound.
The
al-Aqsa mosque compound on Temple Mount, Jerusalem. udra11/Shutterstock
A similar project of
demolishing mosques and building temples in their place was suggested by
Savarkar and Golwalkar. Hindu nationalist organisations focused their attention
on Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodha, since this was the mythical birthplace of the
Hindu god, Ram.
The
co-founder of BJP, Lal Krishna Advani, led a national campaign in 1990 to build
a new temple – a proposal that had been prohibited by the Indian supreme court
for decades. But the fervour the campaign unleashed resulted in a Hindu
nationalist mob demolishing Babri
Masjid mosque in 1992. And after a new Indian supreme court ruling in 2019 gave
permission, a temple was
built on the site of the destroyed mosque, and inaugurated by Modi with great
ceremony in January 2024.
A
few months later, in May 2024, Israeli national security minister Itamar
Ben-Gvir declared from
al-Aqsa mosque compound that a Palestinian state would never exist. As he did
so, his entourage prayed illegally on the contested site of the Temple Mount.
As
Hindu prayers are offered from the site of the demolished Babri Masjid,
hundreds of other mosques in
India now find themselves under threat. Hindu nationalists are petitioning
courts to deliver land administered by Islamic trusts to the majority Hindu
community.
As Modi embarks on a
third term, he may look to complete the task of making India an exclusive Hindu
holy land – albeit with a more powerful opposition than before. //end
text//
Zarni's remark: the following
screenshots from a Myanmar Facebook account reflect typical Rakhine
nationalists who are a part of Arakan Army or support AA. They look
to Israel as a model of a political movement or project to reclaim their sacred
land of Buddhist Rakhine from alien Muslims!!! This has been
a long running theme for the last decade and a half since Rohingya persecution
began to hit international news headlines.
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