Israel and India: the wilful ignorance of a New Democrat

Since the terrorist attack on Indian tourists in Kashmir this week, in which two of the attackers were reported to be Pakistanis (which according to the Hindu nationalist/fascist government in India implicates the whole state of Pakistan), Zionists — Jewish and not, and in this case not — have sought to draw connections between India and Israel and Pakistan and the Palestinians, on count of both of the latter being Muslim (mostly in the case of Pakistan, more than half in the case of the Palestinians). I came across this profoundly ignorant tweet the other day, by someone who has spent the time since October 2023 gleefully repeating every bit of pro-Israel propaganda she can get her hands on while also cheering on Donald Trump’s repressions against anti-genocide protesters in the US:

India was formed in 1947, with Muslims going to Pakistan. They’ve been dealing with terrorism ever since. 

Israel was formed in 1948, with Muslims going to Palestine. They’ve been dealing with terrorism ever since.  

It’s so interesting to me that I’ve never heard anyone ask if India has a right to exist.

On this evidence, Brianna Wu seems to know nothing about the history of India and Pakistan, why Pakistan was formed and why there has been conflict between the two states intermittently since they were formed (as part of Britain’s withdrawal from its empire) which has ramped up in the past ten years or so. The conflict originated because the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir sided with India while its majority Muslim population sought to join Pakistan. Pakistan ended up with what are known as the “northern areas” as well as a small part of the Kashmir valley known as Azad (Free) Kashmir; India ended up with most of the valley, the majority Hindu Jammu area (the province is called Jammu and Kashmir) and Ladakh which is majority Tibetan Buddhist. However, this left a large population of Muslim Kashmiris marooned in India under an often oppressive occupation.

India has not “had to deal with terrorism ever since”. It does not have to maintain control over Kashmir; that is their choice. Whatever terrorism has taken place is not aimed at Indian Hindus for just being Indians or Hindus but at ending India’s occupation of Kashmir. It is also dwarfed by India’s violence against ordinary Kashmiris as well as that of the fascistic movement which rules a number of states in India and from which the prime minister, Narendra Modi, comes. To give a recent example from Kashmir itself, Indian troops have fired pellet guns at not only peaceful demonstrators but also ordinary people going about their business and even at people just looking out of their home windows, resulting in people losing their sight including some children. Over the years, Muslims in much of India, the north-west in particular but intermittently in other states (e.g. Karnataka in the south-west), have been subjected to a reign of terror which has included orchestrated pogroms with state collusion, lynchings of innocent Muslims (often on the pretext that they were in possession of beef), rapes (including gang rapes of both women and little girls), destruction of homes, mosques and businesses either by mob burnings or by legal and bureaucratic tricks, and deprivation of citizenship for Muslims living in border areas, particularly the border with Bangladesh. This has all been amply reported in the international media over many years; the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 by an organised Hindu mob made front-page news here in the UK. Ten years later came the Gujarat pogrom, in which there is clear evidence of state collusion.

There is another crucial difference between India and Israel, which is that the supremacist movement that dominates India is not based on a recent history of oppression or trauma. There is no Hindu equivalent of the Holocaust (not that the Palestinians are to blame for that; the country principally responsible is now on Israel’s side). Much like the Serbian nationalists in Europe, it exploits grievances from centuries and dynasties long past to foment hostility to their peaceful neighbours to further their eventual aim of a ‘pure’ Hindu nation. In more recent history, Hindus and Muslims (and Indians of other religions, such as Christians and Buddhists) were oppressed together by the British colonials: the exploitation of India’s resources to fuel the British industrial revolution (at the expense of India’s own industries), the punitive taxation, the regular famines (such as the one in eastern India in the 1940s which killed between 800,000 and 3.8 million) which have not reoccurred since independence. Muslims have in nothing like living memory oppressed Hindus in India, yet Hindu chauvinists find ways to whip up their flock to hate their Muslim neighbours.

Wu’s tweet also utterly overlooks the complexities of Partition. Muslims did not all just go to Pakistan; there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan. The majority of those who relocated were in the Hindi-speaking north of the country, and in Punjab and Bengal (the majority of Muslims here relocated to what is now Bangladesh, as did a large body of Muslims from Bihar, to the west of Bengal). Until the rise of the BJP and the associated fascist movement, many Indian Muslims considered their position to be superior to that of Pakistanis as India had remained a democracy, Muslim sensitivities were respected in law and customs that were different from those of Hindus remained legal, and the country was in some ways more prosperous than Pakistan (although there are more extremes of wealth and poverty than in Pakistan). Outside of Kashmir, there was no reason for there to be any terrorist campaign. It was Hindu fanatics who started one.

Brianna Wu is the same age as I am; she is old enough to have read of some of the major developments in the world’s biggest democracy in mainstream newspapers, radio and TV channels. She is choosing to gloss over the closest thing nowadays to a KKK-style regime of terror against a minority community, one that employs lynchings and mob violence on a regular basis while the authorities sit and watch, by portraying the victims as the terrorists. This is, of course, the history of her party, the US Democratic Party which ruled much of the United States (including her home state of Mississippi) on a similar basis, with African Americans disenfranchised and subject to mob violence, legally mandated segregation and public lynchings for several decades from the 1890s to the 1950s. (Wu is white; her husband is of Chinese background.) She has stated recently (after previously denying it) that she is considering another run for office, having been defeated in a primary in Massachusetts in 2018. If this is the future of American liberalism, a wilfully ignorant bigot who cheers on a criminal administration as they round up legal immigrants for lawful protest, denies an obvious genocide and pretends not to notice the state terror that threatens to lead to it in another country, one with a billion population where a ‘small’, less sophisticated genocide could claim more lives than the Holocaust, there really is no hope for her already benighted country.