It wasLOng time ago when Hindutva & fanatiscism had not been heard of when Indian leaders supported Palestinenians fate ,themselves having experienced partition & atleast some Indians had tio relocate.
Now it is no suirprise that anti muslim & islam sentiment has taken upper hand to dictate the policy of at one time gentler fairer india of past .LetsNot live in fools paradise and move on with reality .
South Asia
Why India dumped the Palestinians
By Ramtanu Maitra
India’s remarkable change of stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows the impact of the pro-Israel policymakers in New Delhi. Having been in the forefront of support for Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organization for decades, India today is a silent spectator, refusing to comment on the Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip lest it antagonize Tel Aviv, New Delhi’s newfound bania (trading class) friend and comrade-at-arms.
It is not that the Palestinians did not seek out India’s support against the Israeli incursions. In fact, President Yasser Arafat sent his personal emissary, Hani al-Hasan, to meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Afterward, al-Hasan told reporters that Palestine “would like India to play a role in West Asia … Politicians are generally balanced. We want a just equation.” But Hani al-Hasan did not know that India was busy working out a new equation in which the Palestinians do not figure.
While the rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) - wearing Hindu sentiment on its sleeve - helped the Israeli “cause”, New Delhi’s decision to befriend the Israelis and abandon the Palestinians was put in place earlier. In 1992, following the disintegration of India’s ally and fellow backer of the Palestinians, the Soviet Union, the P V Narasimha Rao-led Congress party government granted full diplomatic relations to Israel. Under the leadership of then finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh, India began its economic reforms and liberalization, and economic necessities began increasingly to shape India’s foreign policy.
InYasser Arafat, himself, had never really attacked the terrorist outfits Pakistan deployed against India to destabilize Kashmir. Some claim that Arafat glowed when Pakistan tested its nuclear weapons in the bleak Chagai Hills in 1998. He welcomed it not as a Pakistani nuclear bomb, but an “Islamic” nuclear bomb.
If one puts aside the loaded word “appeasement”, these accusations are by and large factual, but it still does not quite explain why the Palestinians, who are Muslims, were forsaken. It is difficult to deny that the Palestinians have been systematically victimized and alienated in their own land by the Israelis. It is somewhat depressing to go back and read the kind of name-calling that Indian policymakers indulged in, berating the West from the 1950s through the 1980s for supporting Israel against the landless-in-their-own-land Palestinians - because Indian policymakers have now adopted the same policy that most of the West practiced during the Cold War days: the policy of benign neglect.
A claim that the United States had set up an arc to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. The southwestern flank of this arc of containment stretched from Turkey and Israel via the Gulf and Pakistan. The arc also effectively contained India’s foreign policy initiatives, the argument goes: India’s normalization of relations with Israel in 1992 essentially broke that arc, these analysts claim.
The Muslim issue While both India and Israel consider the rising power of Islamic fundamentalism a threat to national security, there is, however, little similarity between the kind of problem that India faces from the Islamic fundamentalists in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and the kind Israel faces in Palestine. In fact, the Palestinians belong to Palestine, while the Israelites came in from outside to establish their claim.
Helped by the British colonialists, the Balfour Declaration and the massacre of Jews by Adolf Hitler, Israel was born. Palestinians lost part of their land where they lived and there is a possibility that they may lose more, if not the whole of it. There is no basis for Palestinians to have a friendly attitude toward Israel, or those who perpetrated, or even benignly overlooked, this calamitous policy.
Idamentalists who infiltrated from Afghanistan and Pakistan to give the Indians a bloody eye through acts of violence, killed thousands of Indian army personnel, innocent civilians and militants. But these mercenaries had neither any commitment to the Kashmiris nor to the Pakistanis. It is a certainty that sooner or later the Kashmiri leaders, now caught up in violence, will understand this little truth. It is likely that the ordinary Kashmiris have already seen through this deception.
These mercenaries wave the Islamic flag and work under instructions from an anti-India Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Despite many complexities that surround the Jammu and Kashmir issue, it is not difficult to see that both the Pakistanis and the Indians can work out a solution with the help of the Kashmiris, and that would marginalize the zealots and killers who wear Islamic garb. The process would require some give and take. Unlike the case of Palestine, neither India’s, nor Pakistan’s, survival is directly linked to the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir.
Some problems Despite the common interest expressed by the two countries in aggressively eliminating the Islamic fundamentalists of various hues, Israel and India have different friends. Israel, for instance, is unlikely to abandon its two-decade-old military ties with China to lessen Indian concerns.
While Israel has expressed its concerns over India’s suspected nuclear cooperation with Iran, there are no indications to suggest that India has raised the Chinese issue during bilateral discussions. This silence should not be taken as a sign of India’s acquiescence or endorsement of the Israeli-Chinese ties. Israel’s involvement and participation in projects such as China’s F-10 fighter are bound to undermine India’s long-term security interests.
Unlike the case of the United States, whose friendly relations with Pakistan are a subject of much anger among Indian policymakers, Israel’s military relations with China are not yet a subject of discussion in New Delhi. But, it is anybody’s guess how long such silence will prevail. And, for domestic as well as regional considerations, India intends to continue consolidating its political and economic cooperation with Iran. In recent years, New Delhi embraced Iran as a principal ally in countering the anti-India campaign by Pakistan in the Islamic world, and India looks to Iran as a major transit route in developing its future economic and political relations with the Central Asian republics.
Now, reverting back to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, it is to be noted that the basic dimensions of that conflict have not changed much, but the Indian position has taken almost a 180-degree turn in recent years. In the past, Yasser Arafat and many other Palestinian leaders visited Delhi regularly to drum up support for the Palestinian cause. Such visits do not take place any longer and, in fact, Arafat now depends more on China than on the tongue-tied Indian political leadership in New Delhi.
It is widely known that the Palestinian ambassador in Delhi, Khalid Al-Sheikh, was running from pillar to post in spring to get the Indian government at the highest level to issue a “favorable” statement at a time when Ariel Sharon was tearing down West Bank towns and was on an anti-Yasser Arafat rampage. India did issue a respectable statement against the Israeli invasion of the West Bank, but the statement came from India’s UN ambassador based in New York, and not from the South Block power center. Khalid Al-Sheikh must admit that things have really, really changed.
Beside that statement, however, not much forward movement in favor of the Palestinians has been noticed in India. Very few Indian authorities found time to show solidarity with Yasser Arafat and while the Israelis kept the Palestinian president a virtual prisoner in his own office at Ramallah, Delhi chose mostly to ignore the gravity of the situation. On the other hand, Indian policymakers and the men in uniform kept falling over each other to get to the right side of Israel. One delegation after another visited Israel to sew up one deal or the other. An equal number of Israelis, if not more, visited Delhi and other places, sometime overtly and sometime covertly.
(m wi South Asia
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