Just As Islamism Destroyed Pakistan, Zionism-Inspired Hindutva Ideology Threatens India's Cultural Ethos
By New Age Islam Staff Writer
21 October 2023
Indian Civilisational Ethos Being Destroyed Today Is Our Millennium
Old Heritage. Unfortunately, Neither Hindus Nor Muslims Seem To Care For Their
Civilisational Heritage.
Main Points:
1.
Gen. Ziaul Haque
promoted Islamism to save protect his authority
2.
Zionism was
propounded towards the end of the 19th century.
3.
Hindutva ideology
emerged in the 1920s.
4.
Hindutva, as a
political ideology, was inspired by Zionism.
5.
Israel is emulated
in the ways to curb Islamism.
6.
The idea of nation states
not very old.
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Why would India want to behave like a Hindu Pakistan
now?
Sourced by the Telegraph
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Sushant Singh's article discusses the influence of Zionism
on Hindutva ideology and also brings into focus Gen. Zia's analogy between
Israel and Pakistan. Gen. Zia was only a military general who had no knowledge
of Islamic history or philosophy.
Similarly, those who want India to be like Israel also do
not know Hinduism and India at its core. Actually, those who support Israel
against Palestine are influenced by Hindutva ideology which is based on the
idea of a Hindu Rashtra, a country where Hinduism will be the state religion
and all the other religious communities will be reduced to second class
citizens. The idea of Hindutva was inspired by the idea of Zionism which came
into existence towards the end of the 19th century and the Hindutva ideology
took its shape during the third decade of the 20th century.
The Jews have a long history of religio-political clashes
with Islam due to their common legacy but they in the modern era, that is, 20th
century they were persecuted by the West, particularly the Nazis of Germany.
They were deported and rehabilitated in Palestine by the US and the Britain in
1948 giving birth to a continuous clash between the Jews of Israel and the
Muslims of the Arabs. The Jews claim that Palestine is the homeland of their
forefather, Israel, son of Prophet Abraham while the Muslims of Palestine see
them as illegal occupants of their homeland. This is the bone of contention
between the Jews of Israel and the Muslims of Palestine.
The problem of Palestine would not have turned to a cause of
war if Israel had contented to the area of land allotted to them. The problem
is that it has eaten into the land of Palestine continually in the last 75
years and have reduced it to what it is today: a strip of a 46 kilometre long
and 12 kilometre wide land.
The proponents of Hindutva are influenced by the ideology of
Zionism which has the vision of a greater Israel that will encompass all the
Palestine with no room for a Palestinian state. The Palestinians will live in
the greater Israel as second class citizens like the Arabs in Israel. The
Hindutva ideology also has the vision of a Hindu Rashtra where Muslims will be
second class citizens.
But in India, the proponents of the Hindutva ideology are
the descendants of the Aryans who had immigrated from West Asia in the period
before Christ. The Adivasis of the south are India 's original inhabitants who
were dominated by the Aryans as they were more developed and cultured. The
Hindu Rashtra of their dreams will not have any place for the aborigines or the
Adivasis.
Therefore, not only Muslims but also the tribal communities
and the low castes will also be subjugated in such a state. The main thrust of
the Hindutva brigade is on subjugating the Muslims due to the fact that the
Muslims are a civilised race who have ruled a vast tract of land and are ruling
in the most part of the world. Subjugating them is a big challenge. Once they
are subjugated, subjugating other low castes and tribal communities will pose
no challenge before them due to their illiteracy and a long history of
subjugation.
Therefore, a vilification campaign is continually run
against them in the media to paint a negative picture of the Muslim community.
The national TV channels have become a means of spreading negative propaganda
against them. They miss no opportunity to do so. The Israel-Palestine conflict
has provided them another opportunity to portray them as terrorists and violent
people ready to kill any one.
Since, Israel also follows the same policy against the
Muslims, the TV channels have been reporting only the attacks and destruction
in Israel while the bombing of hospitals, schools and residential buildings in
Gaza are not being shown.
The reporters have not shown the death and destruction in
Gaza and he starvation of Palestinians due to a total blockade of Gaza by
Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas the 'worst monsters on earth' when he
himself is guilty of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and of war crimes. He has
been using prohibited white phosphorous bombs on Gaza and Lebanon.
Israel cannot be a role model for secular and broad minded
Indians because India 's polity is based on a written Constitution and it
respects all religions and schools of thought. Israel has no Constitution and
is carved out of Palestine illegitimately and has persecuted its original
inhabitants for the last 75 years.
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By Sushant Singh
19.10.23
The world is in turmoil. As if the Russian invasion of
Ukraine was not enough, it has now been surpassed by the horror of the Israeli
military assault on Gaza. Like the rest of the world, Indians are also fixated
on the horrific violence and the humanitarian tragedy in West Asia. Many Indian
mainstream media organisations have sent their representatives, masquerading as
television journalists, to the region. The predictability of their pro-Israel
coverage — perhaps following the cue given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the
first day — and their apathetic insensitivity to the suffering of the besieged
Palestinians are nauseating.
To blame this on the voyeuristic character of the media —
the Indian media is manifold more depraved in that department — is to capture
only a slice of the truth. More to blame is the desire to shape a narrative
which depicts Islam as a breeder of terrorism and Muslims as the group
intrinsically disposed towards violence, extremism and terrorism. That
description bolsters the Hindutva ideological framework about Islam and Muslims
which was employed over the past three decades by the Indian State to initially
target Pakistan and, in the last decade, by the current Indian regime to
aggressively demonise Kashmiris and Muslim Indians. If Islamist terror is such
a major issue for Modi, why did his government forge close diplomatic ties with
the Taliban in Afghanistan, a group widely accepted to be a terrorist
organisation that killed Indians?
Then there is the Indian right-wing’s fantastical
imagination of Israel as a tough security State, which ruthlessly uses its
all-powerful intelligence agency, a professional military, and high-end defence
technology against its adversaries both inside and outside the country. Why
can’t India be like Israel is a question often heard from such
manliness-deficient ignoramuses. Because India is not an Israel and doesn’t
need to be one. They don’t get that Israel is an artificial construct in a
small sliver of land, an insecure entity that has no Constitution or defined
borders, and was created for a single persecuted religious community. India, in
contrast, is a strong and secure nation with defined boundaries, occupying a
major landmass, boasting of the world’s biggest population, and has a written
Constitution which doesn’t discriminate among its citizens on religious
grounds.
Hindutva ideologues imagine India as an exclusively Hindu
nation; many of them now want to render India as a ‘Hindu homeland’ just like
Israel identifies itself as a ‘Jewish homeland’. That fits in with the
Savarkar-Golwalkar idea of the Hindu rashtra, which, these ideologues hope, can
garner strident Western support just like Israel does. Many Hindutva groups in
Western countries have started operating along the lines of hardline Jewish
groups, imitating their language and tactics of funding and lobbying in these
capitals to influence policy and shape government decisions.
Ironically, in seeking parallels with Israel, Hindutva
ideologues are echoing the views of the Pakistani military dictator, General
Zia ul-Haq. “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out the
Judaism from Israel and it will fall like a house of cards. Take Islam out of
Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse,” said Zia in 1981. It
was not a one-way street. As per Benjamin Pogrund, newly-formed Israel followed
post-Partition Pakistan’s lead when it came to taking lands and property of the
Palestinians who had lived there before. A decade back, the Israeli
intellectual, Bernard Avishai, warned of the choice before his country — to be
either “a globalist Hebrew republic or a little Jewish Pakistan.”
Benjamin Netanyahu has made that choice. And that choice is
now before 1.4 billion Indians. Unless their country transmogrifies itself into
a version of Hindu Pakistan, instead of the secular, liberal, democratic
republic that has made it an exception among all post-colonial countries, India
cannot be Israel. Pakistan and Israel are historical twins of the twentieth
century, artificially created by erstwhile colonial masters on the basis of
religion and religious identity. India is not Pakistan. Indians chose a path in
1947 that was opposed to the one chosen by its blighted neighbour. This path
served the country well for seven decades. Why would India want to behave like
a Hindu Pakistan now?
Zia put the Pakistan army on a path of puritanical Islam,
introducing battles and tactics from Islamic mythology in higher military
training. The consequences of that change were to be witnessed over the
decades. Recently, the Indian army announced Project Udbhav, an initiative to
‘rediscover’ India’s heritage of Statecraft and strategic thought as drawn from
ancient Indian texts. A symposium held in Delhi last month declared that it
would study ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts from the 4th century BCE to the
8th century CE, a period before Muslim rulers came to India. This followed the
army’s compilation of Indian battlefield stratagems, based on ancient texts,
which was issued in 2021. Detailing 75 past aphorisms, Paramparik Bhartiya
Darshan… Ranniti aur Netriyta ke Shashwat Niyam (Traditional Indian Philosophy…
Eternal rules of warfare and leadership) has been recommended reading for all
soldiers.
Even geopolitically, today’s India seems to be fitting in
with parallels from Pakistan. In the previous Cold War, the United States of
America exploited Zia’s Pakistan as a frontline ally to defeat the Soviet Union
in Afghanistan. Various administrations in Washington DC overlooked Pakistan’s
human rights violations, its targeting of religious minorities, the illicit
development of nuclear weapons or promotion of violent, majoritarian religious extremism
during that period. Currently, India seems to be the courted by the US in its
new Cold War against China. Sharing a disputed border with China, India has
interests in containing its northern neighbour that converge with American
interests. Even as numerous critical reports from reputed global bodies,
including from the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom,
point to democratic backsliding and ill-treatment of religious minorities in
India since 2014, the Biden administration has chosen to look away.
The price for the US indulgence of Pakistan’s misdemeanours
in the 1980s has been paid by South Asia for decades, but the biggest sufferers
have been the poor people of Pakistan. The US indulges Netanyahu and may do the
same with Modi. But it is for Indians to ponder and decide if they wish their
country to go down the Pakistan route, either directly or via Israel.
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Sushant
Singh is lecturer at Yale University and Senior Fellow at Centre for Policy
Research in New Delhi
Source: Zia’s
Long Shadow
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/islamism-pakistan-zionism-hindutva-ideology/d/130950