Today, Indian and Israeli flags are displayed collectively at rallies demonstrating solidarity with Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault. The two international locations have developed vital army ties. And their leaders, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu, share comparable worldviews, together with concerning the dominant position that their respective religions — Hinduism and Judaism — ought to play of their international locations. Indian and Israeli media, utilizing Netanyahu’s nickname, have dubbed their relationship the “Modi-Bibi bromance.”

Along with many Western leaders, Modi instantly condemned the Hamas assault and later reiterated that the “people of India stand firmly with Israel in this difficult hour.” This declaration displays a wholesale change in New Delhi’s method to the Middle East. India not retains its friendship with Israel out of view and as an alternative trumpets Israeli-style aspirations for muscular overseas and safety insurance policies.

The “public acknowledgment” exhibits India’s rising “fascination with the Israeli model,” mentioned Nicolas Blarel, a Leiden University professor who research India’s relations within the Middle East.

A yr earlier than Israel was established in 1948, Britain break up its colony within the Indian subcontinent, creating India and Pakistan. At the time, Mohandas Okay. Gandhi and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, have been distraught over the choice to carve Pakistan out of British India as a separate Muslim nation. They insisted that India be a secular nation and balked on the Zionist motion’s marketing campaign for the creation within the Middle East of one other nation based mostly on a faith, Judaism.

India grew to become, within the Nineteen Eighties, the primary non-Arab nation to acknowledge Palestine as a state, responding partly to the considerations of India’s massive Muslim inhabitants, based on former diplomats. When Israel lastly secured long-elusive recognition by India in 1992, this was considered as a “prize” that might usher in wider recognition within the Global South. India was the final main non-Arab, non-Islamic nation to provoke diplomatic ties.

“The dispute used to be linked with ideas of decolonization, anti-imperialist,” mentioned Navtej Sarna, who served as India’s ambassador to the United States and Israel. “But as India started looking more toward the West at the end of the Cold War, it started looking at Israel in a different way. … But we developed that relationship quietly.”

As India engaged in border conflicts with Pakistan and China, New Delhi grew to become more and more grateful for an Israeli provide of dependable weapons, as did its “technology fetishism,” mentioned Blarel. “Clearly, there is an interest in what Mossad and other intelligence services from Israel have been able to do to protect their territory.”

Israel, in the meantime, discovered India to be a priceless buyer for army and surveillance tools. The United States had been involved about Israel’s army relationship with China and pressured Israel to divert its army commerce towards different international locations, Blarel mentioned. “The U.S. is very happy that India could step in,” he mentioned. The army relationship ballooned, making India the highest buyer of weapons from Israel and a key co-producer.

“The fact is that India had struggled with how to approach the establishment of the state of Israel at its inception,” mentioned Arun Okay. Singh, a former Indian ambassador to Israel and the United States. “But the partnership has built up. Through successive governments, the relationship has sustained that trajectory.”

After Modi grew to become prime minister in 2014, he made public what had been discreet, mentioned a number of former diplomats.

“Till Modi, the political establishment was a little more cautious. Now, it is more upfront in acknowledging the nature of the relationship,” mentioned a former diplomat, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to remark freely on political affairs. Much of the change, the diplomat mentioned, took place as a result of the “leadership feels less pressure to the sentiments in the left sections of the polity and the Muslim community.”

In 2016, after Indian commandos carried out a raid inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an assault by militants on an Indian military publish, Modi trumpeted the motion, saying: “Earlier, we used to hear of Israel having done something like this. But the country has seen that the Indian army is no less than anyone else.”

Modi grew to become the primary Indian prime minister to go to Israel, in 2017 — he had beforehand traveled there when he was chief minister of Gujarat state — and made a cease on the grave of Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s founding father. He additionally walked alongside the seaside with Netanyahu as cameras snapped images.

Since then, the financial relationship has continued to progress. At the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi in September, the leaders signed on to a brand new “economic corridor” linking India and Israel with railway, pipeline and information elements. Meanwhile, a consortium led by an organization run by Gautam Adani, one in every of India’s wealthiest enterprise tycoons with shut connections to Modi, bought Israel’s Haifa port.

While India continues to assist help for Palestinian refugees, its United Nations vote in assist of Palestinians is “no longer guaranteed,” mentioned Blarel. He added, “India is now looking like an outlier in the Global South when it wants to be a spokesperson in calling out the double standards of the West.”

It is ironic, mentioned Blarel, that early Hindu-nationalist thinkers in India drew upon Nazi ideology, whereas up to date supporters of Hindu nationalism extol the Zionist blueprint, which requires a state that’s each spiritual and democratic. “It’s difficult to square,” he mentioned.