Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post on X condemning the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and expressing solidarity with the Jewish nation has opened a Pandora’s box. “Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour,” Modi wrote within just a few hours of the attack.
It was like Indian foreign policy’s demonetisation moment, knee-jerk and all. Modi’s disregard for India’s decades-old advocacy for Palestinian statehood and the shared anti-colonial stand was glaring. It felt like the whole edifice of moral principles India has upheld over the years collapsed, and the moral heritage passed down generations by the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda was trashed.
The Israel-Hamas conflict is now in its second month and there is no respite in sight for Gaza’s civilians as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes about his “mighty vengeance” despite worldwide calls for an immediate ceasefire. As the world’s conscience is being numbed by the steady stream of stories and images of unprecedented suffering of Gaza’s civilian population, especially children, resulting from Israel’s disproportionate use of lethal force that has now assumed genocidal proportions, the immorality of India’s “solidarity” with Israel is getting starker by the day. It has also dealt a hefty diplomatic blow, leaving in tatters New Delhi’s quest for leadership of the Global South.
Contrast China’s response to the conflict. President Xi Jinping remained silent right after October 7. The day after the attack, a foreign ministry spokesperson issued a statement in which China called on “relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians and avoid further deterioration of the situation”. The recurrence of the conflict shows that the protracted standstill of the Palestinian peace process cannot go on, China said, and called for the implementation of the two-state solution. “The international community needs to act with greater urgency,” the spokesperson said.
It took another four days for India’s foreign ministry to react. Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi, describing India’s position on Palestine as “long-standing and consistent”, said the government would like to see negotiations leading to a Palestinian state “within secure and recognised borders, side-by-side (and) at peace with Israel”. But by then, the damage had been done.
Worse was yet to come. On October 27, India abstained from a UN General Assembly resolution that called for “an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities”. All South Asian nations except India voted for it. The reason given for India’s abstention was that the resolution did not mention Hamas and that the UN needed to send a clear message against terrorism. The General Assembly passed the resolution proposed by Jordan with a whopping 120 countries, a majority of them from the Global South, voting in favour. China and France, too, favoured the resolution.
In the echo chambers of social media and in massive protests around the world, Israel is now accused of committing genocide in broad daylight, with the death toll in Gaza crossing 13,000, more than a third of them children. According to a rights group, by the beginning of November, the volume of munitions dropped by Israel on the Gaza Strip since October 7 was already about the equivalent of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the US at the end of the Second World War.
Apocalyptic scenes are everywhere, such as hungry dogs eating the remains of human bodies buried under the rubble in Gaza, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called “the graveyard of children”. Some grim counts from the conflict are deeply unsettling.
● More children have perished in Gaza since October 7 than the annual number killed across all conflict zones since 2019.
● More UN workers were killed than in any comparable period in history.
● More journalists were killed than in any conflict since 1992.
“We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide,” wrote a group of UN special rapporteurs on human rights.
In a bid to shore up Israel’s war machine and to warn regional sympathisers of Palestine such as Iran and various militant groups, both the US and the UK have ordered warships into the eastern Mediterranean. Like Washington and London, New Delhi, too, has not called for a ceasefire yet, though the recent 2 + 2 summit in New Delhi was a perfect opportunity to do so.
“Israel crossed every legal, ethical and humanitarian red line in its barbaric war on Gazans,” tweeted Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi. Belgium’s deputy prime minister, Petra De Sutter, said that “the rain of bombs is inhumane” and made a rare European call for sanctions against Israel.
With President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, current president of the G20, calling the war a genocide, and South Africa recalling its diplomats from Tel Aviv and asking the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant against Netanyahu, two BRICS countries with close relations with India have taken quite different positions from India’s. Jordan, Turkey, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Honduras are among some other countries that have taken diplomatic actions against Israel. With China and Russia also calling out Israeli excesses, India finds itself an outcast among the Global South.
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How will the conflict impact India? An immediate casualty could be the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which Modi unveiled at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September. The US-backed plan for a logistical corridor now seems knocked off-track. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman called the conflict a “worrying manifestation” of geopolitical challenges to IMEC.
According to Eric Garcetti, the US Ambassador to India, the conflict could “pause” progress on India-US trade and connectivity initiatives like IMEC and the India-Israel-UAE-US (I2U2) minilateral group. The conflict could also have ramifications for the massive Indian-origin population living in the Middle East if India’s domestic politics spills into the diaspora in the Gulf.
But beyond trade hiccups or troubles for the diaspora, what is most worrying is that by declaring solidarity with an apartheid regime committing genocide and crimes against humanity, India has squandered the moral rectitude the country has been known for thanks to the likes of Mahatma Gandhi. By not engaging diplomatically for a ceasefire—unlike China, which is actively leveraging the major Middle East players including Israel—and calling for an international peace conference to help broker a two-state solution, New Delhi is ceding leadership of the Global South to Beijing.
E D Mathew
Former UN spokesperson