Despite significant differences, India and Israel have forged a close relationship over the decades, driven partly by their colonial legacies and their contentious handling of minority issues. Both nations, while promoting themselves as democracies, have faced criticism for their treatment of minorities and adherence to international commitments.

Odd Couple: Yet Commonalities
The relationship between two countries can be multiple. These are referred to as bilateral relations. It is generally understood that bilateral ties are two-sided and can be based on cultural symmetry, geographical proximity, language, or common goals that define the agenda of this relationship. In this context, there are hardly such similarities or commonalities between India and Israel (located in two different Asian regions, the manner of their creation, the size of the population, domestic and foreign challenges, and their approach to global issues). Yet, similarities must exist as they have grown ever closely aligned over the decades (they could not be a more 'odd couple'). A closer inspection is required to understand what these similarities are truly. 

The end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine was replaced by the UK, which was given the mandate to rule Palestine by the League of Nations after the end of the First World War.

In the historical context, a common factor or a similarity is the role of the British colonial power in the two World Wars and post periods in Palestine and the Indian subcontinent. The ‘Independence Movement,’ led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mahatma Gandhi, was a series of historic events in South Asia aimed at ending British rule in colonial India. It lasted until 1947, when the Indian Independence Act 1947 was passed, creating Pakistan and India. While the British colonial role was common, Israel's creation had nothing to do even remotely with a political struggle; rather, it owed to the weakening of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. The German American historian Walter Laquear states, “The situation in the Holy Land reflected the decline that had overtaken the Ottoman Empire since its heydays in the 15^th and 16^th centuries”. The United Kingdom's (UK’s) role was crucial in dismembering the Ottoman Empire, which also ruled Palestine. The end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine was replaced by the UK, which was given the mandate to rule Palestine by the League of Nations after the end of the First World War. Not surprisingly, England administered Palestine in a heartless manner. C. H. Dodd and Mary Sales, two well-known British professors of History, blame England for having ignored the original inhabitants of Palestine, which 'enabled the Jews to flood it with immigrants and help them settle in the country. England did not pay regard to the interests or rights of the Arab inhabitants, the lawful owners of the country.'
The Zionist movement (a nationalist political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state and now supports the continued existence of Israel as such a state) received a fillip from the Balfour Declaration, which was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the WWI, announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine (then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population). The promise by the British Government, in terms of the Balfour Declaration, to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine had a caveat that the 'development of a Jewish national home shall not prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' Professor Fred Khouri, a known specialist on the Middle East, quoted the British colonial power in 1918, 'the future government in all those territories that also include Palestine that had already been liberated by allied arms 'should be based on the principles of the consent of the governed.' He further quotes the Arab leaders of these territories in the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Cyprus), 'Britain was not free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine.' The British made no effort to refute the conclusion drawn by the Arab leaders. At the same time, history witnessed the opposite. According to historian Mohammad Suleman, 'hundreds of thousands of Jews poured into Palestine by force of arms and massacre and had to subsist in camps on the outskirts of their usurped motherland.' Israeli leadership has been known for twisting history. Still, the misfortune is that Western countries, especially after the WWII, on account of many reasons, especially the guilt of not having stopped the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, chose to ignore the fact that the Jewish presence in Palestine had almost ceased as from the 1st century A.D. Henry Cattan, a well-known international lawyer, considers the ‘Zionist objective of creating a Jewish state in Palestine was the root of the trouble source of the Palestine tragedy.’ 
The callous way in which the British colonial power dealt with the then princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 continues to cause pain and suffering to the inhabitants of Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). Professor Khouri sums up the dilemma with the British colonial power in 1947, common to the then Palestine and India, largely resulted from 'her past errors of omission and commission.' In this, he meant that by vacillating in word and deed but 'allowing competing in extremist pressures to alter her policies, avoiding unpopular and difficult decisions and enforcement actions, and trying to please all sides at the same time, Britain was only postponing the day of reckoning and making the ultimate solution that very challenging to find and implement.' The result is for the minorities in these states to pick up the 'unfinished businesses' on their wounded backs, with nowhere to lay down the burden. India and Israel, the successor states, used these 'unfulfilled' promises of the colonial past to their advantage, and the end users, the minorities, are victims of the state's arrogance. Having less-than-comfortable relations in the neighborhood, the region, and beyond are also similarities that India and Israel share. Since the upgrading of India's diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, the relationship received a boost when L. K. Advani, then a member of the cabinet in 2002, strongly supported the bilateral relationship, viewing Israel as a valuable strategic partner due to a 'mutual animosity towards Muslims.
State Creation: Violating the Undertaking 
States are known to keep their words or undertakings given to international organizations on issues of bilateral or multilateral interests. However, history is a witness to India and Israel both having flouted their undertakings given to the United Nations (UN), and the similarities continue. At the creation of independent Pakistan and India, the British colonial power left an open wound regarding the demarcation of boundaries and the fate of princely states. In this context, it is the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Not surprisingly, war erupted in October 1947 between Pakistan and India on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir. At the cessation of hostilities between Pakistan and India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, made a commitment to the UN in support of the expression of the will of the people of Jammu and Kashmir to decide their fate, as reflected in his November 2, 1947, All India Radio broadcast, "We are prepared when peace and law and order is established to have a referendum" and reiterated his pledge to his Pakistani counterpart, "We have agreed to an impartial international agency like the UN supervising any referendum." Regretfully, successive governments in India have reneged on the promise to hold a referendum in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Rather, the people of the IIOJK have witnessed unprecedented atrocities which know no end. The tragedy is that the UN and major powers continue to either ignore the tragedy or have become part of global politics at the cost of the continuing misery of the Kashmiris in the IIOJK. 
To add insult to injury, the election manifesto of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2009, 2014, and 2019 General Elections affirmed its intention to abrogate Article 370 (even though a fig leaf to cover untold atrocities inflicted on the Kashmiris by Indian forces). After winning the election, the BJP government dissolved Article 370 with two Presidential Orders, CO 272 and CO 273, on August 5-6, 2019, respectively. BBC was blunt: "The government then stunned everyone by revoking nearly all of Article 370, which 35A is part of and which has been the basis of Kashmir's complex relationship with India for some 70 years." The abrogation removes the special status granted to Jammu and Kashmir by the constitution. This means the Indian Parliament's power to make laws for the newly formed Union Territories is no longer restricted to three subjects. India's constitution and other territorial laws apply to these two territories as they would to any other State and Union Territory in the country. The Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir is redundant, and the region no longer has a separate flag. Further, the exclusive benefits granted, which were so close to the hearts of the Kashmiris and had shielded their rights significantly as 'permanent citizens' of Jammu and Kashmir to own and acquire property within the region, stand dissolved. In brief, India illegally annexed Jammu and Kashmir, bifurcated it, and absorbed it into the Indian Union in brazen violation of UN Security Council resolutions.
Not to be left behind, Israel is also on record of having gone back on his words to a leading international organization. Global politics has muddled a well-known fact that Israel has violated obligations on international law and under UN resolutions. The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 181 of November 29, 1947, imposed certain obligations, limitations, and restrictions upon the two states (Arab and Jewish) whose creation it then envisaged. Considering Israel, these obligations, limitations, and restrictions included a geographical limitation of the territory of the Jewish state, political rights, human rights and fundamental freedoms in favor of all persons, and the protection of Arab property rights under the guarantee of the UN within the proposed state. It is the territory that is the real bone of contention between the Palestinians (neighboring Jordan and Egypt, having diplomatic relations with Israel, have relatively reconciled to any territorial claims, or have low priority in terms of the bilateral relationship). Thus, Israel, at the time of its creation, was bound by the obligations and restrictions imposed upon it by the UNGA of November 29, 1947, which had fixed Israel's territorial limits; precluded it from invoking sovereignty over territories; seized more than the resolution of November 29, 1947 to defeat; or violate the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, which are protected by the resolution; or to justify any action on its part which is inconsistent with or derogatory to, such a resolution. It is on record that on May 15, 1948, the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government of Israel addressed the cablegram to the Secretary-General of the UN, “The State of Israel would be ready to cooperate with organs and representatives of all the United Nations in implementation of the resolution of the General Assembly of November 29, 1947.” Henry Cattan considers that 'it is obvious that to realize the Zionist dreams of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Israelis were willing in 1948 to subscribe to all the limitations, restrictions, and obligations imposed by the resolution.' The effects on the ground reflect that Israel violated the undertaking it gave to the UN and has refused to evacuate the territories it seized in 1948 and 1949 over the partition resolution in which it was under an obligation to evacuate these territories. Cattan also considers that 'these territories belong in law and in fact to the Palestinians and Israel is under obligation to evacuate these territories.' Larry Collins and Dominic Lapierre, highly regarded historians in the book, 'O Jerusalem,' capture the plight of the Arabs in the wake of the sudden triumph of the Jews in 1948, 'tens of thousands of refugees began swarming up the hills towards Ramallah. This was a calculated policy to drive out the Arabs who summoned the Arab leaders to the army headquarters and bluntly advised them to get out, and subsequently, large parts of the population were physically evicted from their homes.'
The most regrettable part of Israel's violation of the undertaking given to the UN was concerning the international status of Jerusalem (a sacred city to Muslims, Christians, and Jews). Abba Eban, who was then Israel's Representative in 1947 at the UN, was 'most cooperative' at that time and assured that since the legal status of Jerusalem is different from that of the territory in which Israel is sovereign, it shall abide by the UN charter which deals with the domestic jurisdiction of states. 
A tragic situation developed in the post-war, which Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre described as 'long-festering or as bitterly disputed as the one symbolized by the Arab families who had fled their homes in Jerusalem in the first weeks of the partition, that of the Arab refugees.' While the war ended, it left Jerusalem split in half. The line drawn 'down her heart would divide the holy city for years to come.' The divided Holy Land reflected a sad situation where orthodox Jews could not visit the Mount of Olives; on the other side of the city, the Arabs came to the walls to stay at their homes they had lost, occupied by a tide of new immigrants. Decades later, Israel continues to violate most of the commitments it made to the UN, especially about Jerusalem, which it now fully occupies, and atrocities are regularly committed, especially on the Arab population who go to the Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray. The fate of the Christians in Jerusalem is no better, and according to the World Council of Churches (WCC), Christians in Jerusalem face “persecution” by Israeli extremist groups amid government action encouraged either by police negligence or by statements made by Israeli cabinet ministers. For the Arab Muslims, all that is left is for them to mourn the loss of Jerusalem; as Collins and Lapierre summed up, 'the Dome of the Rock now graces Arab homes, from Beirut to Baghdad.' 

India and Israel, the successor states, used these 'unfulfilled' promises of the colonial past to their advantage, and the end users, the minorities, are victims of the state's arrogance.

Trumpeting ‘Democracy’: Denying Truth and Treatment of the Minorities  
India and Israel use all available varieties of media and multilateral fora to trumpet the dogma that they are democracies, which is a 'flawed trumpet'; their similarities are an eye-opener. The facts on the ground belie their 'trumpeting.' Sumera Kauser, a known researcher on South Asia, opines, 'India and Israel are very strange so-called democracies of their kind as both have been unleashing oppressive attitudes towards their minorities.'
India
All religions teach us to respect and spread love and happiness unconditionally, but globally, the reasons for increasingly tense situations between nations and individuals are due to their offensive attitudes and negative behavior. In this context, India and Israel share similarities. India is a multi-religious, multilingual, and multicultural nation. Yet, it has no state religion. According to the Constitution of India, 'it is a secular state in which every religion has equal statuses. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion to all persons and protects the culture of its citizens, especially the minorities. Globally, India extolls itself as the 'largest democracy,' and on multilateral fora, Indian leadership 'trumpeting' the virtues of democracy to its people and the world at large knows no ends. The ground realities are a wake-up call; India's Ministry of External Affairs website proudly proclaims, 'India's support for the Palestinian’s cause (majority of whom are Muslims) is an integral part of the nation's foreign policy, and in 1988, India became one of the first countries to recognize the State of Palestine'. However, when the crunch came in October 2023, where a minority by any standards faced danger (a friend in need is a friend indeed), the friend had switched sides. The Palestinians in Gaza were looking for India, a major country to put into practice its 'oft-repeated support,' given bilaterally and in multilateral fora were in for a shock; media reported that Prime Minister Modi had issued a strong declaration in support of Israel and tweeted, "Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel." As if the United States' support for the Israelis were not enough, India abandoned its 'principled' position. It backed the Israelis to the extent that over 40,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children, some even in their cribs—have been killed. Ashok Swain, a leading international relations expert at Uppsala University in Sweden, invited attention to the 'New Delhi is now trying to maintain a more balanced position; those early statements showed that Modi is more interested in getting votes and had sent the message that Muslims are 'the perpetrators of all sorts of crimes and less than human beings, while 'ignoring the Gaza situation or even who created Hamas.' 
The Indian leadership's throwing muck on the Muslims was most unfortunate and insensitive as the Muslims are the country's largest minority, whose loyalty was not only being questioned, but the dogma of India being the largest democracy was dented as it ignored a sizable part of its population and is obsessed to create a fantasy of India as a Hindu-only nation. According to Apoorvanand, a well-known Indian literary and cultural critic, 'Nine years in power, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government has finally defeated the long-departed Mughal Empire and other Muslim rulers.’ Recent revelations show that it has quietly pushed them to the margins in school textbooks, where they had occupied significant territory for the past seven decades. Several pages on the Mughal rulers and Delhi Sultanate have been deleted from the textbooks of different classes. Apoorvanand considers that the Mughals have not disappeared entirely, but students 'will no longer learn about the achievements of some of India's most important rulers even though their legacy lives on in the architecture and cultural landscape of India, from which the country prides itself and earns huge foreign exchange.' The Prime Minister considers the Muslims as 'infiltrators.' 
Modi used three planks to enforce his and his party's ethno-religious agenda: converting Muslim symbols like the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya into Hindu temples in fulfillment of his promise to nationalist Hindus, introducing the Uniform Civil Code, which sought to replace religion-specific family laws into a common civil code in violation of respective religious preferences and introduction of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), targeted at Muslims to record their antecedence before 1972. Given the status of incomplete record keeping in rural settings, lack of literacy, and access to legal remedies in regions with a history of trans-migrations because of conflict, it meant that those unable to prove residence in India before 1972 were either external or waiting to be expelled. Jawed Naqvi, a well-known Indian columnist, considers these 'regressive measures targeted initially against Muslims in north-east India which, if accomplished, would only proceed to be exercised in the rest of India. Such demographic terror would only deliver a fully subjugated and repressed Muslim minority of over 250 million.' 
The results of the Indian elections were announced recently. The election campaign had the Prime Minister ever more viciously targeting the Muslim community, describing them as infiltrators who posed a demographic threat to 80 percent of Hindus. His office published spurious data in the middle of the elections to shore up the lie. It may be challenging to predict if India is headed for more of the same under Modi's new term, or as some Indian media houses are cautiously optimistic, 'things will change because the two centrist allies are expected to heal the mistrust sowed between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir and elsewhere.'
Sikhism is the dominant religion in Punjab, India, where it is followed by 16 million, constituting 57.7 percent of the population, the only Indian state where Sikhism is the majority faith. After the Muslims, Sikhs constitute the second largest minority in India. A lot of the Sikhs have not been any better than the Muslims; rather, at times, the Indian state has inflicted upon them brutalities, which scars the image of India as a democracy and that which treats all its citizens as equals. Simran Jeet Singh of Aspen Institute Religion and Society Program, U.S, and Gunisha Kaur, a physician, known authorities on the Sikhs and their issues, writing in Weekly Time Magazine on December 5, 2023, stated, 'Indian leadership right from the outset came to see religious minorities as a threat to their nation-building project, viewing Sikhs with suspicion and disdain, recognizing they catalyzed anti-colonial efforts and played a leading role in them.' The authors add that 'Indian elites worried about Punjab becoming a majority Sikh state that would gain political power and threaten the stability of young India.' This led Indian leadership to deny Punjab and its Sikhs consequential rights that were afforded to other states, including official language status for Punjabi and its state capital. India also weakened Punjab's political power by carving out territory from it for other states, such as Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.  
The Indian Government continued to harp on the Sikh militancy, which led the Indian government in 1984 to launch Operation Blue Star, ignoring the injustice that was being done to the Sikhs in the Indian Punjab province. On June 1, 1984, after negotiations with the militants failed, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the army to launch Operation Blue Star in haste, attacking the Golden Temple and scores of other Sikh temples and sites across Punjab which included killing civilians and devotees too. Doctor Joyce Pettigrew, an extremely well-known British anthropologist and an expert on the issues of the Sikhs in the Punjab province, states, 'the resentment among the Sikhs is a combination of all the financial ruin brought on the sick farming community through the high cost of fuel, inadequate support for wheat and contravening riparian law, an international norm, India diverted Punjab's river waters to different states and regions, a massive economic blow to the state long-known as the breadbasket of India, and a threat to the livelihood of Punjab's agrarian society.'  
The tyranny of the state could also be reflected in post-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 when thousands of innocent Sikhs were massacred in various cities of India, even though the two Sikh guards who assassinated the late Prime Minister had nothing to do directly with the other peace-loving Sikh citizens of the country. Doctor Pettigrew's opinion on the continued resistance of the Sikhs is that 'the protection against economic injustice is a spiritual resource when faced with cruelty and oppression as well as an explanation for injustice.' Late Elizabeth Coulson, a known anthropologist, summed up, “Violence, let loose in this fashion does not only destroy the future, but it can also force its victims to settle for any form of government that gives them freedom from attack.”
While Pakistan may not have the most enviable record of treatment of its minorities, it has received accolades for the respect it has for the Sikhs in Pakistan and abroad. Sikh Jathas (group) of pilgrims have been visiting their revered shrines for decades, and the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor in November 2019 is a matter of pride for all those who believe in religious tolerance and harmony. The corridor significantly reduces the journey for Sikh pilgrims who want to visit the sacred temple of Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur, the inauguration of which coincided with Guru Nanak's 550th birthday.   
Yasser Latif Hamdani, a well-known writer on South Asian affairs, corrects the impression held by many that India's founding fathers, Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, were balanced leaders with stable views on minorities and Hindu castes. Highlighting the record of these leaders, he states that both Gandhi and Nehru could give 'Modi a run for his money.' Indeed, Modi would seem like an angel by comparison. Hamdani recalls Gandhi's stay in South Africa, where he was 'an unrepentant racist who believed in the racial superiority of the Aryan race over Africans, whom he dismissed as savages throughout his time in South Africa.' On the other hand, to sideline and isolate the Muslim middle class and secular leadership, Gandhi unleashed some of the worst sectarian bigots from the Muslim community. Regarding Prime Minister Nehru, attention is drawn to him being an intractable opponent of free speech, which he stifled and clipped through the first amendment to the Indian constitution, which took away the very freedom the Constitution of India promised to provide. On human rights violations, Hamdani draws attention to September 1948, when Indian armed forces marched into Hyderabad on Nehru's orders, which caused horrendous war crimes and genocide that, according to the Indian Government's own Sundarlal Committee, claimed upwards of 40,000 lives, including Muslims. 
The renaissance of a particular religion (practiced by the majority), especially in a state with other religions that have co-existed with it for ages, can have serious repercussions for the country's religious harmony. In brief, since Modi came into power a decade ago, fear has risen among Indian minorities as growing intolerance and a new norm of communal violence threaten ethnic minorities. Maleeha Lodhi, the former Ambassador, highlights the situation in IIOJK, noting, "Despite concerns and condemnations around the world, India has continued its repressive policies and human rights violations in occupied Kashmir." AFP describes Modi's decade as Premier, stating that he has cultivated an image as an aggressive champion of the country's majority Hindu faith, which has alarmed minorities, including the country's 200-million-plus Muslim community.

(To be continued…)

The writer holds a Master's in Political Science from Punjab University and a Master's in Diplomatic Studies from the UK. He has served in various capacities in Pakistan's missions abroad, including as an Ambassador to Vietnam and High Commissioner to Malaysia. Currently, he is on the visiting faculty of four mainstream public universities in Islamabad and serves as an Adviser to the India Centre at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. 
E-mail: [email protected]