For India’s Hindutva base, Israel is less an ally and more a model

· Scroll

Visit albergomalica.it for more information.

India’s dominant Hindutva ideology and its advocates do more than support Israel. They study it, absorb it and increasingly seek to reproduce Israel’s logic at home in India.

On February 25, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Tel Aviv for a two-day state visit during which he will hold talks with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel is a friend in a hostile world but also a state that has already answered the questions Hindutva is asking: how to rule a population that is imagined as permanently disloyal, how to make exclusion look like governance, how to normalise extraordinary violence without suspending democracy and how to turn fear into a stable political system.

This is evident from how Gaza is perceived in India, through mockery and jokes about bombed homes, open admiration for the flattening neighbourhoods, and dead children. It reflects a political culture that has already learned to enjoy punishment and sees in Israel a confirmation that such actions can be sustained and defended without consequence.

Gaza’s health ministry estimates that as of February 16, the total death toll is 72,063 since the start of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2023. Two years later, as of October, children made up at least 20,000 of the dead.