Streaming on Netflix now is a harrowing documentary, Born in Gaza, which shows, in agonising first-person accounts, the stories of children who were victims of the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas. In the 7-week conflict, Palestinian children were killed, blinded, maimed, or orphaned and left desperate and alone. Yet, even these excruciating images pale compared to the colossal suffering of Palestinians in Gaza Strip today. The horrific attack on Israelis by Hamas on 7 October has spurred wave upon wave of Israeli retribution on Gaza. It is as if the world is suddenly divided into stark black and white in which every Palestinian is regarded as guilty and in which every Palestinian, young and old, must bear collective responsibility for the crimes of Hamas. Half the population of Gaza’s over two million are children. Every day, the world is seeing the immeasurable suffering of the young, grief stricken and broken, parents wailing inconsolably holding little shrouded bodies. As the adage runs, nobody wins a war, and everyone becomes a victim.
How does India navigate its way through this divided and difficult time for the world? Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often spoken of India being ‘Vishwaguru’. If India is to live up to that, our foreign policy needs to take a higher moral position than it has in the Modi years. Today, the high moralism of India’s international outlook of the 1950s and 60s has been lost in the pursuit of non-permanent pragmatism and stealthy realpolitik. In a polarised and traumatised world, too much deal-making calculation is hardly the mark of a ‘Vishwaguru’.
The Nehruvian policy of non-alignment was a moral statement by newly independent India. India would not partner with either of the rival superpowers in the Cold War but would pursue the path of global peace and justice. As Indira Gandhi famously replied, when asked which way India tilted: “India walks upright.”
Yet, non-alignment did not mean moral neutrality, or an amoral both-sidedness. Instead, Jawaharlal Nehru saw India’s foreign policy as a reflection of the ideals of India’s independence struggle: national self-determination for the oppressed, nonviolent struggle, and advocating the cause of world peace. For Nehru, India had a moral purpose in the world. Mahatma Gandhi’s tremendous stature as an advocate of peaceful struggle was to be harnessed to independent India’s global outlook and actions. India was non-aligned, but not amoral; India walked alone, but India stood for a moral world order, based on justice and the UN charter.
These high ideals are no longer in evidence. On October 27, India abstained from a UN General Assembly vote calling for an immediate and humanitarian truce in Gaza. India abstained, refusing to condemn Israel but also at the same time refusing to sympathise with the Palestinians in Gaza. India has similarly abstained from UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, neither openly siding with Russia nor lining up with the western democracies to censure the way Ukraine’s territorial integrity has been violated.
There is something wishy-washy and mealy mouthed about these abstentions. It’s as if India is hedging its bets, prevaricating, looking for a safe exit, sneakily wanting the benefits of ‘both-sidedness’ while avoiding the responsibility of taking a moral stand. Last year, Modi famously told Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Today’s era must not be of war.” But despite this headline statement, India has stopped short of public disapproval of Putin’s war and instead struck oil deals with Russia. In December 2022 alone, India bought 33 times more Russian oil than it had in the previous December.
In the Israel-Hamas war, the Modi government first rushed to stand in full support of Israel. Within hours of the Hamas attack on October 7, Modi tweeted his shock at the terrorist attack and announced India’s solidarity with Israel. Four days later, in a phone call with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Modi re-emphasised India’s support and tweeted, “India stands firmly with Israel in this difficult hour.” But a day later, perhaps waking up to the dangers of a backlash from the Arab world, India’s foreign ministry came up with a detailed explanation that stated that India’s decades-old position of supporting a sovereign independent Palestine remains unchanged. Modi’s rather hurried and reckless show of partisanship with Israel needed to be corrected later by the MEA and by the PM’s subsequent tweets on humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The Modi government has built bridges with Israel but at the same time reached out to the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE. However, India has failed to speak up at a time when reports say the death toll in Gaza has crossed 8,000, most of the dead being children and women.
India has long supported the Palestinian cause. Wrote Gandhi in 1938: “My sympathies are all with the Jews…but my sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice…Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English.” In 1974, India became the first non-Arab State to recognise the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and in 1980, full diplomatic recognition was given to the PLO when its office in Delhi was upgraded to an embassy. Then PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat was a regular visitor to India and even “wept like a baby” at Indira Gandhi’s funeral. The Gandhi-Nehruvian worldview has always insisted that the rights of the Palestinian people to their own land must be upheld. The RSS-Hindu nationalist worldview, by contrast, sees Israel as a buffer against the Islamic world. Modi was the first Indian PM to visit Israel in 2017 when pictures were publicised of a beachside “bromance” between Modi and Netanyahu. When Modi was Gujarat CM, after the Gujarat riots of 2002, Israel was one of the few countries that had welcomed him.
The Hamas attack on Israel was undoubtedly bestial and barbaric. But Israel is not Hamas. It is a settled democracy and as such it is incumbent on Israel to act according to international norms governing war, uphold the human rights of civilians, and act within the bounds of proportionality. Bombing Palestinian children in Gaza has caused shock and outrage across the world. In this situation, the Modi government’s pragmatist deal-making and transnationalism is jarring. Too much realpolitik has replaced the sense of moral purpose that is essential to a great nation’s foreign policy. India should stand for human rights, respect for civilian lives, observing proportionality and the norms of war. It cannot claim to be ‘Vishwaguru’ if it is devoid of a moral compass itself or cannot provide one to the world.
(The writer is a senior journalist and commentator based in Delhi)