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For over a week now, Kashmir has been under a lockdown, cut off from the world, its political leaders under arrest and about million armed personnel deployed on its street to enforce a curfew. These repressive measures were set in place as the BJP-led government brought in a Presidential decree to remove the special status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian constitution. While such special provisions exist for other states too, abrogation of Article 370 has been a longstanding agenda of the Sangh parivar. This move opens the floodgates to change the demographic nature of the Muslim-majority state, one that has seen a three decades long conflict.
Modi government’s affinity with and admiration for apartheid Israel has never been as obvious as today. India is already the biggest buyer of Israeli weapons. It has given space and legitimacy to Israeli agrobusiness companies and state agencies that colonise Palestinian lands and steal their water, at the cost of Indian farmers reeling under a decades long agrarian crisis. And now, with its latest decision on Kashmir, India is preparing to physically turn Kashmir into West Bank.
In this context, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to visit India on September 9. For Netanyahu, this is part of campaigning for the upcoming elections in Israel as his party failed to form a coalition government in the previous round. For Modi and the BJP, this is a spectacle of its majoritarian agenda. Hindutva draws on and is the mirror image of Zionism in its anti-minority, supremacist ideology. And with abrogation of Article 370, the Modi government has just proven how desperately it wants India to be like Netanyahu’s Israel. Here we have Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian lawyer and author, on what brings Netanyahu and Modi together:
“I used to assume that in the complicated structure of a modern state like Israel’s it would not make a huge difference who serves as the Prime Minister. Surely it isn’t so.
When I consider Benjamin Netanyahu’s decade-long tenure as Prime Minister it is clear to me that we are much worse off than ever and that during all this period not a happy day has passed. The man has succeeded in killing all hope for a better future of peace and an end to the conflict in Palestine/Israel. Through his ways he shows how much easier it is to divide than to unite, to sow tension than to resolve conflict. And this he has done by capitalising on fear and encouraging the worst in his people. He has consistently refused all offers for a peaceful end to the conflict. His vision is a dark one and it has brought about dismal times.
In many of these ways he finds a congenial spirit in Narendra Modi. The two fortify each other in their urge to separate communities and stoke the causes of conflict, fear and war. When they meet in India next month, they have much to learn from each other and none of it will make the world a better place.”
