Operation Sindoor: Both Hindutva backers and leftists are wrong in claiming India-Israel parallels

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12-05-2025

The escalation of hostilities between India and Pakistan and the ceasefire announced on Saturday have hurled the countries into the global news cycle. As India sought revenge for the terrorist attacks in Pahalgam on April 22, some Hindutva supporters called for it to emulate Israel-style attacks on Gaza.
Mirroring these calls are allegations by Islamists and misguided Leftists that draw parallels between India and Israel. These parallels are erroneous and must be corrected.
Products of Partition
The subcontinental version of Israel is Pakistan, not India. Both were created by partitioning existing countries on the basis of religion. Pakistan was the product of the Two Nation Theory which, as Pakistani Army Chief Asif Munir reminded us in April, postulated that Hindus and Muslims could not live together within the same nation-state owing to their vast cultural differences and antagonistic worldviews.
Pakistan was established in 1947 as the homeland of Indian Muslims, even as a third of the subcontinent's Muslim population rejected its foundational worldview.
Israel was the product of Zionism, a movement that claimed a homeland for Jews in historic Palestine, even as over half the world's Jews live outside it. These parallels led the historian Faisal Devji to call Pakistan a 'Muslim Zion'.
India and Palestine neither claimed nor intended themselves to be mono-religious, mono-cultural entities – although majoritarian movements in both countries seek to change that historical reality.
Pakistan and Israel represent the parting gift of the British as decolonisation commenced in Asia. Both emerged as satellite states of the West as the Cold War progressed, allowing the US to use them as springboards to extend its presence across Asia.
By contrast, India and Palestine remained steadfastly committed to non-alignment. Having opposed Palestine's partition, India maintained ties with the Palestinian Authority and became the first non-Arab nation to recognise the State of Palestine state and the Palestine National Authority as its legitimate government.
The personal friendship of Gandhi and Yasser Arafat was legendary.
National identity
Both Pakistan and Israel define themselves in religious terms. Pakistan's Objectives Resolution define itself as an 'Islamic Republic' in which sovereignty rests with Allah. The Basic Laws of Israel define Israel as a 'Jewish state'. Pakistan's constitution prohibits non-Muslims from the office of Prime Minister and President of the republic. In its Middle Eastern equivalent, only those political parties that accept Israel as the state of the Jewish people are allowed to participate in elections.
A clear hierarchy between Jews and non-Jews is established in exactly the same way that a clear hierarchy between Muslims and non-Muslims is consecrated in Pakistan.
Pakistan and Israel are both ethnocracies that establish the supremacy of one religious group over others living in their territories. Both display the formal trappings of democracy and hold regular elections. Minorities are accorded formal protections in both countries, but – as we have seen above – excluded from the national identity of their countries.
Minorities in India and Palestine also suffer discrimination but these are not institutionally inscribed and ideationally legitimised as they are in Pakistan and Israel.
To be sure, there are vocal demands to reconstitute the national identities of both India and Palestine in religious and ethnocratic terms, but these have so far not come to fruition – and there remains stout resistance to these ambitions.
Allegations of occupation
A particularly misguided notion that claims parallels between India and Israel is the charge that India practices settler-colonialism in Jammu and Kashmir similar to the settlements that Israel has established in West Bank and Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Although India's treatment of its citizens in Jammu and Kashmir is far from exemplary and leaves much to be desired, settler-colonialism it is not.
Unlike Israel, which regularly settled Jews in Arab-majority areas over seven decades, Article 370 of India's Constitution actively prohibited 'outsiders' from purchasing land in Jammu and Kashmir and settling in that state until it was abrogated in 2019.
If anything, the flight of Kashmiri Hindus and Sikhs after 1990 reflected Pakistan's attempt to alter the demographic balance of the state via its proxies – a move similar to Israel's efforts at regularly evicting Palestinian Muslims and Christians from their historic homelands across West Bank and Gaza.
Parallels are being drawn between the atrocities inflicted by Hamas on October 23, 2023, and the slaughter of tourists by The Resistance Front in Pahalgam. This parallel is, again erroneous given their different contexts, identities and relative support received for their actions.
While violence is always reprehensible, the attack by Hamas – which has been designated as a terrorist group by several countries – was reported to have been widely celebrated in Gaza. Many Palestinians viewed its strike in Israel as a legitimate act of resistance to occupation.
Hamas was seen to be responding to the decades-long occupation of Palestinian lands, systematic dispossession of its people and everyday forms of policing and violence inflicted by the Israeli state.
Ironically, Hamas were the elected representatives of Gaza's population for years, propped up, as it happens, by the Israeli state as a counterfoil to the secular-minded Palestine Liberation Organisation.
By contrast, The Resistance Front terrorist group has minimal support from the people of Kashmir. Far from celebrating the cold-blooded murder of tourists, Kashmiris mourned alongside other Indians and stoutly resisted attempts by the hawkish Indian media to foment religious and ethnic discord.
The two events are not comparable.
False parallels
The governments of India and Israel have cosied up to each other in recent years. There is much that brings them together – not least the spectre of Islamic terrorism to which both have been subject. India's efforts at courting the Islamic world have not always been reciprocated. The defence and security partnership between New Delhi and Tel Aviv has only deepened, for good reason, since the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
However, the newfound bonhomie between the two nations should not cloud our judgments about their fundamentally contrasting histories, politics and social structures.