India's Shift on Palestine: From Nehru to Modi (2025)

The Hindu

01-07-2025

Published : Jul 01, 2025 19:31 IST - 6 MINS READ
I was accorded the privilege of a private audience with the Palestinian political leader Yasser Arafat when he visited New Delhi in January 1992. Rumours were afloat regarding the possibility of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao imminently raising India's relationship with Israel to full diplomatic status. Referring to this, I told Arafat that only he could stop India from slithering down this perilous slope. Arafat listened but did not reply. The next day, I watched helplessly as Arafat sat next to Rao at a press conference as the Indian Prime Minister proclaimed the upgrade and Arafat applauded the decision.
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What neither I nor most Palestinians—and much of the world—did not know then was that secret negotiations in Norway were on the verge of reaching the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords of 1993 opened the road to Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) return from exile in Tunisia to Gaza and the West Bank to run what in effect was Panchayati Raj in the Gaza Strip. No sovereignty, nothing that amounted to Poorna Swaraj or even self-defence, just a post-dated cheque the Israeli establishment had no intention of ever honouring. Arafat's hope was that if India had full diplomatic relations with Israel, it might help Palestine secure the 'two-state solution' promised them by the United Nations in its 1967 resolution. I was sure this was an illusion.
So, when Arafat invited me to join the 50th anniversary commemoration in May 1998 of Al-Naqba, the Catastrophe that overtook Palestinians when Israel was proclaimed as a sovereign state, I was not surprised that non-PLO elements (including many of those who later formed Hamas) could not participate because Arafat had thrown most of their cadres into jail. This lay at the origins of the later electoral defeat of the PLO by Hamas in 2007, a political elimination of Palestine's true freedom fighters, a move backed and welcomed by the Zionist leaders of Israel. The PLO and Arafat himself were expelled to the West Bank to pay the price of their appeasement. It did not stop the Zionists from poisoning Arafat, as believed widely by Palestinians of all political hues.
Nehru's moral vision
It is now clear that Jawaharlal Nehru was absolutely right on two counts in not according full diplomatic recognition to Israel: first, because according statehood to Israel recognised the reality of Israel (not driving the Jews into the sea, as some Arab extremists were propagating); second, not according full diplomatic recognition till either Israel became a composite, secular state (as India was constitutionally becoming) in which Jews and Arabs could live and grow together or, failing that ideal solution, a separate sovereign state had been constituted for the Palestinians in their homeland. Without either solution, Nehru predicted that the issue would fester, as all partitions imposed by the departing colonial power have done. In essence, he presciently foresaw that the partition of Palestine was a legacy of imperialism and would cause endless conflict unless colonial divide-and-misrule were replaced by independent national unite-and-rule in peace and harmony. This was the ethical, moral and, indeed, Gandhian way forward.
'Nehru presciently foresaw that the partition of Palestine was a legacy of imperialism and would cause endless conflict unless colonial divide-and-misrule were replaced by independent national unite-and-rule in peace and harmony.'
While the Rao/Arafat path was a strategic mistake, the twist given to it by Modi/Jaishankar lacks all moral vision. They have made India the abject camp-follower of a felon indicted on 34 counts by his domestic courts, and another declared a war criminal by the International Court of Criminal Justice. As a man is known by the company he keeps, so are governments. The Mahatma would have shuddered at his beloved country abstaining on a UN vote (carried by a huge majority of our erstwhile comrades in the Non-Aligned Movement) condemning Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and then urging de-escalation on Iran after its sovereignty was violated on every canon of international law, instead of urging their two best friends, the indicted felon and the war criminal, to de-escalate.
It is also comical to hear India's Prime Minister urging 'dialogue and diplomacy' in West Asia after adamantly eschewing both with Pakistan, exhorting others that this is 'not an era of war' when initiating hostilities in our own neighbourhood, and recommending 'de-escalation' to others while keeping Operation Sindoor open-ended. No wonder everyone in the world condemns 'terrorism' but none, notwithstanding Shashi Tharoor's charm offensive, are ready to identify Pakistan as the sponsor of the Pahalgam outrage. By contrast, it was Nehru that even his international critics turned to ensure the armistice in Korea in 1953; the conclusion of the 1954 Indo-China agreements in Geneva; peacekeeping in Gaza after the trilateral Israeli-French-British invasion of Nasser's Egypt in 1956; and to resolve the proxy war in the Congo on the morrow of its independence from Belgium in 1960.
It was also to Nehru's India that the international community turned to ensure peacekeeping in a Cyprus torn asunder by Turkish and Greek differences. The world recognised Nehru's India as a true peacemaker, even as they mock the humbug peace-making to which the Modi government has reduced India.
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They have doubtless noted the return to the moral compass of the Indian National Congress signalled by Sonia Gandhi's recent article in The Hindu where she unambiguously states that 'the world expects and needs leadership that is grounded in facts and diplomacy, and not by force and falsehoods', where 'moral responsibility and diplomatic leverage act as a bridge for de-escalation and peace'. Pointing out that Prime Minister Narendra Modi 'has all but abandoned India's long-stranding and principled commitment to a peaceful two-state solution', she deplores 'New Delhi's silence on the devastation in Gaza and now on the unprovoked escalation against Iran', a nation, she reminds us, that has stood with us in 'steadfast support, including on Jammu and Kashmir, at crucial junctures'. The Modi government's foreign policy thus reveals 'a disturbing departure from our moral and diplomatic traditions'.
One hopes Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Xi Jinping (and Zohran Mamdani, the new kid on the block) will note that while the Modi aberration has the support of but one-third of Indian electors, the INDIA bloc position, as articulated by Sonia Gandhi, represents well over half and nearly two-thirds of India's voters. India will yet survive Modi—and the world will yet survive Trump and Netanyahu.
Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009.