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Newly independent and partitioned India took significantly more anti-colonial stances than it does in the trade-focused deals it makes today. This decolonial stance made India a historical supporter of Palestine for decades.
India, in 1947, voted against the partition of Palestine at the UN General Assembly. India was the first non-Arab state to recognize the PLO as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians people in 1975 and recognized the state of Palestine in 1988.
However, today India is the largest buyer of Israeli arms and, under Narendra Modi’s leadership, has become one of Israel’s most vocal allies.
This transformation is reflected in India’s post-Cold War integration into a United States (U.S.) led neoliberal order while coinciding with the rise of Hindu nationalism at home. These shifts have laid the foundations for the close military and surveillance partnership that exists between India and Israel today.
Historical Foundations of Modern Partnership
Although India is often remembered for its support of Palestine, India recognized Israel in 1950 but did not establish formal diplomatic relations until 1992. Before the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise in 2014, Indian governments made an effort to keep their interactions with Israel silent to maintain diplomatic distance.
The warming of India-Israel relations coincided with India’s post-Cold War economic transformation. As India sought to be a participating member of the global economy rather than on the periphery, the nation had to adopt more neoliberal stances. This made its foreign policy more aligned with the interests of the United States and its allies. Closer trade and strategic ties with the U.S. and U.K., both strong supporters of Israel, also made warmer relations with Israel more politically useful for India.
Alongside diplomatic and economic shifts, security cooperation amongst the nations developed during this time. Indian PM Indira Gandhi led the founding of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in 1968 when she got Israeli assistance in creating an Indian intelligence agency.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, this once quiet relationship became an openly celebrated strategic partnership. India buys about $2 billion worth of arms from Israel every year, and some Israeli-made weapons and surveillance tools have reportedly been used in domestic security operations. This partnership extended into major investments such as the Adani Group’s ownership of the Haifa Port. The Adani Group, known for its powerful influence over Modi’s trade decisions, is one of the largest Indian corporations. Modi referred to Israel as a “great friend…more than a friend – a brother.”
While economic and geopolitical shifts are significant to cooperation between the nations, strategic interests are not enough to understand the depth of this partnership. It was further strengthened by an ideological convergence between Hindutva and Zionism.
Shared Ideological Foundations
The current Indian government and the state of Israel have a major ideological commonality rooted in their ethnonationalist definitions of statehood. Both Hindutva and Zionism follow and believe in supremacist, hierarchical systems of governance, where the nation is closely tied to a dominant religious community.
Zionism itself is a justification of settler colonialism based on religion, ethnicity, and a supposed holy land, the Jewish homeland. The implementation of this ideology has led to the displacement of Palestinians for nearly a century now.
The founder of the Hindutva movement, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, praised the advancements of the Zionist movement as he wanted the Hindus to view India as their holy land, leaving other religions to remain as second-class newcomers to the subcontinent.
He founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist mode of thinking with the desire to create an Israel-like, religion-based ethnostate out of the entire Indian subcontinent.
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Modi is a lifelong member of the RSS. He is now the most famous proponent of Savarkar’s movement. He has led Hindu nationalist thought to the epicentre of Indian society, even though a decade ago the movement would have been considered peripheral. As Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi faced widespread criticism over his government’s handling of anti-Muslim violence that killed over a thousand people.
A Siege Mentality Model
Scholars refer to the thought that these ideologies require as “siege mentalities.” This is the case when, in the mind of a Hindu nationalist or Zionist, the number of the so-called enemy population will always remain a threat to the existence of the ethnostate, and they will use the language of elimination.
Today, India views Israel as an ideological model, a methodology for committing human rights abuses against Muslims. In 2019, Indian Consul General Sandeep Chakravorty, while addressing Kashmiri Hindus, was quoted as saying, “It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.” Chakravorty said, adding that the Modi government was “determined” to do so in reference to the resettlement of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir.
For Hindu nationalists, Israel’s approach to occupation and security has become an inspirational model for managing Muslim-majority regions such as Kashmir.
The Indo-Israeli relationship becomes a framework through which surveillance and population control methods are adopted by the Indian state, during which the Israeli entity is treated as an aspirational model.
From Ideology to State Policies
The aforementioned ideological convergence translates into a convergence of approaches to governing populations that are treated as external threats. Since 2014, BJP-ruled states have demolished homes, businesses, and mosques belonging to Muslims, often following religious tensions or protests and, in some cases, allegedly without proper legal notice.
The bulldozer has become a symbol of Hindu-nationalist government violence towards Indian Muslims. This can be seen as a direct nod to Israel demolishing Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and displacing Palestinians as they make way for illegal Israeli settlements.
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India and Israel have been supplying each other with tools of repression. India has reportedly supplied weapons to Israel during the war on Gaza, even as Israel faces ongoing accusations of genocide. Israel has exported the surveillance software Pegasus to India, which has been used to target journalists. This is one of Israel’s many exports to India, among drones, air defence systems, and radars.
The surveillance relationship helps reinforce this diplomatic alignment. This year, Netanyahu announced plans for a “hexagon of alliances” against what he calls the “radical Shia axis,” for which he is strengthening his relationship with India. Modi visited him shortly after this announcement in February, where his address featured a complete focus on support for Israel with absolutely no mention of Palestine. This was a demonstration of the extent to which India’s foreign policy has changed from its historical position of decolonial solidarity with Palestine.
Exporting the Israel Model
Israeli surveillance practices have informed policing and counterinsurgency, particularly in regions of India where there are large-scale separatist movements or protests.
- Kashmir:
Kashmir represents the clearest example of how India uses surveillance to repress resistance in the region. India allowed Mossad agents to come in in 2004 to gather surveillance in areas where insurgency against the Indian state was taking place. Mossad agents questioned members of the Kashmiri resistance in India in what was a clear effort to try to connect them to the idea of “global jihad.”
This connection gives states a broad justification to criminalize and suppress resistance movements. This is a direct consequence of the post-Cold War push for neoliberal capitalism and American military dominance. The American “War on Terror” narrative has treated many global resistance movements involving or relating to Muslims as a monolithic global threat, especially to the Western way of life.
- Haryana:
The adoption of these surveillance practices goes beyond regions experiencing armed conflict. During the Farmer’s Protests of 2020-2021 in India, the Chief Minister of the state of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, authorized the use of drone surveillance to create a database of protestors.
Khattar has spent nearly a decade attempting to replicate Israeli military and policing tactics within Haryana. Haryana’s use of drone surveillance and tear gas during the Farmer’s Protests was reportedly influenced by state officials’ efforts to study and replicate Israeli policing and intelligence tactics. This shows how the security concern excuse is used to suppress political dissent.
- Delhi:
As Indo-Israeli relations have grown warmer over the last decade, India’s capital, New Delhi, has imported elements of Israel’s security and administrative approaches into its domestic policies under the Modi government.
Indian media has reported that Delhi Police developed a SWAT force in response to security concerns linked to Sikh resistance movements in Punjab, and that officers received training from Mossad. This relationship had begun when Delhi Police worked with Mossad after an Israeli diplomat’s vehicle had a bomb fitted into it.
- Punjab:
Admirers of the Indian military have long boasted about the involvement of Mossad in training the Indian army before Operation Blue Star. It is claimed that Indian commandos received specialized training from Mossad before Operation Blue Star, when Indian forces attacked Harmandir Sahib.
This relationship with Mossad was sensationalized in the infamous India Today propaganda piece by Prabhash K Dutta, which portrayed Israel’s support as the beginning of an intelligence partnership between the two nations. It is said that this experience inspired India to take on Israeli military and surveillance strategies.
What this Partnership Means
India and Israel currently wield significant influence in Asia, and their partnership represents far more than just their bilateral relations. What they are doing is supporting global American hegemony with strategic alliances that complement U.S. power. Whether in Palestine or Kashmir, India and Israel continue to treat these movements as a manifestation of terrorism instead of a political response to their occupation of land.
Palestine and Kashmir are parallel expressions of the same security paradigm. Both states portray the respective struggles taking place in their countries as a part of a larger battle against extremism. This is done by drawing on the post-9/11 counterterrorism narrative developed and promoted by the United States.
Through their usage of surveillance systems, military technologies, and policing, these states reinforce each other’s methods of controlling resistance movements. They increasingly deploy these methods against domestic dissent, showing that practices initially justified as a response to counterinsurgency have become regular instruments of governance. As the line between counterterrorism and suppression becomes blurrier, the reward for criminalizing anti-colonial resistance becomes higher.
Edited by Atena Abbaspourbenis
