Historical erasure at India-Israel meet at IISc
On September 23, the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, hosted an Indo-Israeli business summit in its prestigious JN Tata Auditorium to deliberate on opportunities in the defence, energy, and water sectors.
Given the relentless mind-numbing news of the suffering deliberately unleashed by Israel on a whole population over the past year, the announcement of the summit caused outrage. It impelled an open letter by 1,500 signatories to the director of IISc, a protest by students on campus at the foot of the hallowed Tata statue, and a press conference by several concerned citizens at the institute’s entrance.
Widespread dismay was expressed at how an eminent national institution such as IISc could host an event that seeks to enhance bilateral ties with Israel in the military sector even as the relentless atrocities by the Israeli government on the Palestinian people continue, and how an institution that claims to uphold excellence in science and education could implicitly endorse the decimation of all educational institutions in Gaza. Was IISc oblivious to the world-wide condemnation of Israel’s actions by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations and the world-wide protests against the ongoing genocide and calls to withdraw arms supply? Was it ignoring the voices of its own students and the scientific fraternity? Did IISc forget that science disjoined from the ethical questions of its context can only lead to untold harm? Wouldn’t one expect IISc and the other hallowed institutions, viz., NIAS and IIM-Bangalore, whose faculty were speakers in the event, to exercise abundant caution before deliberating upon engaging in the military arena, when there have been widespread accusations that Israel has been using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons?
Post-facto, IISc supposedly “clarified” that it was merely renting out
its auditorium to paying customers — this does not cut much ice since EntIISc (an IISc entity) was a “campus partner” of the summit.
There is, however, another bizarre strand to the whole story. One of the sponsors of the summit was an entity called the Mysore Lancers Heritage Foundation. They customarily celebrate September 23 as “Haifa Day” to commemorate a battle in 1918 between the British Empire and the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Some Indians who were in the personal army of the then Maharaja of Mysore (a British princely state) were made to fight the Turkish Ottoman empire on behalf of Britain as part of its global colonial project. The British colonisers then commemorated the Mysore Lancers along with the Jodhpur and Hyderabad Lancers in a sculpture called the “Teen Murti” (i.e., three figures) in Teen Murti Bhavan, New Delhi, now a national museum.
Notwithstanding this colonial history, it is understandable that the descendants of the Mysore Lancers would like to celebrate the sacrifices and battlefield valour of their ancestors in the 1918 Battle of Haifa. Reportedly, some of the descendants have in their possession artefacts from this battle, such as a captured sword from an opponent who they killed in combat.
What is puzzling, however, is that the Mysore Lancers Heritage Foundation has been displaying the Israeli flag as part of their celebrations of Haifa Day at the Lancers memorial in Bengaluru. Haifa was in historical Palestine. It was not until three decades later that Haifa was occupied by the then newly declared state of Israel, during the 1948 Naqba. Furthermore, the Mysore Lancers were disbanded in 1920. Indeed, the Lancers memorial has engraved on it “Gaza - Meggido - Sharon - Damascus - Palestine” with no mention of Israel. Why then have their inheritors allowed their legacy to be appropriated by the state of Israel? The Battle of Haifa of 1918 primarily affected the Palestinian residents of Haifa, for better or worse. In 1948, most of them lost their homeland to the Israelis. Are their descendants also not the inheritors of memories of the 1918 event?
While the Mysore Lancers themselves historically took sides in battle as per their lords, what is it in that legacy that compels the Mysore Lancers Heritage Foundation to seek out an alliance with Israel that had no historical relevance to the Battle of Haifa of 1918? And now, what compels the Foundation to be oblivious to the actions of the current regime of Israel that has killed over 41,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children? Not only has the Foundation been displaying the Israeli flag at the annual celebration, but now it even co-organises a military-related business summit to coincide with Haifa Day! Isn’t this tantamount to incentivising profiteering from a genocide?
Clearly, the date of the trade summit hosted by the Indian Institute of Science was chosen to coincide with Haifa Day. The day’s summit was followed by an evening event that was seemingly a Haifa Day celebration but involved a speech by the Israeli diplomat stationed in Bengaluru on the Mysore Lancers. Is this then an attempt by Israel to legitimise itself by erasure of the history of India’s policy on Palestine by falsely claiming that there has been a tradition of support for the State of Israel right since 1918 (when it did not exist)?
Top leaders of the Karnataka government wriggled out of a most embarrassing knot in the nick of time by withdrawing from being speakers at the event. The drift of the “celebration” might align with one of the stated patrons of the summit, viz., Think India, which, on its website, claims to be an entity of the ABVP. But what of the other patrons of the India-Israel Business Summit? A global twist to the tale is the media report that the Indian embassy has been celebrating the Mysore Lancers valour on “Haifa Day” in Haifa! (Though not this year because of the circumstances.) Strange are these erasures of history and the complicity in it of our high-intellect IFS officers, IISc, and the Mysore Lancers inheritors. Do we charitably interpret this complicity as due to a forgivable brain-fade?
(The writer is an astrophysicist based in Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.)