Things have changed

The ongoing atrocities in Gaza, and the cloying admiration of Sangh Parivar right-wingers for Israel's military machine (as expressed in the recent New Indian Express front-page headline: "Israel Strikes While India Dithers") led to me recall a time when Indian attitudes to Israelis and Palestinians were radically different to what they are today.

The Indian response to the Jewish Question was led by Gandhi, in a famous article in Harijan in 1938. The Mahatma, while asserting his deep sympathies for the Jews (his disgust at Hitler partly explains his pro-British stance during World War II), took issue with the principles behind Zionism. The Biblical land of Palestine, he contended, was "not a geographical tract"; when other religious groups did not have states based on scriptural promises, why should the Jews? To "partly or wholly" create a Jewish national home in Palestine would be to do a grave injustice to the Arabs. Gandhi asserted that Palestine was as integrally a home to the Arabs as England was to the English and France to the French. Territorial claims and aspirations, he wrote, were to be made on the basis of residence (a literal rather than figurative "home"), not religion.

In the first four decades after independence, the series of Congress governments took their cues on this issue from the Mahatma. On 29 November 1947, India (along with Pakistan) was one of only 13 countries that voted against the UN Partition Plan to create two states and a UN-administered "zone" out of Palestine. India's opposition to the plan was deeply grounded in an opposition to the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. India, indeed, did not even extend diplomatic recognition to the state of Israel until the early 1990s.

In retrospect, the attitudes of Gandhi and Nehru towards the issue of Palestine were significantly mistaken. By 1947, a third of the population of the region was Jewish, and there were thus territorial claims to a national state that ran deeper than mere textuality. Additionally, the Mahatma gave insufficient consideration to the role that creating a Jewish state would play in redressing the horrors of the Holocaust- after all, Jews had never received humane treatment in Europe, being best treated in, of all places, the Muslim world (prior to the 1920s). Gandhi would, one suspects, have advocated a one-state solution, the creation of an India-type secular state in the region. But I think it is fair to say that since no side was ever acceptable to this idea, it is an unviable one. And in any case, to revisit today the notion that Israel has no right to exist is counterproductive, to say the least.

Nevertheless, the Indian attitude was flawed in the noblest of ways. It showcased a deeply felt concern for the Palestinian Arabs that is a fitting riposte, if any were needed, to the silly claims of those who accuse the founders of the Indian state of being covertly anti-Muslim. Gandhi's distaste for state creation and the dispossession of people on the basis of religion is one that I entirely share. And when the angry middle class and their spokespeople in the media- the irresponsibly shrill Arnab Goswami and Barkha Dutt- demand Israeli-style "retribution"; a demand that is a mere cloak for Islamophobia of the worst kind; it is impossible not to be wistful for a time when the Indian approach to distant global events was defined by humanity and idealism.