Ariel
Sharon had a way of talking peace when he meant the opposite. His stated
purpose in going on a wander about the premises of Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque
in September 2000 was to make a case for peace. And from behind massed ranks of
grim, heavily armed security personnel guarding his promenade around one of
Islam’s most hallowed spots, he did manage to mouth a few pieties on peace into
the scrum of media microphones that loyally followed in lockstep behind the
security detail. Unsurprisingly, the immediate outcome of the Sharon ramble was
an explosion of suppressed rage among the Palestinian people that the thuggish
soldier turned politician had spent all his mature years devising ways of
removing from the land he imagined as the indivisible patrimony of the Jewish
people.
First
protests were met with brute force. Mourning rituals for those killed in
asserting the claim to a Palestinian homeland, merged into the spiral of rage.
All of Palestine was soon in a state of full-fledged insurrection. That, we are
told by a comprehensive study of the charade of the U.S.-sponsored “peace
process” in Palestine and its ignominious end, may well have been the tacit
calculation of Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak in indulging Sharon’s
instinct to trample over the territory of an enemy faith. Palestinian factions
most amenable to peace had just thrown up their arms in despair at the derisory
and mean-spirited offer made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp
David peace summit in July 2000. And to retrieve political advantage, Israel sorely
needed to prove that Palestinians could never be a credible partner for peace.
Streets seething with rage were seen as a useful accessory in pursuing that
agenda.[1]
Sharon
enjoyed Barak’s unstated patronage in calling forth this final showdown before
the peace process was formally administered its last rites. He soon ascended to
the Prime Ministerial position, after general elections that fed into the
prevailing mood of paranoia. From then on, there was no talk of peace, only of
“unilateral separation” on terms that Israel would impose. In the twilight
years of his career, Sharon had opted for the lesser act of brutality as his
parting gift to the Palestinians, since expulsion -- always his first
preference -- was clearly infeasible. From being a region under active military
occupation, Gaza was transformed into the world’s largest prison, garrisoned
through air and sea-power and remote-controlled weaponry. And the West Bank was
transformed into a maze of roads and settlements of Jewish exclusivity guarded
by an apartheid wall of hideous concrete snaking through its length.
Sharon’s
first known entry in the register of crimes against humanity can be traced to 1953,
when he was a newly commissioned officer in the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and carried
out an armed raid in the village of Qibya, killing sixty-nine Palestinians,
mostly women and children. The purpose evidently, was didactic: to underline
that Palestinians displaced from their homeland by the last kick of Britain’s
colonial mandate, should not make too strong a point about return and
restitution. As he moved up the military hierarchy, he became a highly valued
hit-man for the Israeli political leadership, always willing to fulfil their
deepest wishes, though without the formal instructions that would encumber them
with moral responsibility. No such convenience was afforded him when the Sabra
and Shatila massacres of 1982 occurred under his watch as Defence Minister. Indicted
by a commission of inquiry and compelled to serve a longish political exile, he
managed a rehabilitation without really seeming to seek one. He was just too
integrally connected to the thuggish, terrorist personality of the state of
Israel, to be too long in the wilderness. And once having ascended to the
office of Prime Minister, Sharon was not about to retreat from the path of
bloodsoaked violence.[2]
In
September 2003, Ariel Sharon came calling in Delhi, in a visit touted as a historic
first for an Israeli Prime Minister in India. The day before he was scheduled
to land, a commentator in India’s largest English language newspaper acclaimed
his visit as an occasion to “finally put behind us a dreary chapter in the
history of our relations with the outside world”. India’s longstanding refusal
to do business with Israel, he said, might once have had a purpose: it “took
care” of India’s oil imports, “ensured” jobs for thousands of citizens in the
Gulf, and “kept afloat” the foreign exchange situation. But that was only part
of the story. The other side, perhaps the decisive influence in determining
decades of estrangement between India and Israel, was more unsavoury: “dogmatic
anti-Americanism fanned by fellow-travelling academics, politicians and
bureaucrats to ensure Soviet support for our foreign policy objectives and the
desperate need that avowedly secular parties felt to keep on the good side of
the Muslim electorate”. This “vote bank phenomenon”, accounted for India’s
“refusal to build bridges with Israel” – a “vibrant democracy” that it shared
core values with -- and its willingness to be best friends intimate with “tinpot
dictators and sundry sheikhs”.[3]
On
the day of Sharon’s arrival, another major English-language newspaper ran a
commentary which purported to see amid all the apparent differences, certain key
points of convergence between India and Israel: “... two nations. One large and
the other so diminutive that it appears as a mere dot on the map. Both contain
within their boundaries so many diversities. And yet, both exhibit several
similarities: the fight against terrorism being perhaps the foremost of them”.[4]
In
their tone, these commentaries foretold most of the themes that were played out
during the Sharon visit. A common commitment to democratic pluralism and shared
concerns over terrorism were ostensibly two powerful solvents that at long
last, were wiping away the legacy of estrangement between India and Israel. In brief
and heavily guarded moments in the public eye, these were precisely the themes
that Sharon underlined. Following the accustomed ritual Sharon was compelled
among his first public engagements to pay a call on Rajghat, India’s memorial
for Mahatma Gandhi. Having paid ostentatious homage to the message of peace
with rose petals strewn over the spot where the Mahatma was cremated, Sharon wrote
the following few lines in the visitor’s book: “From Jerusalem, the city of
peace, eternal capital of the Jewish people, I bring you a message of hope and
peace. Today Israel and India are embattled democracies, sharing values and the
challenge of terrorism. United in our quest for life, liberty and peace our
joint determination to fight for these values can inspire our hopes for a
better future for our people”.[5]
As
during his walkabout in the Al Aqsa compound, the pieties at Rajghat issued from
behind a heavy security blanket. Local police took over the venue many hours in
advance and traffic on main thoroughfares leading there was stopped an hour
ahead of Sharon’s arrival. It was a harrowing experience which top officials of
the police admitted, they were happy to see an end to.
After
it all, a curiosity persisted and an enormous, unresolved incongruity. The man
that Sharon paid florid homage to at Rajghat was best remembered for his insistence
on the peaceful attainment of political ends, for his deep religious beliefs
which coexisted with a wide and generous ecumenism in matters of faith. And
even if these aspects of Gandhi’s legacy could be submerged in the empty ritualism
that diplomacy today thrives on, Sharon surely could not have been unaware of
the views on Palestine of the man whose memorial he was at. This is an aspect
of Gandhi’s political legacy on which there is absolutely no ambiguity. From
the time of the Balfour declaration promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine,
to the very eve of the creation of Israel, Gandhi remained a resolute opponent
of the forcible expropriation of the Arabs from their land by terrorism and military
coercion, tactics that reached their very acme in the person of Ariel Sharon.
In
1921, soon after the Balfour declaration and the revelations of the Sykes-Picot
agreement had brought to light the devious imperial game-plan for the Arab
lands, Gandhi had this to say: “So far as I am aware, there never has been any
difficulty put in the way of Jews and Christians visiting Palestine and
performing all their religious rites. No canon, however, of ethics or war can
possibly justify the gift by the Allies of Palestine to Jews”.[6] It
is true that Gandhi’s principal concern here was not the territorial integrity
of Arab lands, but preservation of the institution of the “Khalifa”, putatively
the spiritual guardian of the Islamic faith. In this respect, Gandhi’s priorities
seemed to fit the description of what revisionist historians today would term
the theme of “appeasement” of the Indian Muslim. Indeed, Gandhi explicitly
refers to the need to “placate” the “Indian Mussalman”, for which a necessary
condition would be the preservation of the “Island of Arabia” (sic) under
“exclusive Mussalman control ... and under the spiritual sovereignty of the
Khalifa”. This effort to forge a cross-confessional alliance in India using unrelated
and disparate issues to appeal to different partners, has often been criticised
as one among a succession of political blunders, born in Gandhi’s belief that
all politics is a variety of religious faith.
The
jury is still out on the strategic wisdom of Gandhi’s espousal of the cause of
the Islamic Khalifa. Charges of pandering to extreme religious chauvinism have
been levelled against him, but these typically, have come from those who would
rather overlook the contribution that Hindu extremism made to India’s bitter
communal estrangement during the 1920s. What is relevant is that Gandhi
retained till his last days, his conviction that the Zionist colonisation of
Palestine was an unqualified wrong. His most famous locutions on this matter of
course, date from 1938, when the Palestinian intifada against the expropriation of their land was raging and the
Jewish influx was rising to a flood – aided as we shall see, by a policy of
relocation actively sponsored by Nazi Germany. Asked to clarify his point of
view, he said, famously, that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense
that England belongs to the English or France to the French”. It was “wrong and
inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs”. The colonisation of Palestine by the
Zionists could not be “justified by any moral code of conduct”. And the
ostensible “mandate” under which it was being carried out had “no sanction but that
of the last war”. The programme of reducing the Arabs to an alien presence in
their own land was in this respect, little less than “a crime against
humanity”.[7]
In
the twilight of the British mandate in Palestine, when the imperial power was
in the throes of its ignominious scuttle, unmindful of the political and humanitarian
disaster it was leaving behind, Gandhi chided the Zionists for “seeking to
impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with
the aid of naked terrorism”.[8] And
in one of his last public statements on the issue, he responded with little
equivocation when asked the best way out of the spiralling crisis in Palestine:
“The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence”.[9]
Evidently,
Gandhi’s abiding solidarity with the Palestinians had nothing to do with
political constituency building or pandering. It was simply the spontaneous
reaction of a fighter against colonialism, who saw the same malign practices
that had fettered his people, refurbished and implemented elsewhere. A point
expressed in various ways over the years, was put with appropriate clarity in a
1979 work by the great Palestinian scholar, Edward Said. Literary creations and
social commentary in Europe, through the years when Zionism as an ideology was
in its formative phase, saw it as a movement of redemption, of bringing vast
expanses of territory into the benign embrace of civilisation. That these
territories were inhabited by people with their own cultures and traditions, and
ideas about how to forge their destinies, was simply not admitted into the
realm of possibility. Thus, Palestine was a “land without a people” destined to
be settled and civilised by “a people without a land”. “Zionism appealed to a
European audience for whom the classification of overseas territories and
natives into various uneven classes was canonical and ‘natural’. That is why,
for example, every single state or movement in the formerly colonised
territories of Africa and Asia today identifies with, fully supports, and
understands the Palestinian struggle”.[10]
Said
wrote at a time when Third World governments still retained some sense of anchorage
in the ethos of their national liberation movements. But the glow was rapidly
fading. The economic crises that many of these countries sank into over the
1980s, was apt reflection of the underlying moral bankruptcy of their ruling
elites. And as they began flailing desperately in an effort to regain the
legitimacy forged for the most part in struggles against colonialism, there
seemed only one way forward, involving the ardent embrace of the mantra of progress in a free enterprise
world, where every country would get ahead to the extent that it enjoyed the
benediction of the U.S. Considerably strengthened by the resurgence of a vein
of Islamophobia that had briefly remained buried in these countries – India
included – this became the determinant of a new attitude, which viewed Israel not
as unlawful coloniser of another people’s land, but as long-lost friend.
The motif of “Muslim appeasement” as a force
retarding India’s quest for its rightful place in the world, was raised to the
status of official policy when Jaswant Singh, then External Affairs Minister,
visited Israel in July 2000. Deliberations during this visit focused on moving
the military and strategic relationship between India and Israel several
notches higher. And on his triumphal return, Jaswant Singh put down India’s
unreasonable hostility to Israel to the domestic politics of cultivating the
Muslim vote. Jaswant Singh had been preceded by a few weeks in Israel by his
cabinet colleague at the time, Home Minister L.K. Advani, principal political
ideologue of his party through the 1980s and beyond, and key architect of the
“Hindutva” platform, which set itself up as a quest for enthroning the
authentic cultural identity of the nation, ostensibly buried under the debris
of minority appeasement.[11]
Sharon’s
homily on terrorism at Rajghat tapped into a quite different political
tradition than that identified with the man memorialised there. It was eloquent
homage though, to a state system that had in deluded pursuit of international
recognition, successfully interred the ideals that brought the nation into
existence.
Islamophobia
is a thread that runs through India’s modern history, notably among those who sought
to put down the indignities of colonialism, to the loss of its primordial
cultural identity. This fall of the nation was in turn the consequence of the intrusion
of the Islamic cultural strain under the sword-arm of conquest. Like Zionism,
Hindu revivalism came in a spectrum of shades. In the more moderate variants, it
took the shape of a quest for a golden past that could be recreated in modern
times. Typical in this regard was the Arya Samaj, a social reform movement that
gained roots in India’s Punjab region in the late-19th century. Like
many such movements from the time, the Arya Samaj drifted into quite distinct
streams by the early years of the 20th century. One of these sought
“political solutions to the problems that faced the Hindu community” and
“merged with a broader Hindu consciousness”. Another strain retained a “more
religious and devotional vision” and sought to “create a new man, the Arya
Hindu and a new world for him to inhabit”. This was an ideological and political
tendency that worked through active processes of defence of the community (“prachar”) and conversion of those who
had strayed into other faiths (“shuddhi”).[12]
Writing in 1902, Lala Lajpat Rai – an early
lion of Indian nationalism, nurtured in the political cradle of the Arya Samaj
-- was at pains to refute the common supposition that Hinduism is “devoid of
any basal principles on which the foundations of a church national could be laid”. The accusation that Hinduism was
not a unified religion but a wide congeries of myths and beliefs, often
inconsistent and incommensurable, was devoid of all validity. Hinduism had a
“pivot” and that was and would remain, the Veda. “Philosophers and
non-philosophers, Vishnuits and Sivaits (sic) all echo the word Veda..”, said
Rai. In a later work, also written in 1902, Rai challenged the notion that “the
idea of Nationality is an essentially European and modern idea”. The Hindus
were a nation from the earliest origins of the faith and there was no substance
in the argument that they did not merit this status by their failure over
history to establish themselves as an autonomous political entity. The mere
fact that such a question could be posed, he said, meant that “Hindus” as a distinct
body within society always existed in history. “We cannot deny the existence of
a nation simply because all the members of that nation did not join in the
struggle for defence, or that some of them seceded or proved traitors, or
joined the enemy’s camp”. “Nor can we deny the existence of the sentiment of
nationality, because that sentiment was not sufficiently strong and marked to
overcome all differences, among the different numbers of that nation, to enable
them to stand as one man in defence of national interests..... If in 1193
providence decreed the fall of the Hindus, that alone is not sufficient to
justify us in damning the Hindus of that period as men who were totally bereft
of the sentiment of nationality”.[13]
Tellingly,
the “fall of the Hindus” is ascribed to the date of Islam’s advent in India’s
northern plains. In the years that followed his early writings on Hindu
nationalism, as competitive politics expanded in scope, Rai spoke of the
unfettered exercise of rights by all communities as cause of the attendant
surge in communal violence. A doctrine of rights had been implanted with
mischievous intent by western civilisation, when Indian traditions placed
emphasis on the duties of man. Rai took note of Gandhi’s suggestion that Hindus
should honour their duty towards other faiths. Those of the Muslim faith had an
aversion to loud revelry outside their places of worship, which imposed in
Gandhi’s vision, a duty on the Hindu to maintain silence outside an Islamic
mosque at all times. Lajpat Rai found this attitude lacking in symmetry, since Gandhi
did not at any point, administer “similar admonition to the Muslims”.[14]
Rai also
took issue with Gandhi’s effort to promote unity among Hindus and Muslims on
the platform of the Khilafat campaign. Reliance on the theme of the Khilafat,
which recruited Muslim loyalty to the cause of a supranational, alien
institution, was totally out of place for the Indian nationalist cause. This
tendency for the Indian Muslim to respond to an extra-territorial call, put his
place in India on a different plane than the Hindu’s, who had no other space on
earth to call his own. And from his travels through some parts of the erstwhile
Ottoman empire that just preceded these 1924 writings, Lajpat Rai had found
that pan-Islamic bonding was really an illusion conjured up by self-serving
religious leaders. Palestine was a case in point. “In Palestine the Muslims are
an overwhelming majority over the Jews”, he observed: “Christian Europe is
creating a strong and well-protected Ulster in Palestine, which leaves almost
no hope of the Muslims ever regaining their lost position of supremacy.
Everywhere one sees well-built and well-equipped colonies of Jews springing up
with their own highly efficient educational and philanthropic institutions and
with their equally efficient industrial concerns. They are fast buying lands of
Muslims and Christians. Money is pouring in from America and Europe. The only ‘disconcerting’
feature is that it is only the poorer class of the Jews and the oppressed
members of the race that are emigrating to Palestine for permanent settlement”.[15]
Rai
is careful not to state an opinion on the Jewish influx into Palestine under
western colonial sponsorship, but he does seem to view it as a most useful
antidote to the deep malaise of pan-Islamism, which seriously afflicted the
prospect of national unity in India. As a pragmatic politician committed to
constitutional means, Rai was disinclined to follow the more extreme elements
of the Arya Samaj in advocating the “shuddhi”
of the Muslims in Punjab and the North-West Frontier, to secure the frontiers
of the Indian nation. The “shuddhi”
programme was a key contributor to a surge of communal animosity, provoking the
countervailing mobilisations of “tablighi”
by the Muslims. Competitive politics was making its entry into India under the
colonial dispensation and strength was seen to lie in numbers. Unlike Mahatma
Gandhi, who found the shuddhi ritual
singularly unappealing, as too the counterpart movements among Muslims, Rai was
quite unequivocal that it was there to stay. There was no way that the Hindus
could be swayed from the political programme of augmenting their numbers by
bringing communities that had strayed – such as the Malkana Rajputs -- back to
the faith.
These
shades of opinion within Hindu revivalism corresponded, though not always
exactly, to a similar differentiation within Zionism. Theodore Herzl is seen as
representing mainstream Zionism but he was always in competition with other
approaches. A more benign variant originated in Eastern Europe with the Russian
born Asher Ginsburg (better known by his Hebrew pen-name Ahad Ha’am), who broke
bitterly with the Zionist strategy of actively cultivating the patronage of
western powers to facilitate the colonisation of Palestine. Ha’am saw the mission
of Jewish civilisation not as a programme of colonisation but as a spiritual
revival without a necessary territorial component. He warned repeatedly against
the Zionist practice of writing native Palestinians out of their history and
territory, foreseeing bitter strife as the inevitable consequence of the forced
expropriation of another people’s land. Herzl dismissed him as an impractical
and woolly headed idealist, famously pointing out that the Jewish people, with their
facility in arithmetic, would have little difficulty figuring out how long it
would take them to claim a homeland of their own if they were to follow the glacial
pace of settlement Ha’am advocated.[16]
Since
Herzl’s death at a relatively young age and especially since achieving the
signal triumph of securing the Balfour declaration, the Zionist movement split
over strategic perceptions. Chaim Weizmann and others – who were branded,
rather inaccurately, as Ha’am’s successors – favoured working closely with
Britain and France to secure the ends of a Jewish homeland. The other main faction
headed by the Russian Vladimir Jabotinsky, insisted on an accelerated pace of
colonisation, aided if necessary by governments and armed movements in eastern
Europe that had been among the most resolutely anti-Semitic in both ideology
and practice. Jabotinsky’s effort to secure the active support of a rabidly
anti-Semitic Ukrainian armed group, then deeply committed in the civil war
against the Bolshevik revolutionaries, for an accelerated programme of Jewish
transfer to Palestine, enraged others within the Zionist movement, contributing
among a host of other factors, to his formal break from mainstream Zionism.[17]
This
willingness to barter and deal with even the most hostile and virulently nationalistic
elements, persisted long into the career of Zionism. In many senses, Zionism
identified as a a greater enemy than anti-Semitism, the assimilationist
tendency among European Jewry, which saw the future as one of striving towards
a universal and inclusive culture that all could partake of, irrespective of
ethnicity. Despite Herzl’s concerted campaign to drum up outrage over the
persecution of a Jewish officer in the French army – in what came to be called
the “Dreyfuss affair” – and the continuing threat of pogroms in Russia and its
wider zone of influence, Jews were not signing on to the Zionist project in the
numbers that he expected. The far-right nationalists of Ukraine and Poland had
in this respect, an identity of interests with the Zionists in seeking a
thinning down – or even an eventual effacement – of the Jewish presence in
their territories. The triumph of Nazism in Germany was a final moment of
vindication for Zionism. As the author and biographer Emil Ludwig, then a recent convert to Zionism put
it: “So many of our German Jews were hovering between two coasts; so many of
them were riding the treacherous current between the Scylla of assimilation and
the Charybdis of a nodding acquaintance with Jewish things. Thousands who
seemed to be completely lost to Judaism were brought back to the fold by
Hitler, and for that I am personally very grateful to him”.[18]
Chaim Nachmann Bialik, a Russian Jew who is recognised as the poet-laureate of
Zionism, put it with an eloquent economy of words: “Hitlerism has perhaps saved
German Jewry, which was being assimilated into annihilation”.[19]
It
was this bizarre conflation of seeming opposites, the identity of interests
between the brutal Nazi regime and the political campaign for a Jewish homeland
that Hannah Arendt reflected over as she watched the trial of the notorious
death camp commandant Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1962. Eichmann’s defence
was that far from being an enemy of the Jews, he was their most ardent ally. He
had attended a commemoration of the thirty-five year anniversary of Herzl’s
death in 1939 and remonstrated very strongly with Nazi youth who had vandalised
his grave-site in Vienna. He had thrown himself into the project of relocating
Germany’s Jews in a homeland of their choice: first Palestine and when that
proved difficult because of British ambivalence, other parts of Europe and the
distant shores of Madagascar. The Zionists were in Nazi perceptions, Jews they
could do business with. The larger Jewish organisations, which sought to combat
the growing tide of anti-Semitism, were seen as enemies of the German Nazi State
which it could not possibly engage with in any meaningful manner. Between 1933
and 1938, an agreement between the Zionists and the Nazi regime for the
transfer of Germany’s Jewish population to Palestine, worked with great
efficacy, beating the economic sanctions imposed on Germany and contributing to
a substantial accretion in Zionist numbers and economic assets in the
territory. When the Nazi gaze turned east with the invasion of the Soviet
Union, the regime found many more Jewish people coming under the putative “area
of German influence in Europe”, making both relocation and concentration infeasible.
The first and second options had to be abandoned and the “final solution” of mass
extermination brought into active play.[20]
Eichmann
claimed at his trial to have been appalled at the orders he received from on
high. But as a loyal citizen of the German Reich and a bureaucrat concerned
about career advancement, he fell in line with due deference to authority. As
recounted at his trial in Jerusalem, his ardour in enforcing the “final
solution” did not lessen his admiration for the Jewish people, or diminish the
sincerity with which he had partaken of the Zionist project of colonising
Palestine. On this narration of a dark chapter of twentieth century history
with its kernel of partial truth and its deep moral ambivalences, on this
arrangement of mutual convenience between political forces that have since then
sought to portray themselves as resolute opposites, Arendt quotes a study of
the early phase Hitler’s Germany by a team of Jewish historians: “Thus, what
must have been one of the most paradoxical episodes of the entire period of the
Nazi regime began: the man who was to go down in history as one of the
arch-murderers of the Jewish people entered the lists as an active worker in
the rescue of Jews from Europe”.[21]
As Hindu
nationalist ideology moves into its more extreme fringes, its inherent
paradoxes stand out with similar starkness. These are articulated by the early
pioneers of the ideology in the confident belief that in the prevalent mood of
facing down a common enemy in Islam, minor doctrinal inconsistencies would be
of no consequence. As India under colonial rule lurched from the bitter
aftermath of the collapse of the Khilafat agitation, into an extended phase of
bitter communal estrangement, the notion of a country inhabited by two nations
became widely accepted, crystallised especially in two political vehicles: the
Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). A text published in
1939 by M.S. Golwalkar, a year before he took over the leadership of the RSS,
remains one of the most authoritative statements on Hindu nationalism, offering
rich insights in its comments on contemporary world events, into the
ideological pantheon that it drew sustenance from.
Golwalkar’s
statements lauding Nazi Germany for its virulent manifestation of “race pride”,
which led to the expulsion of the Jews despite the world recoiling in horror at
the enormity of the deed, are widely cited. These offer eloquent testimony in
themselves, but only tell the full story when juxtaposed against the
observations on Zionism that the same text offers. Golwalkar identifies India
as one among the early nations to afford sanctuary to the Jews after their
country passed into Roman tyranny, though the greater dispersal in his view
occurred when the “engines of destruction ... under the name of Islam” were let
loose in the land. Palestine in this sense, suffered much like India did,
losing its culture and traditions on account of the intrusions of Islam:
“Palestine became Arab, a large number of Hebrews changed faith and culture and
language and the Hebrew nation in Palestine died a natural death”. But hope was
not lost, since the “attempt at rehabilitating Palestine with its ancient
population of the Jews is nothing more than an effort to reconstruct the broken
edifice and revitalise the practically dead Hebrew National life”. Nationalism
for Golwalkar was a compound of religion, culture and language, which he found
somehow lacking in Palestine. All three attributes though, were on display
among the Jews, who unfortunately, lacked a territory. It was entirely appropriate
then, that “in order to confer their lost Nationality upon the exiled Jews, the
British with the help of the League of Nations, began to rehabilitate the old
Hebrew country, Palestine, with its long lost children”. “The Jews”, said
Golwalkar, “had maintained their race, religion, culture and language: all they
wanted was their natural territory to complete their Nationality”.[22]
Golwalkar’s
attitude towards India’s Muslims is well known and recorded: they could either
adopt the Hindu religion and all its customs, learn to glory in its heritage,
or live on sufferance, “wholly subordinated ... claiming nothing, deserving no
privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights”.[23] India
did not quite take that path, though “Guruji” as he is referred to in RSS
circles, should be credited with a remarkably accurate forecast of what life
for the Palestinians would be after the Zionist takeover of their land.
Towards
the mid-1980s, as the political consensus forged through India’s struggle
against colonialism and the subsequent effort at “nation-building” through
centralised planning and administration fell apart, Golwalkar’s vision began
its journey back towards the mainstream. Resurgent Hindu nationalism charged that
decades of rule under the Congress party which claimed – spuriously at the best
of times – to have inherited the mantle of the liberation struggle, had
enshrined the denial of India’s primordial cultural solidarity as a governing
virtue. As the decade wore on and the troubles in Punjab added to existing
headaches in Kashmir and the North-East, indicating how tenuous the integration
of religious minorities into the national mainstream had been, an embattled
ruling elite in India stood in need of a coercive state ideology to restore
order. Hindutva filled that need. And as the country lurched towards its most
serious economic crisis in decades late in the 1980s, the state itself felt
compelled to shed its pretence towards being an agency for the welfare and
development of all. From then on, it was each for himself and the devil take
the hindmost. This shredding in domestic policy of all norms of equity and
justice, created beyond Indian shores, the climate for a warming towards the
U.S. and Israel. Restoring the foundational values of equity and justice to
India’s overseas engagements is partly about political activism in the domestic
arena, partly about solidarity actions with global civil society actors.
[1] Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine,
How to End the War of 1948, LeftWord Books, Delhi, 2003; especially chapter
III.
[2] Nur Masalha, A Land Without a
People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians, 1949-96, Faber and Faber,
London, 1997, provides details of Sharon’s military exploits: p 89 for Qibya
massacre; pp 34, 150 and 160 for his attempts at various times to put into
action an expulsion plan.
[3] Dileep Padgaonkar, “Shalom! Ariel Sharon”, The Times of India, Delhi edition, 8 September 2003, editorial
page; extracted on 15 January 2013 from: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2003-09-07/all-that-matters/27211135_1_palestinians-hamas-israelis.
[4] Manish Pant, “The Israel Question”, The
Hindustan Times, Delhi, 9 September 2003, editorial page.
[5] A
description of the visit and remarks entered in the visitors’ book can be found
at the news website Rediff: “Sharon pays homage to Mahatma Gandhi”, September 9
2003, extracted on January 15 2013 from: http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/sep/09sharon2.htm.
[6]
“Interview to the Daily Herald”,
March 16 1921, Collected Works of Mahatma
Gandhi, (Electronic Book), Publications Division, Delhi, (hereafter CWMG), available at: http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html, Volume 22, p 429. All citations from this source are made with due
regard to the caveats entered at this website address, which also has a
reference to the controversial effort to publish a new edition of the CWMG to
replace the authoritative version commissioned in 1956 and published in full by
1994.
[11] See the
news report datelined 11 July 2000 by Ranjit Devraj of the news agency IPS
following Jaswant Singh’s visit to Israel, extracted on 15 January 2013 from: http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/BG11Df01.html.
[12] Kenneth W. Jones, Arya Dharm:
Hindu Consciousness in 19th Century Punjab, University of
California Press, 1976, p 310-1.
[13] Lala Lajpat Rai, “The Religious Unity of Hinduism” and “A Study of Hindu
Nationalism”, in Writings and Speeches,
Volume I, University Publishers, Delhi, 1966, pp 32, 38.
[14] Lala Lajpat Rai, “The Hindu-Muslim Problem”, in Writings and Speeches, Volume II, University Publishers, Delhi,
1966, p 184.
[16] Yitzhak
Conforti, “East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the
Zionist vision?”, Nations and Nationalism,
Volume 16, Issue 2, pages 201–219.
[17] See Colin Shindler, The Triumph of
Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right, IB
Taurus, London, pp 41-2.
[20] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in
Jerusalem: Notes on the Banality of Evil, (Amazon eBook), chapters I to IV.
[21] Ibid, chapter
IV.
[22] M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our
Nationhood Defined, Delhi, 1939; for the lines on Nazi Germany, see p 35.
For the endorsement of Zionism, pp 20, 27 and 30.
