After the dastardly rampage by Hamas in Southern Israel on 7 October, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first global leaders to extend support to the Jewish state. There was no equivocation, nor any attempt at balancing which led many to believe at home and internationally that India, under Modi, is following a “pro-Israel policy” in a sharp break with the past. However, if one examines closely, the Hindutva movement in general and the BJP, in particular, have shown enormous warmth to Israel ideologically, it has continually balanced it with support for the Palestinian cause in terms of policy.
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Homelands: Ganga and Galilee
Among the Hindutva ideological pantheon, VD Savarkar, a leading figure of the Hindu Mahasabha, was perhaps the staunchest champion of a Jewish state. Writing in his chef d’oeuvre, ‘Essentials of Hindutva,’ as early as 1923, Savarkar stated that “If the Zionists’ dreams are ever realized—if Palestine becomes a Jewish State… it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” Upon the success of the UN Partition Plan vote in late 1947, Savarkar expressed satisfaction employing the trope of Fatherland-Holyland, stating: “the Jews will soon recover their national Home in Palestine which has undoubtedly been their Fatherland and Holyland.” A survey of Savarkar’s writings, Hindu Mahasabha’s resolutions, and interventions of Mahasabha parliamentarians like VG Deshpande suggests that Mahasabha never signed up for the two-state solution nor deliberated in detail about the status of Jerusalem. In other words, Hindu Mahasabha never took a policy approach.
For other Hindutva offshoots, Israel-Palestine was as much a policy question as it was an ideological issue. For the Swatantra Party—the free market coalition of Hindutva—establishing diplomatic ties with Israel was a priority. The party’s Parsi face and former Indian ambassador to Brazil, Minoo Masani, used to recurrently attack the Congress government for having ties with enemies with whom India had fought wars but not with Israel—a democratic country from which India has much to gain and learn. His party colleague and former editor of The Statesman, Cushrow Irani’s position was that the Congress party was too fearful of Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser to make its independent choice regarding Israel. Unlike Mahasabhaites, Swatantra leaders were not oblivious to international realities and took a pragmatic view of Palestine and Jerusalem. At the national convention in 1968, a year after the Six Day War, Swatantra passed a resolution to place Jerusalem under international trusteeship and urged the world leaders to alleviate the plight of Palestinian refugees, falling short of endorsing a two-state solution.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent to both the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), took a part-ideological part-political view of the topic, leaving the precise solution to its political arm, the BJP. Its second leader, MS Golwalkar, in his now-disowned work, ‘We, or Our Nationhood Defined,’ cites the Jewish state as an example of ideal nationhood. He is neither buoyant like Savarkar nor strategic like his Swatantra counterparts. However, the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, has remained unsparingly scathing of Congress’ policy of non-recognition of Israel. A June 1964 editorial stated that both Israel and the United Arab Republic (now Egypt) are facts of international life, implying that it is folly to withhold recognition. Like Swatantra, it was incensed that the Congress party took its diplomatic cues from Cairo. “Are Arabs going to dictate us what our foreign policy shall be?” asked another editorial in October 1964.
To a student of Hindutva politics, it becomes clear that the closer a Hindutva offshoot is to party politics, the more they approach the Israel-Palestine issue as a policy question. For the ideologues, who maintained an arm’s length from the trenches of formal politics, it was all about supporting another religious homeland—of the Jews on the shores of Galilee—that was under menacing aggression from Arabs (read Islam), just like theirs was on the banks of Ganga.
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BJS and BJP: Policy of Equidistance
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya—the third ideologue in the trinity with Savarkar and Golwalkar, whom the RSS loaned to the BJS—was most clear-eyed policy-wise. Warning LK Advani, the future deputy prime minister of India, and others in the fold, Upadhyaya cautioned that “we should not become blindly pro-Israeli just because the Congress is blindly pro-Arab… We must judge every issue on its own merit.” This advice metamorphosed into an equidistance policy between both the Arab bloc and Israel. For the BJP, however, the Israel arm of the equidistance policy was missing in Congress’ Middle East vision, which ought to be rectified by establishing formal ties with Tel Aviv.
If their ideological counterparts thought about homelands, these politicos advanced arguments of national interests. Balraj Madhok, founder of Jammu-based Praja Parishad and later BJS stalwart, viewed the West Asia situation through the lens of Pakistan. Writing for a party souvenir called ‘What the BJS Stands For,’ Madhok censured the thirteen Arab countries, twelve of which sided with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue save for a neutral Egypt. If Arabs did not side with India, argued Madhok, why should India stand with Arabs against Israel?
The notion of bringing equanimity to the West Asia policy, however, did not prevent the BJP from advocating a two-state solution and the rights of Palestinians. In its resolution on the Gulf War in 1991, the BJP resolved: “The Palestinians have an inalienable right to a homeland, just as Israel has a right to exist in comity of nations.” This advocacy for a Palestinian homeland, as party MP and prominent lawyer Ram Jethmalani argued in Parliament in 1981, was not carte blanche to “to destroy the existing state of Israel.”
The balancing acts of subsequent BJP premiers, when in power, echo this policy. If Atal Bihari Vajpayee invited Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to New Delhi, he rolled out the red carpet for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. If Modi became the first Indian leader to visit Israel, he calibrated it by stopping over in Ramallah. If Modi tweeted in support of Israel, he later spoke to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Beyond the Israel-Palestine question, the Modi government’s Gulf outreach exhibits clinical pragmatism flowing from Upadhyaya’s advice of merit and interest-driven approach.
Some might argue that there is indeed an erosion of this equidistance policy under Modi. For instance, India has dropped the demand for East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital since November 2016. However, one can chiefly attribute this shift to the Trump administration’s alacrity to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital than to Hindutva ideology.
The Hindutva policy of balancing—from Upadhyaya to Vajpayee, and Madhok to Modi—stems from a duality: the embrace of Israel is rooted in conviction, while the support for Palestine is undergirded by cold pragmatism. The former is firm, the latter is vulnerable.
Chirayu Thakkar is a doctoral candidate jointly with the National University of Singapore and King’s College London. He tweets @ThakkarChirayu. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)