As India under Modi openly embraces Israel, New Delhi appears to import more than just weapons.
Kashmir, spying, demolitions: How Modi’s India embraced ‘Israel model’
New Delhi, India – At a private event in November 2019, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s then consul general in New York, was caught on camera calling for New Delhi to adopt an “Israeli model” in Indian-administered Kashmir.
At the time, millions in Kashmir were already reeling under a crippling military lockdown and communication blackout: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian government had stripped the region of its semi-autonomous status months earlier, jailing thousands of people, including the region’s political leaders – even those who are pro-India.
The senior Indian diplomat was musing about Israel’s far-right settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, in reference to the resettling of thousands of Kashmiri Hindus, who had to flee their homeland in a 1989 exodus after an armed rebellion against Indian rule started in the Himalayan region.
“It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it,” Chakravorty told the gathering, adding that the Modi government was “determined” to do so.
Six years later, Chakravorty’s words ring truer than ever. As Modi prepares for his second visit to Israel starting on February 25, the two countries are bound by more than just friendship, trade and military partnerships – they are increasingly, say some analysts, also joined at the hip in certain facets of their models of governance.
Under Modi, India has openly embraced Israel – at the expense of its longstanding support for the Palestinian cause, say analysts. But New Delhi, they add, also appears to have imported multiple elements of Israel’s security and administrative approach to Palestinians, and unleashed them into its domestic policies since Modi took power in 2014.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has roots in a philosophy, Hindutva, that seeks to turn India into a Hindu nation and a natural homeland for Hindus anywhere in the world – similar to Israel’s view of itself as a Jewish homeland.
“The India-Israel relationship under Modi is a bond between two ideologies that see themselves as civilisational projects and Muslims as demographic and security threats,” said Azad Essa, author of the 2023 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel.
“The friendship works because they have similar supremacist ends,” Essa told Al Jazeera. “Under Modi, India and Israel became strategic partners, and Delhi began to see Israel as a template and as key to India’s move toward becoming a great power.”
One of the most apparent examples of India borrowing from Israel is the so-called “bulldozer justice” policy of Modi’s party.
Over the past decade, authorities in several BJP-ruled states have demolished the homes and shops of hundreds of Muslims and also razed multiple mosques. These demolitions have been carried out, for the most part, without legal notices being issued to occupants or owners of the establishments. They have usually followed religious tensions in the particular neighbourhood, or protests against Modi government policies – and sometimes, after just a local argument that had taken on religious overtones.
One of the BJP’s top leaders, Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, is now known by his supporters as “Bulldozer Baba” (Daddy Bulldozer).
It’s a leaf straight out of Israel’s playbook. Israel has demolished thousands of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and displaced their residents, making way for illegal Israeli settlements. And during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, almost all of the Palestinian territory’s homes, offices, hospitals, schools, universities and places of worship have been destroyed or badly damaged.
“The Hindu nationalist belief system is steeped in affinity for Zionism and Israel,” said Sumantra Bose, a political scientist whose work focuses on the intersection of nationalism and conflict in South Asia. “Generations of [Rashtriya SwayamSevak Sangh, the ideological fountainhead of the BJP] cadres, Modi included, have been indoctrinated in this ideology and have imbibed the love of Israel.”
The nation-state of Israel, which Bose characterised as majoritarian and supremacist, is the model Hindu nationalists are implementing in India in the Modi era, he argued. “The Israeli ideal finds reflection in many policies and measures of Modi’s government.”
