The gravest threats to world peace within the twenty-first century now not come up solely from typical great-power rivalries or territorial disputes. More and more, they emanate from ideological initiatives that weaponize identification, fusing faith, ethnicity, territory, and militarized nationalism into exclusionary state doctrines. On this context, the rising convergence between Hindutva in India and Zionism in Israel represents not merely a strategic partnership, however a deeper civilizational rupture-one that undermines worldwide legislation, pluralism, and the ethical foundations of the post-World Struggle II rules-based world order.
India’s emergence as one in all Israel’s most dependable defence companions is commonly framed as pragmatic realism: arms procurement, know-how switch, and strategic alignment in a risky worldwide system. But this slim lens conceals a much more consequential shift. What’s unfolding is India’s transition from an ethically anchored overseas coverage custom to a transactional energy alignment, even when that alignment implicates it-directly or indirectly-in grave violations of worldwide humanitarian legislation.
From Non-Alignment to Normative Abandonment
For many years, India cultivated a fastidiously balanced overseas coverage identification. Strategic realism coexisted with a principled dedication to anti-colonialism, sovereign equality, and Palestinian self-determination. This equilibrium granted India credibility throughout Asia, Africa, and the Center East, positioning it as a normative voice of the World South.
That equilibrium has now fractured.
As a number of European governments-despite their very own historic complicity-face authorized challenges, parliamentary resistance, and public stress over arms exports to Israel amid the devastation in Gaza, India has quietly stuffed a part of the vacuum. It’s now not merely a purchaser of Israeli weapons; it has turn into a co-producer, supply-chain associate, and diplomatic enabler of Israel’s defence ecosystem. Joint ventures, know-how transfers, and home manufacturing beneath the “Make in India” framework collapse moral distance. When drones, missile elements, surveillance platforms, or digital warfare techniques are partially manufactured in India, accountability ceases to be summary.
Arms commerce is one factor. Arms integration is one other.
That is alignment by stealth-avoiding formal navy alliances whereas producing comparable outcomes: strategic dependency, muted criticism, and ethical lodging.
Ideological Convergence Beneath the {Hardware}
The India-Israel partnership can’t be understood solely by means of defence contracts. Beneath the {hardware} lies an ideological convergence that explains the weird political consolation between the 2 states.
Zionism, in its modern state apply, has advanced from a historic response to persecution right into a settler-colonial challenge sustained by means of everlasting securitization, demographic engineering, and authorized exceptionalism, all justified by means of the language of existential risk. Hindutva follows a parallel trajectory, looking for to recast India not as a plural, constitutional republic however as an exclusivist Hindu Rashtra, the place citizenship, loyalty, and belonging are filtered by means of non secular identification.
Each ideologies share strikingly comparable options:
the sacralization of territory, majoritarian supremacy, normalization of everlasting emergency, militarization of identification, and the systematic delegitimization of dissent as treason. Defence cooperation thus operates on two levels-material capability overseas and ideological reinforcement at house.
Israel is admired inside sections of India’s ruling institution not just for its battlefield-tested navy applied sciences, however for its governance mannequin: a securitized state the place faith, surveillance, and coercive energy merge seamlessly into political authority.
From Gaza to Kashmir: Exporting the Structure of Management
Israeli applied sciences perfected in occupied Palestinian territories don’t stay geographically confined. They flow into globally, marketed as counter-terror options whereas normalizing practices of inhabitants management, digital surveillance, predictive policing, and militarized governance.
From Gaza to Kashmir, from borderlands to city areas, such doctrines reshape political cultures and decrease thresholds for coercion. Israeli drones, facial-recognition techniques, data-driven policing instruments, and intelligence-fusion platforms are more and more embedded inside India’s inner safety structure. What’s imported as counter-terror experience usually returns as counter-citizen governance.
Applied sciences developed beneath occupation are usually not impartial. They carry embedded assumptions about risk, obedience, and collective guilt-assumptions that corrode democratic norms when transplanted into civilian political contexts.
Identification Politics as a Weapon Towards the Guidelines-Primarily based Order
On the coronary heart of the Hindutva-Zionist convergence lies the weaponization of identification. Identification politics, when mobilized by the state relatively than society, turns into a robust instrument to bypass worldwide legislation, neutralize ethical scrutiny, and delegitimize common norms.
The post-1945 worldwide order rests on a fragile consensus: that sovereignty doesn’t justify mass atrocity, that occupation is short-term, that civilians are protected, and that legislation restrains energy. Identification-driven nationalism systematically undermines this consensus. It reframes authorized obligations as civilizational impositions, portrays accountability as exterior conspiracy, and recasts human rights as threats to nationwide survival.
In each Israel and India, identification is deployed to raise majoritarian narratives above constitutional rules. Worldwide legislation is accepted when handy and dismissed as biased when constraining. This selective legality hollows out the very concept of a rules-based order and replaces it with civilizational exceptionalism-the declare that sure states, by advantage of historical past or religion, function above common norms.
If normalized, this logic is contagious. It invitations different states to invoke tradition, faith, or nationalism as justification for repression, occupation, and demographic engineering. The consequence isn’t multipolar stability however normative anarchy.
The Erosion of World South Credibility
India’s rising defence intimacy with Israel has coincided with a putting diplomatic silence on Gaza. Abstentions on the United Nations, fastidiously calibrated statements, and the avoidance of authorized language round occupation, collective punishment, and battle crimes mirror not neutrality however strategic threat administration. Arms relationships constrain speech. They slim ethical house.
This silence carries extreme prices for India’s World South standing. For post-colonial societies, Palestine isn’t a peripheral subject; it’s a dwelling image of unfinished decolonization. One can not credibly invoke anti-colonial solidarity whereas materially supporting one of many world’s most entrenched settler-colonial regimes. Selective invocation of worldwide legislation in the end empties it of that means.
Satirically, India has turn into worthwhile to Israel exactly as a result of it’s much less constrained-ethically, politically, and institutionally-than Europe. That’s not a mark of power. It’s a warning.
Energy With out Restraint Is Not Civilizational Power
The Hindutva-Zionist axis is due to this fact not merely destabilizing geopolitics; it constitutes an existential risk to civilizational norms. It normalizes occupation as everlasting, collective punishment as safety, non secular supremacy as governance, and energy as an alternative to legislation.
None of this requires hostility towards Israel’s existence or denial of India’s respectable safety wants. What it calls for is ethical coherence. Historical past is unforgiving to states that confuse strategic achieve with ethical silence. Arms offers fade from steadiness sheets; complicity lingers in reminiscence.
The central query isn’t whether or not India has the fitting to pursue its interests-it does. The query is what sort of energy it seeks to turn into: a civilizational state that balances power with restraint, or one which sustains injustice by means of silence and identity-driven exceptionalism.
For a rustic that when spoke the language of justice fluently, the price of forgetting that language might show far larger than any defence contract can justify.
