India’s ruling party is using the Israel-Gaza war to demonize Muslims

The intent was clear. Accompanied by video depicting past militant attacks, the message promoted a narrative of Islamist terrorism in a country where the 220-million-strong Muslim population has been demonized by the Modi-led government in the year leading up to general elections.

Soon after the tweet was released, pro-government news channels in India portrayed the attack on Israel as an Islamic jihad menace, something they alleged India had been grappling with for decades. India and Israel faced a common enemy, they said: “Islam.” Millions of tweets followed in solidarity with Israel and laced with anti-Muslim rhetoric.

This development is rooted in a skewed idea of Hindu supremacy. Historically, Hindu nationalists have idolized Adolf Hitler, dating back to the period before independence, when the leading ideologue of the movement, M.S. Golwalkar, praised the Nazi’s “final solution” to the Jewish problem and held it up as a “a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” “Mein Kampf,” with its focus on racial superiority, has consistently remained a bestseller in India.

Yet, today, many Hindu nationalists are also ardent supporters of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Modi considers one of his close friends and allies.

Far-right Hindu nationalists even rallied outside the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi asking to enroll in the Israel Defense Forces to combat the common enemy of both Israel and India. “The same radical jihadist Islamist terrorist thinking that Israel is a victim of, we are a victim of as well,” one anchor said on television. “Israel is fighting this war on behalf of all of us.” Another leader of Modi’s BJP said on social media: “We may face the situation that Israel is confronting today if we don’t stand up against Politically motivated Radicalism.”

Such strong support for Israel is a departure from the country’s history of solidarity with Palestinians. According to a 2019 brief on the Indian government’s website, “India’s support for the Palestinian cause is an integral part of the nation’s foreign policy. In 1974, India became the first non-Arab state to recognize Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

But Modi’s BJP has embraced Israel in line with the belief held by many conservative Hindu nationalists that they have a right to a Hindu state, just as Zionists succeeded in creating a Jewish state. Hindu nationalists — who very often sport a swastika or an image of Hitler as display pictures on their social media accounts — are well aware of the paradox; nevertheless, they hail Israel as the only country they believe has shown Muslims their place, a model they wish to replicate in India, where equal status for Muslims is now being challenged with introduction of various laws in Parliament.

When Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said “we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” it drew loud cheers in a section of Indian social media. Hamas, for the Indian right, is not just every Palestinian, but every Muslim.

This is not the first time the Indian right wing has used international terrorist attacks to fuel anti-Muslim sentiments. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Modi, then a senior functionary of the BJP, appeared on a talk show, “The Big Fight,” to call out the Indian media for not acknowledging Islamist terrorism and cherry-picked quotes from the Quran to link Islam with terrorism. A few months later, the Indian state of Gujarat, where Modi was the chief minister, was the site of a 2002 pogrom in which more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed. (For his failure to act to stop the rioting, Modi was banned for nearly a decade from entering the United States.)

The Israel-Gaza conflict is taking place as Islamophobic hate in India is at its peak and disinformation and misinformation find fertile ground. Doctored or mislabeled videos originating in India have flooded social media and been viewed millions of times. Pro-government social media pages, citing Palestinians who are suspected of doing reconnaissance for Hamas when they worked in Israel, are promoting a complete social boycott of Muslims so they will not be able to carry out a similar operation against Hindus. WhatsApp messages exhort Indians to vote for Modi as the only way to avoid such a massacre.

The intense support India is extending to Israel should be viewed through one lens: Islamophobic politics. General elections will be held in April and May — and every seat in the lower house of Parliament is at stake. The Israel-Gaza conflict has come at just the right time for Modi and his party.