Comment by Riaz Haq on January 8, 2023 at 4:51pm

Islamophobia Drives India-Israel Cooperation to Oppress/Occupy Kashmir and Palestine

By Dr. Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/06/17/india-israel-and-geopolitica...



The Indian Home Minister Amit Shah in a recent statement praised Prime Minister Modi for “annexing Kashmir with [the] rest of India,” referring to the abolition of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution on August 5, 2019 (Article 370 guaranteed Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomous status). In this context, he pointed to how India, in its ‘surgical strike’ response to Pakistan for the 2019 Pulwama attacks in Kashmir (carried out by an indigenous Kashmiri militant), has now joined the ranks of countries like Israel (and the US) that can “hit back at those meddling with their borders”. In the aftermath of the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy, without consultation or consent, the Indian Consul General in New York Sandeep Chakravarty was filmed speaking to a gathering of Kashmiri Pandits (Kashmir’s Hindu minority) saying that there was a model for settlements in Kashmir, and that “If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.” Ironically, the Indian government officially rejects parallels between Kashmir and Palestine, maintaining that Kashmir is an internal matter, while recognizing Palestine as an international issue with a two-state solution.

On the other hand, advocacy groups, especially those that focus exclusively on the Indian oppression of Kashmiri Muslims (but not on repression in Pakistan or of other oppressed groups such as the Kurds where the oppressors are co-religionists), dwell on the topic of Muslims oppressed by India and Israel. They point to how Israel is the source model of oppression, due to its arms exports and its treatment of Palestinians.

Yet is it really the case that India imports its mechanisms of oppression from Israel? And what does this story obscure from view?

There is something deeply troubling about the designation of Israel as a unique source of oppression. There is absolutely no doubt that Israel is a small country yet spends 12 percent of its government budget on defense, a per capita spending significantly higher than all developed countries except the U.S. Similarly, Israel is a reliable ‘no questions asked’ supplier that sold arms to India after nuclear tests. Importantly, the subjugation and dehumaniation of Palestinians by the state of Israel is an internationally recognized fact. Moreover, as I pointed out in 2014 prior to the election of the Modi-led BJP in India, there is a ‘necropolitical’ exercise of sovereignty in Kashmir where the state has the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die (necropolitics as articulated by Achille Mbembe refers to the subjugation of populations in this way). The Palestinian resistance movement and the global solidarity that it generates has been an inspiration for many people, including in Kashmir.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 8, 2023 at 4:52pm

Islamophobia Drives India-Israel Cooperation to Oppress/Occupy Kashmir and Palestine

By Dr. Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/06/17/india-israel-and-geopolitica...


However, it is also important to recognise that formal diplomatic relations between India and Israel only go back 30 years. For most of its post-colonial era in the 20th century, India’s relationship with Israel was checkered to say the least. The considerations underpinning Nehruvian foreign policy meant that engagement with Israel was undertaken when necessary (such as when help was sought during wars with Pakistan, or when the intelligence agency RAW was set up), but without reciprocation via explicit ties. Long before the Modi regime’s current de-hyphenation strategy in relation to Israel and Palestine, India repositioned vis-a-vis Palestine and Israel in the aftermath of the Cold War. Today, Modi’s visit to Israel in 2017 (the first Indian Prime Minister to do so), and Foreign Minister Jaishanker’s ‘goosebumps’ when recalling it, are reiterated to illustrate a deep cooperation, alignment against terrorism, and relational warmth. However, it was not Israel that supplied India with the ideology or infrastructure of wide-ranging oppression as Kashmir’s autonomy was gradually eroded between the 1950s and 1980s. The political dispute was communalized under the still unclear circumstances of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and Kashmir’s Muslim population was subjected to sexual violence, enforced disappearances, torture, and encounter killings (extra-judicial killings of civilians by the police or armed forces). Police and soldier-level training exchanges between Israel and India date mostly to the start of the 21st century; it was in the 1990s that Kashmiris were subjected to the most egregious nightmares by Indian security forces. Even in more recent times, India did not import pellet guns from Israel; these guns were used indiscriminately in Kashmir against protestors in the summer of 2016 and resulted in inflicting death and blindness on Kashmiri civilians.

The designation of Israel as a unique source of learning for oppression detracts from recognizing the indigenous Indian nature of long-standing ideological and technological infrastructures of occupation in Kashmir. It also fits comfortably into a vein of anti-semitism professed openly by some radical Islamists and others who see a ‘Jewish hand’ behind every political force they disagree with. The contemporary Hindutva Indian nationalism has historic roots in the beliefs of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling BJP), an organization whose leaders admired both Nazis and Zionists. The RSS was founded in 1925 and is therefore older than the state of Israel.

The nature of the territorial political dispute in Kashmir and Palestine is different, and while Palestine has international recognition, Kashmir barely makes headlines. India’s occupation in Kashmir proceeds through the use of coloniality as development, what I have elsewhere called ‘Econonationalism’ (the use of the supposedly liberatory idea of development to mask a dehumanizing subjugation). There have been conscientious objectors in the Israeli army, but not a single one so far in the Indian Army. The media in India is conspicuously state-centric and usually silent on dissent when it comes to Kashmir. The longest ever Internet shutdown in any democracy was perpetrated by India. Some in the IDF found India’s modus operandi in Kashmir excessive in 2010 (another summer when many young Kashmiri protestors were killed), and more recently, some Israelis have petitioned the Supreme Court to not train Indian officers accused of human rights abuse in Kashmir. In other words, the trope of Kashmir and Palestine being the same kind of occupation and India learning oppression from Israel is simplistic. Further, it invisibilizes the potential of solidarity between Israeli and Kashmiri human rights activists.

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 8, 2023 at 4:52pm

Islamophobia Drives India-Israel Cooperation to Oppress/Occupy Kashmir and Palestine

By Dr. Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit

https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2022/06/17/india-israel-and-geopolitica...


Kashmiris share aspects of the experience of dehumanization and the colonial exercise of power with Palestinians, but they also experience modalities of oppression—detention, surveillance, debility, censorship, intimidation—akin to those faced by Hong-Kongers, Uighurs, Tibetans, Kurds and others. The reference to the new ‘Middle Eastern Quad‘ includes not just Israel and India, but also the U.S. and the UAE. The economic and defense linkages are malleable across regimes and there is nothing unique about Israeli technologies used by India when the oppressed are Muslims in both cases; a number of Muslim countries buy surveillance infrastructures from Israel to repress their own populations. When it comes to digital authoritarianism, China is a key player, and its narrative of justifying repressive data governance through the distribution of entitlements also has much in common with India’s narrative on Kashmir, notwithstanding the regime type differences in the two countries.

Moving beyond the established frames of thinking about the global circulation of ideas and technologies of oppression, as well as building solidarity across movements for self-determination, statehood, human rights, or freedoms, is a complex and important endeavor. As the lines between democratic and authoritarian regimes become blurry (especially with de jure enactments of different levels of citizenship in many democracies), and electorally legitimated misogynist authoritarians shore up power in multiple Western and non-Western countries by combining neoliberalism and nationalism, we must eschew simplistic geopolitical imaginaries of cooperation and oppression and pay greater attention to the similarities as well as the differences across contexts.

…

Dr Nitasha Kaul (@NitashaKaul) is a multidisciplinary academic, novelist, and economist. She is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster in London. Links to her books and all her written and spoken work are at www.nitashakaul.com.

Comment by Riaz Haq yesterday

The Hindutva Lobby, by Andrew Cockburn

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/10/the-hindutva-lobby-hindu-nation...

In the summer of 2023, California legislators approved a bill banning discrimination on the grounds of caste. Defined in the bill as “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status,” caste is a central feature of life for hundreds of millions of people in India and beyond. The measure had been championed by California’s Dalit community. Once known as “untouchables,” Dalits occupy the bottommost rung of the Hindu hierarchy, and they have traditionally been confined to menial occupations on the fringes of Indian society, purely by virtue of their birth.

Dalits in California report that this ancient system has been imported to the United States where it remains prevalent in the Indian diaspora, including among those in the tech industry. “They say that in California this doesn’t exist,” declared the measure’s sponsor, State Senator Aisha Wahab. “If it doesn’t exist, then why do we have so many people advocating for the need of this bill?” (As if to corroborate Wahab’s allegations, Google had canceled a planned talk in 2022 by the Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, in reaction to the vehement objections posted on internal Google message boards that denounced her as “Hinduphobic”—a common defense against claims of casteism.) Despite furious opposition from leading figures in California’s Hindu tech community—such as Asha Jadeja Motwani, widow of the engineer who helped craft the original Google search algorithm—by September the measure had passed both House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities and was sent to Governor Gavin Newsom for his signature. While Newsom deliberated, Dalit activists, led by Soundararajan, waged a monthlong hunger strike outside the state legislature. Then, in October, Newsom announced that he was vetoing the bill. It was unnecessary, he claimed, because any discrimination was already covered by existing civil-rights laws.

Newsom’s decision took many by surprise, but others knew better. A month earlier, the ambitious governor, widely considered a future Democratic presidential candidate, flew to Chicago, where Joe Biden’s campaign had convened major donors for a meeting of the Biden Victory Fund PAC. Among them was Ramesh Kapur, a wealthy Massachusetts entrepreneur, whose voice and checkbook carry weight in the firmament of Democratic Party fundraising. In Chicago, Kapur made it clear to Newsom that he faced an important choice: if he ever hoped to secure Kapur’s support, he had better make the right decision on the caste bill. Kapur was hoping to encourage competition between Newsom and Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian. “I raised money for her when she ran for the Senate and the presidency,” Kapur told me. (His goal, he said, is to elect the first Indian-American president—“hopefully before I get reincarnated!”) “If you want to be our next president,” Kapur bluntly informed the governor, “veto the bill.”

Newsom received an equally unequivocal message from Ajay Jain Bhutoria, another major Biden fundraiser who had served as deputy finance chair of the Democratic Party. “We used very strong words,” Bhutoria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, later recounted on Twitter,

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