From Gandhi to Modi: How India abandoned Palestine

In November 1947, less than four months after Indian independence, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, head of India’s UN delegation and sister to first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, stood before the UN General Assembly to cast a rare vote: she rejected the partition plan for Palestine. In 1974, India became one of the first countries to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and then the state of Palestine in 1988.

Decades later, in February 2026, Indian PM Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), stood at the Knesset’s podium to declare a “special strategic partnership” with the Israeli occupation state.

His statement crowned an accelerating trajectory of political, military, and technological rapprochement between the two countries, one that has seen India stray from the path of Palestinian support that its independence leaders had paved. Chief among them was Mahatma Gandhi, who as early as 1938 wrote in his essay ‘The Jews’ that “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English,” indicating that imposing a Jewish national home upon it was “wrong and inhuman.”

Seventy-eight years later, how did the compass reverse?

Hindutva: The ideology that makes allies

This shift in India’s attitude toward Palestine can be mostly traced to the rise of “Hindutva” within the political scene.

In literal terms, Hindutva means “the essence of being Hindu.” Yet the Sanskrit word has shed its purely descriptive meaning, taking on political connotations. For its adherents, Hindutva has come to redefine the national culture and identity of the Indian people as exclusively Hindu.

This ideology was developed by the Indian politician and thinker Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who laid out its foundations in his 1923 book “Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?” Its premise is stark: India is a Hindu nation, and everything else is an exception requiring justification. 

Savarkar’s legacy is bound up with accusations of sectarian incitement and support for Hindu supremacist policies. Most damningly, his movement is associated with the assassination of Gandhi, shot dead by a Hindu extremist on the evening of January 30, 1948, based on his belief that Gandhi had made too many concessions to Muslims.

Hindu nationalist organisations carried this vision forward until it became central to the discourse of the BJP, which governs India today. When Modi led the party to power in 2014, he moved Hindutva from the margins of political life to the core of state decision-making. In the India he began to build, Muslims and Islamic history were recast as a threat to the Hindu identity he was determined to impose.

The effects of Hindutva’s rapid ascent magnified quickly: the revocation of the special status of the mostly Muslim region of Kashmir in 2019 and the stripping of its right to self-governance; the amendment of the citizenship law to exclude Muslims from obtaining nationality, unlike other minorities.

It was perhaps inevitable that this ideology would find in Israel an inspiring model, a state that defines itself by a rigid ethno-religious identity and whose “existential threat” justifies its every action. Muslims thus found themselves at the ideological intersection of Hindu nationalism and Zionism as a shared existential threat.

A fork in the road

Since Modi came to power, New Delhi has adopted what has come to be known as a policy of “de-hyphenation”; treating the relationship with Israel and the Palestinian cause as two entirely separate tracks.

This approach gave the Indian government room to expand its cooperation with Israel in defence, technology, cybersecurity, and AI, without formally abandoning the two-state solution or its historical relations with the Palestinian Authority. While Israeli PM Netanyahu visited New Delhi on January 14, 2018, just one month after India voted against the USA’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, Modi became the first Indian PM to visit Palestine weeks later.

It appeared at that moment as though the de-hyphenation policy was working smoothly: each track moved in its own direction without standing in the other’s way. But, since Israel began its genocide in Gaza, the the two tracks can no longer run in parallel. Now, any stance supportive of the Palestinian cause carries an obvious price, one that stems directly from India’s relationship with Israel.

A study last April described the relationship between the two countries as having entered a new phase of “strategic integration”

During Modi’s February 2026 visit to Israel, the two countries signed 16 new cooperation agreements covering defense, emerging technology, and artificial intelligence. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel accounted for roughly 13% of India’s military imports between 2020 and 2024, with a notable concentration in drone systems and electronic warfare.

A study published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies last April described the relationship between the two countries as having entered a new phase of “strategic integration,” going beyond arms trade to encompass research, development, and cooperation in confronting “security threats.”

The scale of the shift becomes clear when India is compared to other Global South countries. South Africa led an unprecedented legal case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, charging it with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. Bolivia and Colombia severed their diplomatic relations with Israel. A growing coalition of African and Latin American nations formed the Hague Group; a coordinated bloc that at the Bogotá Conference in July 2025 expanded to twelve countries committing to block the export of weapons, ammunition, and military fuel to Israel.

India, by contrast, walks a tightrope. In September 2025 it voted with 142 nations in favor of a UN General Assembly resolution endorsing the “New York Declaration” on a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian cause and the implementation of the two-state solution. At the same time, however, it abstained at key junctures from voting in favor of sharper resolutions on Gaza, among them the humanitarian truce resolution in October 2023 and the unconditional ceasefire resolution in June 2025.

Manipulating public opinion

The expansion of the India-Israel partnership has not been confined to state calculations alone, it has been accompanied by broader shifts in the Indian public sphere. While Hindutva provided the intellectual framework for this transformation, digital platforms became the fundamental tool for its entrenchment. In recent years, the BJP has built a vast network known as the IT Cell, comprising more than 150,000 volunteers, coordinators, and online activists working to convert the party’s ideological framework into everyday convictions reaching millions.

After the attacks of October 7, 2023, the hashtags #IndiaStandsWithIsrael and #HamasIsTerrorist became remarkably dominant in Indian social media. Any sympathy with Gaza or Palestine, meanwhile, was framed as “support for terrorism” and “betrayal of the nation,” explicitly linked to “terrorism in Kashmir.” The result was a tactic simple in its essence but devastatingly effective: whoever mourns the people of Gaza is portrayed as effectively siding with India’s enemies.

A January 2026 study by researcher Kiran Garimella documents this systematic manipulation. It reveals how pro-Israel narratives spread inside BJP-aligned WhatsApp groups at through the circulation of fabricated images, clips, and information linking “the Islamic threat” across the Indian and Israeli contexts.

Indian journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who worked within this network, documented its internal mechanics in her book “I Am a Troll.” Volunteers, she found, did not express personal opinions; they received ready-made, pre-framed materials that transformed “Palestine” from a humanitarian cause into a new threat to Hindu identity.

These efforts even extended to intimidation. Since October 2023, approximately 17 criminal cases have been registered in seven states across India against activists and individuals for posts and participation in pro-Palestine protests. Some were even prosecuted under the notorious Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which permits detention for extended periods without trial.

These prosecutions sent a clear message that expressing solidarity with Palestine would not pass without consequence, even as they provoked widespread condemnation from human rights organisations and opposition parties. And yet there are still some serious voices that reject this shift and consider it an explicit deviation from India’s historical identity as an anti-colonial state and champion of peoples’ right to self-determination.

The Indian National Congress, the most prominent opposition party, accused the prime minister of displaying “moral cowardice” by travelling to Israel while international criticism of the genocide in Gaza was mounting. The Communist Party of India described the visit as a “betrayal of the Palestinian cause” and a legitimization of “Netanyahu’s murderous regime,” with its General Secretary M.A. Baby saying that Modi’s embrace of Zionist Israel amid its relentless assault on Palestine represents a “betrayal of India’s anti-colonial legacy.”

On the civil society front, the India Palestine Solidarity Forum issued a statement in February 2026 demanding repudiation of the visit. In academic circles, Achin Vanaik, professor of international relations at Delhi University, continues to document what he calls the “moral-political degradation” resulting from the ideological convergence between Hindutva and Zionism.

What is happening in India is not only a change in foreign policy and its alignments. It is a model for how public opinion is reshaped from within: through an ideology that redefines identity, a digital machine that pumps out a daily narrative, and laws that shackle protest.