When Narendra Modi stood in the halls of the Knesset and spoke of an "enduring friendship" with Israel, the moment carried a symbolism that travelled far beyond diplomacy. It signalled not merely a strategic embrace but a moral repositioning, one that many felt unsettled India's long-held posture in the international community. Amid the rising applause of the ruling benches, countless listeners back home noticed a silence; the absence of any mention of Gaza Strip and what is happening there.
History has a peculiar discipline as it records not only the words leaders carefully pronounce, but also those they choose to leave unsaid. Sometimes the unsaid gathers a gravity of its own, until the silence itself begins to speak, heavy enough to alter the moral weight of an entire moment, and to linger as a question that ceremony alone cannot answer.
For decades, India's position on Palestine has been more than a matter of diplomatic alignment. Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle was an extension of the ethical imagination shaped by India's own anti-colonial movement, and later by the anti-colonial consensus of the postcolonial world. Gandhi's reflections on Palestine were rooted in a universalist moral logic. He could not have been clearer in stating that historical suffering cannot justify new injustices, and that the dispossession of one people cannot be redeemed by the trauma of another.
The contemporary shift toward an open embrace of Israel reflects a broader transformation in international relations. Security cooperation, technological exchange, and geopolitical balancing have long overshadowed ethical postures. Today, nations led by right-wing forces increasingly operate within an opportunist paradigm that is undermining even this realist paradigm of yore.
It was said earlier that heeding realism, as a theory, India should pursue national interests over ideals, 'survival' over 'sentiment'. Yet realism alone cannot explain the discomfort many citizens feel today, because India's global identity was never built solely on power; it was built on the claim that power could be tempered by conscience. Defence, intelligence, and counter-terrorism frameworks that have drawn India and Israel closer have nothing to contribute to the greatest common good of the Indian masses. On the contrary credible claims exist that this 'strategic partnership' has in fact jeopardised civic liberties and freedoms of the people of India.
The question of genocide stands over and above all this. We need to pay attention to the meanings manifest in this term. Raphael Lemkin coined it not just to describe mass killing but the systematic destruction of a people's existence; their culture, institutions, and capacity to endure as a collective.
Lemkin understood genocide as a process that unfolds through stages of dehumanisation, isolation, displacement, and ultimately annihilation. Later, scholars of mass violence expanded this understanding, emphasising that genocide is often preceded by narratives that render victims invisible or culpable for their own suffering. The Indian Prime Minister chose not to name the oppressed people of Palestine and actively sided with the aggressor's narrative.
To keep silent about injustice is a form of participation because when leaders avoid naming a humanitarian catastrophe, they risk contributing to the very normalisation of horrific violence that Hannah Arendt warned about. It is this that allows extraordinary violence to exist and continue as if it was just an administrative footnote.
Gaza today confronts the world with precisely this moral dilemma. Whether one uses the legal term "genocide" or prefers other descriptors of mass atrocity, the scale of civilian suffering has forced a reckoning with the adequacy of diplomatic language and with the morality of diplomacy itself as a mode of communication and conflict resolution between states.
India's historical role complicates this crisis further. From the Bandung Conference to the Non-Aligned Movement, India positioned itself as a voice for the colonized and the dispossessed. It championed the principle that sovereignty must be inseparable from justice, that freedom achieved through anti-colonial struggle should translate into solidarity with others facing domination. While we accept that this posture was never perfect nor free from contradictions, it endowed India with a moral authority disproportionate to its material power.
Today, that authority appears to be undergoing a recalibration wherein the language of civilizational affinity and strategic convergence has replaced the rhetoric of Third World solidarity. Some view this as a pragmatic adaptation to a multipolar world but this is an abandonment of a hard-won ethical inheritance. Yes, nations evolve, but their founding narratives must not be made to disappear. Otherwise, what resources can we access to decide how nations should behave in moments of crisis?
In the theatre of diplomacy, medals and honours often glitter brighter than the truths they are meant to conceal. Power believes that by staging spectacle it can overwrite inconvenient memories, but history is an unforgiving archivist; it records not only proclamations but also the complicity of silences. Moral clarity cannot be minted like a medal, nor can conscience be negotiated across polished tables. Human suffering has a stubborn afterlife as it seeps into the moral memory of nations and waits there, unsettled and accusing.
In the end, what defines a republic is not the dignitaries it embraces for favour, but the vulnerable it chose to stand beside and those it quietly forsook when courage was demanded. Perhaps the most unsettling realisation is that silence itself communicates a doctrine; a doctrine that some lives are geopolitically inconvenient to acknowledge and that has happened in the case of Gaza. Against this, Gandhi's voice still echoes, insisting that politics without moral courage is merely the management of power.
If India once taught the world that ethical leadership was possible, the world now watches to see whether that lesson still holds for us. I invoke Gandhi today not with a nostalgia for the past, but to ask whether ethical language still has a place in contemporary statecraft. Do India's leaders and people care that their choices today will be measured against a moral horizon in the years to come?
In the end, the sadness a large number of Indians wish to express is not only about one speech or one leader but it is about the fear that a nation born from a struggle against injustice might grow accustomed to witnessing injustice without naming it. It makes our hearts feel heavy, because it presses against the memory of what India used to believe itself to be, and what many still hope it can remain.
(Professor Manoj Kumar Jha is a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal. Views are personal.)