Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s response to the Israel-Hamas war chimes with that of most western governments, but for India, it marks a departure from the past, The Guardian points out.
India was among the countries that did not back a UN resolution for a “humanitarian truce” in Gaza, instead choosing to abstain, The Guardian noted.
For many, the immediacy of Modi’s comments after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel followed by Israeli bombardments of Gaza and the UN resolution vote symbolises just how significantly the India-Israel relationship has shifted since he came to power in 2014, notably demonstrated by the public bonhomie between the two countries’ prime ministers, The Guardian said.
Nicolas Blarel, associate professor of international relations at Leiden University and author of The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy, said: “Modi’s position has been openly supportive of Israel but this is the first time that you had an immediate pro-Israel reaction without a balancing statement that immediately follows it up.”
Israel appeared to take Modi’s statement as unequivocal backing. Speaking to reporters in Delhi last week, Israel’s ambassador, Naor Gilon, thanked the country for “100% support”.
Following India's candid support for Israel, The Guardian added, internet fact-checkers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power.
The BJP-associated Facebook groups began to push the message that Hamas represented the same Muslim threat facing India in the troubled, majority-Muslim region of Kashmir and Palestinians were sweepingly branded as jihadis.
The Guardian report, noted among other things, that India was the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the legitimate representative of Palestine in the 1970s, giving the group full diplomatic status in the 1980s and inviting PLO’s long-serving leader Yasser Arafat to visit several times, and consistently maintained a pro-Palestine position at the UN.