~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Note: "Bhai Bhai" means "Brother Brother" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Saffron-Zion bhai bhai Amulya Ganguli August 25 http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_349290,00120001.htm Left to itself, the BJP would have sent the Indian army to Iraq immediately after the American request. From its Jan Sangh days, the party has been pro-American in its outlook. A major reason for this orientation was its anti-communism. Since the US was battling the 'evil empire', the Jan Sangh-BJP could not but be its ally. It had no time during the Cold War for Nehruvian non-alignment. In addition to the Jan Sangh-BJP's anti-communism, another reason which made it gravitate towards the US was its pro-business economic line. Known as a party of traders which favoured the market forces, it didn't think much of the controlled economy under the Congress's licence-permit raj. In both these aspects, the BJP's policies have finally won the day. Non-alignment is dead and so is the licence-permit raj. There is a third aspect, however, which is new. It is the BJP's tilt towards Israel. The inclination wasn't much in evidence earlier. In fact, the praise lavished on Hitler's Germany by the BJP's guru, M.S. Golwalkar, wouldn't have amused the Israelis. In his book, We or Our Nationhood Defined, Golwalkar said: "German race pride has now become the topic of the day. To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic races — the Jews. "Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by." So far as Golwalkar is concerned, not only did German exclusivism lead to the eviction of Jews from Germany (and their extermination), but "the Hebrew nation in Palestine died a natural death" when "Palestine became Arab". The BJP today, however, is more than a little pleased with the revival of the 'Hebrew nation' in Palestine. The feeling is not the result merely of admiration for the ability of the Jews to overcome huge odds. The reason why the BJP wants to reach out to Israel is the perception that it is imbued with anti-Muslim feelings because of Palestinian terrorism. However, the Israeli diatribe against terrorism is not a little disingenuous. Israel made abundant use of terrorism while attaining its nationhood. Among the Zionist organisations engaged in murder and mayhem were the Irgun, whose leader was Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel, and the Stern Gang. Among their most devastating acts was a truck-bomb attack on King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 people, in 1946, and the assassination of Lord Moyne, a British minister, in 1944. After Lord Moyne's death, Churchill told the House of Commons: "If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently in the past." Churchill wasn't the only one to compare the Jewish terrorists with the Nazis. Louis Spears, the British Minister for Syria and Lebanon, also accused the Zionists of a rabid nationalism indistinguishable from Nazism. The horror with which the rest of the world regarded the Holocaust earned so much sympathy for the Jews that their acts of terrorism have now largely been forgotten. Instead, the focus is on Palestinian — or Islamic — terrorism, the factor which has brought Israel and the BJP closer together. The BJP has always envied the ease with which Tel Aviv launches its offensives against the Palestinian targets. The saffron hawks have always been in favour of such attacks against the terrorists in Kashmir and their bases in Pakistan. Their supporters have often wondered why India cannot replicate Israel's military onslaughts against Muslim terrorists. The answer — that Israel can afford to do so because it has the unstinted support of the US — has never seemed convincing to the Hindutva hardliners. They seem oblivious of the fact that, in this part of the world, it is Pakistan which has been an ally of the US for the last half a century. The BJP's latest objective is to undo this equation. It wants India to replace Pakistan as America's first choice as an ally in South Asia and thereby become the Asian Israel, as it were. The moves for a US-India-Israel axis is significant in this context. The case for such a tie-up is that these democracies should cooperate in the matter of fighting the Islamic menace. When Jaswant Singh was India's external affairs minister, he had confided to his Israeli hosts during a visit that till the advent of the BJP, India's foreign policy towards Israel was hostage to the previous government's pro-Muslim bias. Now that the BJP has corrected this unholy tilt, the Indian government is all set to be a close ally of Israel. The only fly in this ointment is that large sections of Indians may not take too kindly to an overt alliance with the Zionists and the American neo-cons (many of whom are Jews) if only because it will pit India directly against the Muslim world. Even a hardliner like L.K. Advani has noted that there is not a single Indian in al-Qaeda while there are Pakistanis, Indonesians, Saudis and others. This remarkable fact suggests that, first, the Indian Muslim has faith in his country's pluralism and, second, he does not believe that India is involved in a clash of civilisations. An alliance with America and Israel will dispel such a notion. The BJP may not mind antagonising the Indian Muslims to consolidate its saffron vote bank. But it is doubtful whether the rest of the country, including the BJP's allies in the NDA, are ready for such a dangerous anti-Muslim line with its portents of unleashing a civil strife. Besides, Israel itself has begun to overdraw on the world's reserve of sympathy for the Jews. As the earlier comparisons of the Zionists with the Nazis showed, the former's brutal propensities were recognised even during World War II. Now, the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians has confirmed the Jewish preference for merciless policies. Even a section of Israeli army recruits have been so appalled by their government's cruel attitude that they have refused to fight the Palestinians, saying that they were not prepared to "expel, destroy, blockade, assassinate, starve and humiliate an entire people". An Arab League member had once noted that the Jews had become so Europeanised as to be unrecognisable to Arabs as their one-time Semitic 'cousins'. Instead, they were imbued with the European will to impose their 'imperialistic... materialistic... ideas and trying to implement them first by British pressure, then by American pressure, and then by terrorism'. And now by the US-backed military prowess, it can be added. |