Links: Unpacking India-Israel ties, Yamini Aiyar on CPR and understudied Indian thinkers

Plus, an Uzbeki celebration.

India Inside Out begins 2024 after a bit of a hiatus. Our last edition was way back in October, and the big gap certainly wasn’t because of a dearth of news stories relevant to India watchers.

Indeed, in the interim we had election results in five Indian states (with the BJP winning Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, the Congress taking Telangana, and the upstart Zoram People’s Movement clocking a victory in Mizoram). Meanwhile, the US announced charges against an Indian citizen, accused of working with an unnamed Indian official to assassinate a Khalistani separatist on American soil, the Indian Supreme Court declined to legalise same-sex marriages, more than 140 members of Parliament were suspended during the Winter Session for protesting against a security breach on the premises – and India lost the cricket World Cup final. I’ll try and include some links to pieces on some of these subjects in a future round-up for anyone who missed out on analysis.

This year begins with preparations for the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya – built on the site of a medieval mosque illegally demolished by right-wing Hindutva activists in 1992 – and all the political maneuvering that comes ahead of General Elections due by May 2024.

I’d like to apologise for the long break in India Inside Out issues, caused in part because of work I was doing elsewhere – which I’ll link to below – and in part because of bad planning on my part around our family trips. To make up for our radio silence, I offer you this picture of a turtle from a diving adventure in Marsa Alam on the Red Sea.

The plan is for India Inside Out to be much more regular over 2024, not least because it is an election year and there will be much to discuss, examine and explain. I hope to continue doing regular explanatory pieces on key topics of interest emerging from India, link round-ups to the most interesting writing on India and interviews on subjects dear to my heart that may not be in the news, most notably history and, given my current perch in Egypt, India’s relations with the Arab world.

Plus, of course, links to my work elsewhere. On that note:

India’s ties with Israel

For Himal Southasian, I looked at India’s growing ties with Israel over the past few decades and the Hindu nationalist embrace of right-wing Israeli talking points, by way of reviewing Azad Essa’s Hostile Homelands.

“Two post-partition democratic states, both products of British colonialism. Each featuring within their territories sizeable Muslim minority populations, which are frequently depicted by majoritarian forces as “the enemy”. Both ruled by right-wing governments that deploy surveillance technology with impunity and brazenly seek to undermine democratic institutions that might otherwise act as a check on their power. And both currently dominated by social and political movements that assert claims of civilisational superiority, predicated on the idea that this sets them apart from “barbaric” neighbours.

As many have observed, the India and Israel of today bear striking similarities – a fact reflected and amplified by the wholehearted recent embrace of Israel by Indian Hindu nationalists. Ever since Israel began bombing Gaza and invaded the territory in response to the brutal Hamas attack on its soil on 7 October, Hindu nationalists have been out in force online – and sometimes in person – advertising their support for and solidarity with Israel.

…

Members of India’s Hindu nationalist ecosystem see in Israel a model for the India they seek to build: an ethno-nationalist, illiberal democracy that treats its Muslim minority as subordinate to the majority, and maintains Western support regardless. As the researcher Angshuman Choudhury has written, “In the Zionist project, the modern Hindu nationalist elite sees a tangible conclusion of its own Hindu Rashtra blueprint. Israel shows that [this] isn’t an abstract dream; that there is a step-by-step means to the end.” 

The piece doesn’t just cover the ideological convergence between the ruling elites in both nations. It also sketches out the expansion in defence and economic ties – which are a crucial part of the India-Israel story ever since relations between the two nations were normalised in 1992 – and the way that these developments fit into India’s broader policy towards West Asia/the Middle East.

India’s Israel policy has always been fascinating. Initially, because of the extremely unusual position New Delhi took in recognising the state but not establishing normal relations with it for four decades, and then for the switch that took place in the 1990s, with ties then being supercharged by the current government. There are many elements that deserve closer scrutiny: How the BJP government integrates foreign policy into its domestic narratives, what the embrace of Tel Aviv may mean for India’s ties with other Arab states and the millions of Indians who live in West Asia, how the Indian state is deploying Israeli surveillance technology and what the Israel relationship tells us about New Delhi’s broader thinking about the US and its strategic plans in the region.

Unfortunately there aren’t too many experts who have devoted substantial time to studying this relationship.(Nicolas Blarel, who we interviewed earlier on the newsletter is one of a handful). I name-check a few of the books that I found useful on the topic in the Himal piece, but am always happy to hear from readers if they know of other scholars or books featuring relevant research on the India-Israel relationship, a topic we will undoubtedly be returning to.

Yamini Aiyar on CPR’s past – and present

On CPR Perspectives, a flagship interview series I host for the Centre for Policy Research, I spoke to Yamini Aiyar, president and chief executive of CPR. We spoke about a whole range of things, from Aiyar’s journey into the policy world, to the current challenges facing the Centre:

“Through this whole process, the questions that have been raised about the institution, the nature of its work, the nature of its funding, all of that collectively makes me feel even more determined that institutional spaces like CPR must be fought for and kept secure because we need these. Otherwise, how are we going to understand the overarching context? It also is important to remember that even the process of evidence collection, the process of intellectual pursuit, can get heavily polarised when you are in this complex moment.

It’s really important always to ensure that the work that we do finds its anchors back into the grassroots. I personally find that – even as we’re dealing with all the difficulties of responding to questioning that the government is raising, CPR is now in the court – but just going back to the field, talking to people, getting their perspectives in villages, in urban centres, understanding – through everybody from the Block Development Officer to the state secretary – what’s actually going on, serves as a refreshing reminder of why the work that we do is so important.

One response that I and I think all of our colleagues at CPR have to this present moment is a determination to find a way to continue this work because as we find ourselves caught in this moment, the relevance and significance of sober, empirically grounded, intellectually grounded engagement with the very critical questions of our times, to try and understand the roots of the polycrisis, the nature of the polycrysis is just so, so critical.”

You can read, or listen, to the whole interview here.

(Forgotten) Indian Thinkers

On India in Transition, a publication from the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m a Consulting Editor, we published two interviews with authors of insightful recent books looking at important threads of Indian thought that have been relatively understudied.

First, Rahul Sagar, author of the fascinating To Raise A Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics.

Rohan: What also comes across very clearly is how strong certain colonial narratives—like a despotic Muslim period, an Enlightened British one, a “spiritual” India—and so on animate these conversations, authored by Indians. Is it possible to disentangle the opinions of the colonized from the colonial narratives that were in vogue at the time?

Rahul: This is a very important question. It gets to the heart of why intellectuals in contemporary India have such disdain for their predecessors. The presiding assumption on the Left and the Right is that the intellectuals of the nineteenth century were either “reactionary” or the “denationalized” (or to put it slightly more generously, that they were simple-minded “victims” of circumstance). This way of thinking ignores agency or the possibility that these intellectuals were able to think for themselves and break free of structural and contextual limits. This happened far more often than we realize. For example, Indians of the nineteenth century were educated to believe that the British conquest of India was an act of Providence: that God had entrusted the British with the “duty” to “civilize” Indians. You will find many Indian intellectuals of that era dutifully repeating this line—when this served to blunt colonial authority. In short, our predecessors knew well the power of words, and were not shy to use them creatively. For instance, the trope of an “enlightened” Britain was used by the denizens of “backward” Madras to push the colonial authorities to establish modern schools and universities, which then empowered Indians to compete with and eventually outmaneuver the British. Now you tell me, who was the prisoner of words here?”

And second, Aditya Balasubramanian, author of Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India.

Rohan: Swatantra’s history of opposition to the Congress is something that was familiar to me. But the book really offers a sharp sense of how deliberate the thinkers in the party were about building an opposition politics.

Aditya: What was unique about Swatantra is that it took a kind of educational role quite seriously. And of course, this is the period that Dipesh Chakrabarty describes as one in which the leaders of post-colonial democracies take a pedagogical approach to politics. But that is something that you see of leaders in office: Sukarno, Nehru, etc. Seeing the educational role assumed from the opposition side was something that I found to be unique. So too, in the context of the time, was the idea that the opposition should work to provide checks and balances on the party in power.

The third thing is that they see democracy as an end in itself. Whereas for example, the other large opposition parties of the day—the communists—are interested in, ultimately, the proletariat seizing the means of production and the dissolution of the state. The communists operate within a democratic framework, but that's not the end goal.

Similarly with Jan Sangh, which is the other prominent opposition party, but on the right, the end point is about allegedly returning to a society of a hundred Mahajanapadas, and as we hear today, Vipaksh-mukt Bharat (Opposition-less India). It's not about multi-party democracy. There was this understanding [in Swatantra] that a multi-party system is a valuable thing to have to prevent a country from going down the road to authoritarianism.

In a very moving passage in the Idea of India, Suni Khilnani writes that by the 1970s, Indian democracy became purely about winning elections and cynical electoral calculus trumps all. Now, of course, there is certainly an element of realpolitik in Swatantra's activities, particularly in the 1967 alliance with the DMK. But there is a larger project [of democracy] which—without glorifying or fetishizing—we can broadly say they helped advance.

It’s also worth noting that Swatantra was given an environment in which it could make itself viable. Nehru welcomed opposition parties if they were able to provide something constructive. And that's harder for opposition parties today. And there was also greater independence of institutions like the judiciary in those days.

Part of Swatantra's project of opposition politics was to use the tripartite system of government to impose checks on the ruling party, whether that meant passing no confidence motions or sitting on parliamentary committees, etc. One of the things that they're able to do is to bring court cases to the Supreme Court on the issue of the right to property and win. Now that presumes an independence of the judiciary, that's willing to go against the executive.

Can’t Make This Up

That’s all for this edition of India Inside Out. We should be back to our regularly scheduled programming from the next edition. Please do send feedback or suggestions for what you’d like to be reading over the next few months, and any important memes I may have missed, by writing to rohan.venkat@gmail.com.