Two examples, one in the US and another in India, illustrate why India and Israel get the short end of the stick when it comes to negative storytelling. While a small population of Jews still manages to influence American and European politics fairly efficiently — though less easily of late — the very large and influential Hindu diaspora is largely ineffective in presenting the Indian perspective to a Western audience. On the contrary, both “secular” Hindu and Muslim voices in India and America sometimes tend to demonise the country, especially when something can be associated with Hindus or Hinduism. Lies, half-truths, or the deliberate suppression of truth are among the tools used to achieve this effect.
The ease with which such narratives gain traction becomes visible when the people doing the demonisation of Israel or India are not your garden-variety Leftists or fire-spewing Islamists. Secular denigration, it seems, has greater value.
The two people I will focus on here are Zohran Mamdani, likely the next mayor of New York City, and Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah, who recently wrote a column in The Indian Express explaining why he misses the old India. He apparently misses it only because Hindus today are speaking their minds, even if that offends some ears. Neither Mamdani nor Shah can be categorised as bigots, but both use sophisticated language and dog whistles to get their points across.
Also read: Muslim minds, not bodies, are targets of Hindutva vigilantes. Their crimes resemble terrorism
Zohran Mamdani’s balancing act
Let us first consider Mandani, who has drawn a lot of critical attention after winning the Democratic Party primary, defeating heavily favoured Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor. Many argue that Mamdani is criticised just because he is Muslim, but this is the usual trick used to brush off all criticism of his policies and positions.
Mamdani, the son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair, is positioned to the Left of the US Democratic Party, a sensible choice for someone whose camouflaged views Islamists would not mind owning. Reason: if he’s attacked for promising ruinous rent control, higher taxes on “richer and whiter” neighbourhoods, or raising the minimum wage to levels that might dent New York’s employment potential, the Left will bat for him. And if he is attacked even more, he can claim it is the result of in-built American Islamophobia.
Mamdani is a smart politician. He manages to couch his views in broadly politically correct terms, even while getting his dog whistles across, especially when it comes to Jewish Israel or Hindu India.
He has repeatedly called Israel to account for its alleged “genocide” of Palestinians, not just in Gaza today, but earlier as well. He has referred to both Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi as “war criminals” and doesn’t condemn the slogan “globalise the intifada”, a phrase widely seen in Israel as a call for the state’s erasure. He also backs the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. BDS is favoured by the global Left, and even more so by Islamists. Again, it is about economically decapitating the Jewish state.
To balance this stand, Mamdani claims he wants to reduce anti-semitism (see his quotes on various issues here). If elected mayor of New York, he has said he will set up a department of Community Safety to focus on hate crimes. But one wonders whether Mamdani himself is not guilty of stoking hatred against Israel, by calling Israel a genocidal state and labelling its Prime Minister a “war criminal.” Anybody who fights terrorists can be called a war criminal, it seems.
But just in case you are willing to give Mamdani a pass because of his sensible stand on anti-semitism, he remarks against the idea of a Jewish state, since he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” By this yardstick, he should be against more than 50 Muslim-majority states, but he has not been heard speaking about that much.
Regarding India, Mamdani upset many when he wrongly alleged that there are very few Muslims left in Gujarat, a patently false claim for which he will never be held to account in the West. Reason: after 2002, Modi has been held up as a figure of hate among the Left, evangelical Christians, and Islamists in both America and Europe. Mamdani knows he is on a good political wicket when he talks negatively about Modi’s India and Gujarat.
Mamdani has criticised Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “genocide”. He has used the G word repeatedly, even before the Israeli army went into Gaza to defang Hamas. One wonders if it is ever possible to go after Hamas terrorists without causing collateral damage among civilians, when both are joined at the hip. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has said that Hamas has operated from schools and hospitals, which makes it impossible to target them without killing civilians.
The excess use of the term “genocide” is problematic since it is politically loaded. It is overused selectively to define conflict situations where a hated adversary is involved. The 2002 Gujarat riots were also called a genocide, when in fact they were a deadly communal conflagration.
Under the UN-adopted Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnical, racial, religious or national group.”
Hitler’s extermination of six million Jews by sending them to gas chambers surely qualifies as genocide, as does the Hutu-led killings of Tutsi in Rwanda. Israel’s actions in Gaza, while unacceptable, do not quite qualify as “genocide” of Palestinians.
If Mamdani really wants to call out real genocide, he should start with Bangladesh, where the Hindu demographic has dramatically declined in less than three generations, dropping from 22 percent in 1951 (after the Partition) to under 8 percent in the 2022 census.
Instead, Mamdani indirectly sees a genocide in Gujarat. Not in Bangladesh. Or Pakistan. Or Afghanistan. Or Kashmir Valley.
What a politician says is important, but what he does not say is even more important.
There is a Latin phrase, suppressio veri, suggestio falsi—suppressing the truth is as good as uttering a falsehood. Likewise, someone who does not quite speak the truth, but indirectly suggests a falsehood (like Mamdani did about Muslims in Gujarat), is also guilty of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi.
There is something not quite kosher about Mamdani, and it is not his Leftist credentials. Being silent about obvious things and using dog whistles to convey your message of covert bigotry is not the sign of a trustworthy politician — even by the low standards of American politics.
Also read: Hindu nationalism has taken first steps toward establishing a Jim Crow system
Naseeruddin Shah’s selective criticism
Now let’s come to Naseeruddin Shah. In his Indian Express article “The India I Miss” (4 July 2025), he writes that he misses the India where he did not have to wear his patriotism on his sleeve. No issue here. In the article, he defended actor-singer Diljit Dosanjh, who came under fire for starring opposite a Pakistani actress. After Pahalgam and Operation Sindoor, the sentiment against Pakistani actors and anyone with ties to that terrorist state has been negative in India.
While Shah defends Dosanjh, he goes further and suggests that “the rising tide of jingoism, hatred, and, of late, war fever here, cannot but have encouraged all ‘right’ minded citizens to no longer bother disguising the bigotry that has been latent in them all along”. One must ask whether there really is a “war fever” in India, when there was bound to be anti-Pakistan anger after terrorists singled out Hindu tourists to kill in front of their spouses in Kashmir. In the immediate aftermath of India blasting terrorist bases in Pakistan, there was a lot of TV and internet chatter on the short war, but that is not the same thing as generating a “war fever”.
Shah’s problem seems to be with the Hindu “right” (his quotation marks), not with Islamists who murder people or start rioting just because they may have expressed support for Nupur Sharma or played music in front of a mosque.
Shah asks: “Is it in any way beneficial to us to hate every Pakistani citizen for what their government (read, army) does? Or does it simply satisfy some feral urge?”
Is that really true? The anger of Indians is not directed against all Pakistanis, but against its terror-backing state, including the army. And where is the feral urge in India (outside some internet fringe), when it is in Pakistan that Hindus are demonised, and their school textbooks speak negatively about Hindus and India? The feral urge is largely Pakistani in origin, but Shah hesitates to call a spade a spade.
Shah also claims that Indian artistes are not only not barred from Pakistan, but “they (are) welcome and honour us”. In contrast, poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar says that one should ban Pakistani artistes from working in India since the welcome is one-sided. While Pakistani artistes receive a huge platform in India, the same is not the case with Indian artistes going to Pakistan. Pakistan never welcomed Lata Mangeshkar, arguably the greatest artiste in the Indian sub-continent, even though India has hosted Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Ghulam Ali, among others.
Shah goes on: “Hatred is self-destructive but evidently it can be sustained indefinitely if one is to go by the continuing actions of some ‘cow vigilantes’.”
Really? While no one is about to defend “cow vigilantes”, whose actions have since tapered off, the question is why Shah chooses to mention only these groups and ignores mobs shouting “sar tan se juda”, which sounds feral enough to Hindu ears?
He correctly says that he should not be obliged to wear patriotism on his sleeve, but he cannot see that Hindus are required to wear their “secularism” on their sleeves to prove they are not communal. They must carry a permanent guilt complex about caste, even if most of them may not be casteist in the least. Shah only sees what he wants to see.
In the article’s very first para, where Shah writes about his early upbringing “divided between an orthodox Muslim home, a Roman Catholic, and then a Jesuit Christian school”, he admits that it is “grossly unfair that everyone ‘except us’ was doomed to perdition, and I have never been able to get my head around that.”
What he admits is true only for Christianity and Islam. He fails to mention that in Hinduism, there is no such exclusivist belief. That he cannot bring himself to say what is good about Hinduism or Buddhism tells us more about what he really stands for. Without missing a beat, he tells us what was “the coolest idea” for him: “Namaaz in the Adhai Din Ka Jhonpda surrounded by Hindu sculptures…”. The “jhonpda” is a Jain-Hindu monument that was overlaid with Islamic art after Qutb-ud-Din Aibak partially destroyed the original structure. Later, Mamluks added the Islamic architecture. Reading namaaz in the midst of Hindu sculptures does not seem to suggest anything unusual to Shah. Would he advocate the same in reverse: doing puja in a mosque?
As for the India he misses, one wonders whether the Bollywood of old was really his cup of tea. In that Bollywood, Yusuf Khan and Mahjabeen Banu had to Hindu-ise their screen names as Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari. Today, the three Khans who dominate the Hindi film industry do not have to compromise on their religious affiliations. On the other hand, films like PK — which, incidentally, is Pakistan’s internet domain — win popular acclaim despite making fun of Hindu gods but never Christian or Muslim ones, while a film on the killing and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (The Kashmir Files) is dubbed as propaganda.
Shah is effectively conveying a sophisticated sense of Muslim victimhood, and putting only right-wing Hindus in the dock by accusing them of jingoism and anti-Muslim hatred. The boot is never on the other foot, which amounts to suppressio veri.
Neither Zohran Mamdani nor Naseeruddin Shah can be accused of honesty in the views they hold dear.
R Jagannathan is the former editorial director, Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)
It’s always a pleasure to see the liberal-secular cabal get triggered. Ms. Devaki Khanna’s frustrated ventings and fulminations are a delight indeed.
Firstly, the Ottoman Turks allowed the Sephardic Jews to settle in Thessalonica in Greece. Several Ottoman Sultans employed Jewish physicians. There were Jewish communities already settled among Arab populations (Mizrahi Jews).
Secondly, the people who backed the Zionist state (which was to be a settler colonial state, if you read reports of Zionist congresses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) were the Ashkenazi Jews, settled in territories ruled by the Russian empire, where they were subjected to pogroms. This was due to the claims made in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery attributed to the Russian czar’s secret police.
Thirdly, the plan of a Jewish state in Palestine was backed by two powerful European groups–the anti-Semites and the evangelical Christians. The anti-Semites for obvious reasons (see what Lord Balfour says about this) and the evangelicals because they wanted to bring Christ’s kingdom to earth. The first step was the re-establishment of a Jewish state in West Asia. This would lead to a war between the Jewish state and its Christian allies and the Arab states that surrounded it. This war would lead to Armaggedon, the coming of Christ on earth and the establishment of a Christian state worldwide. Many Orthodox Jews familiar with the Torah opposed the formation of this state, because such a state could only be formed if God gave the command.
Unlike India which wavers one step forward and another back, Israel is a country that actually understands what it means to be modern and secular. There is no equivalence between the two. Things like the riots in India are unimaginable in Israel. We have much to learn from Israel about how to create a secular state.
Secondly, Israel is not “a colonial, settler state.” If decolonization was actually something the left welcomed, they should have welcomed Israelis back to what is indisputably documented as their homeland from ancient times. Instead they fall back on cliches.
What has been done to Yazidis, Armenian Christians and Hindus in various countries should make the these people hang their heads in shame and leave their religion. It is they who did the genocide since centuries. Instead, the Palestinians and even Muslims in India have never held any protest for Hindus or Yazidis. So what Israel is doing is correct and the jehadi Palestinians need to be cleaned off. Israel’s actions are god’s way of payback.
While I have zero sympathy for Mamdani or Shah, I find it interesting that the Hindu right thinks that Israel and India are somehow similar or in similar positions. This will be detrimental to India and Hindus in future.
The creation of modern Israel is the result of centuries of persecution of Jews by European Christians and Ottoman Turks. Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, were forcibly evicted from their homes and European Jews were settled there in and around 1948 and the eviction continues to this day. This happened within living memory and there is a lot of documentation about this.
As memories of the Holocaust fade, newer generations in the West are more willing to blame Zionism for “genocide “. Pushing the false narrative that India and Hindus have anything whatsoever in common with Israel and Zionists will only give more ammunition to people like Mamdani and Shah. Hindus have never pushed anyone out, rather the reverse. Zionists have actually made millions of Palestinians homeless in their own land.
This false narrative doing the rounds currently reminds me that somehow the Hindu right always seems to need the white man’s validation. Maybe it feels good when a powerful country like Israel pretends that they are in the same position as India.
I say this as someone who is proud to be a Hindu and generally find this writer’s views well- reasoned and articulated. This silly narrative on the Hindu right needs to stop. Israel and Jews should not be mentioned in the same context as India and Hindus.
Re Yusuf Khan and Baby Mahajbeen changing their names–the learned writer may be interested to learn that Devika Rani of Bombay Talkies discovered Yusuf Khan in 1944 and had him trained as an actor. It was she who selected his stage name. Bombay Talkies already had Ashok Kumar on their rolls. Bombay studios, like Hollywood studios, quite freely changed the names of their stars. Baby Mahajbeen had been a child star; her name was changed to indicate that she was now playing adult roles. At the same time, Nargis felt no need for a name change and neither did Muhammad Rafi, although Talat Mahmood, who sang Bengalu songs in Calcutta for a while, did so under the name of Pradip Kumar. By the time Shah Rukh Khan came to Mumbai, the studio system had broken down; what you had were camps. Both Aamir and Salman Khan came from a film background–no question of a name change. But Panchajanya did publish a cri de couer on how painful it was to see three Khans dominate the Mumbai film industry while poor Hrithik Roshan was left in the shadows (perhaps the learned author can ask his friends in the RSS for a copy of the piece). It was Hrithik, not any of the Khans, who played Emperor Akbar in Jodhaa Akbar, just as it was Naseerudin Shah who played Shivaji versus Om Puri’s Aurangzeb in Bharat ek Khoj.
What I find truly appalling about this writer is his equating of India with Israel. India is (or was, till 11 years ago) a democratic, secular nation. Israel is a settler colonial state, based on the idea of Zionism, which has as much to do with Judaism as Hindutva has to do with Hinduism. Israel is most like Pakistan, which was founded on the two-nation theory. Both Israel and Pakistan have done a lot of dirty work for the US–supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime with a large team of military advisors and setting up training facilities for mujahedin fighting in Afghanistan being some of the tasks performed by both nations. For this reason, the US is prepared to overlook minor transgressions, such as the sinking of USS Liberty in the late 60s, the deaths of peace activists from 2000 onwards in the West Bank or the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan because Pakistan’s ISI was sharing information with the Taliban (2001-20). The little matter of Osama bin Laden located in Abbotabad, both Pakistan and Israel carrying out nuclear programs without any UN oversight…all these are brushed under the carpet in the US. The US support for Israel has a lot to do with AIPAC funding US legislators on both sides of the political aisle and with people like Epstein running prostitution rings patronized by US politicians and businessmen–both these facts are true of Europe also. Also, Israel’s existence is a thorn in the side of Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi monarchs, whom the US has sworn to defend, even against democratic reformers, for access to Saudi oil. Also, Anglo-American evangelism, which wants to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ to earth by a) supporting the creation of Israel and b) supporting Israel in its wars against Arab states and Iran till Armageddon, all of which will lead to the coming of Christ on earth and the setting up of his kingdom and the conversion of all humanity to Christianity. Those Jews who had relatives in the concentration camps or were there themselves know when a genocide is taking place.
Its good to realize that there are not many who read your venomous views. Last month, Bangladesh returned more than a thousand Indians who were arrested, blind-folded and literally kicked out of our country by the incumbent home minister of Gujarat. Our country accepted them back from Bangladesh as citizens of India – not as Bangladeshis. All this while there was a war game being played at the borders in May June 2025.
Muslim are always like this
Interesting piece. We are surely a DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY. The opinion of this author comparing India with Israel which is committing genocide on helpless population of Gaza. !!! This is simply shocking. This author could not find any other better country in todays world to compare India !!!