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For India’s Muslims, the Hindutva applause for Israel’s war on Gaza is especially chilling
Earlier in October, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh held an event to celebrate the centenary of its founding. Around the same time, Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza completed its second year.
Though separated by geography, early Hindutva ideologues were admirers of the principles of Zionism on which Israel would later be founded. VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar expressed appreciation not only for Zionism as a nationalist project but as a model of ethno-religious supremacy.
Since October 2023, the Hindutva ecosystem has transformed Gaza into a battlefield of identity politics in India. Pro-Israel hashtags such as #IndiaStandsWithIsrael and #HindusWithIsrael flooded social media, often accompanied by dehumanising portrayals of Palestinians and inflammatory messages equating Indian Muslims with Hamas.
Hindutva social media networks have emerged as major sources spreading and amplifying anti-Palestinian disinformation and fake news. Twitter (now X), Facebook and WhatsApp became echo chambers where videos of bombed hospitals and refugee camps in Gaza were claimed to be “terrorist hideouts”, while any sympathy for Palestinians was treated as a betrayal of India.
The consequences of this digital propaganda were not abstract. They shaped real-world attitudes and deepened everyday precarity for India's Muslims. In the second half 2023, incidents of anti-Muslim hate speech rose by over 62% across India, with the majority recorded in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states, according to India Hate Lab. Much of this surge coincided with Israel's invasion of Gaza and became a reference point for anti-Muslim hate.
For Indian Muslims, the Gaza war has a haunting parallel. Expressing solidarity with Palestinians today comes at a crushing personal and political cost. Muslim students and journalists who posted pro-Palestine messages online have been suspended, interrogated or doxxed by Hindutva vigilantes.
Solidarity protests have been denied permission or dispersed under the pretext of “maintaining law and order.” Even symbolic gestures – the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag emoji, a line of prayer – are perceived as acts of subversion.
This weaponisation of patriotism has created an environment in which empathy itself is criminalised. The moral inversion is stark: cheering for a foreign military's bombardment is considered nationalist, while mourning for the civilian casualties of that bombardment is seen as radical.
The Sangh's century-long project to define India as a Hindu nation has found reinforcement in the imagery of Israel – a state that claims exclusive ownership of its land and faith, and justifies systemic violence as existential necessity.
Hindutva supporters have drawn parallels between Kashmir and Palestine. After the Pahalgam terror attack in April, several commentators called for India to “respond like Israel”. Already, there are accusations that Israeli surveillance technologies, such as the spyware Pegasus, have been deployed in India.
The social media age has only intensified these ideological exchanges. The convergence of Hindu nationalism and Zionist militarism is sustained through memes, misinformation and emotional manipulation – a digital theatre where Muslims everywhere are cast as the eternal enemy.
For a generation of Indian Muslims growing up online, this digital environment is both omnipresent and exhausting: to exist visibly, to voice grief, even to share facts, is to risk being denounced as an infiltrator in one's own country.
Two years since the siege of Gaza began, the line separating distant geopolitics and domestic bigotry has nearly vanished. What unfolds in Rafah reverberates in Delhi's alleys and Aligarh's campuses. The normalisation of genocide abroad feeds the normalisation of hatred at home. Each missile fired into Gaza becomes a metaphor for the moral decay that allows citizens of the world's largest democracy to cheer for human suffering, aligned with their imagined civilisational loyalties.
To understand what Gaza means for Indian Muslims is to confront the unsettling truth that the celebration of another people's annihilation is also a rehearsal for one's own marginalisation.
The applause for Israel's war has nothing to do with foreign policy. It is a declaration of domestic desire, a performance of what many wish could be replicated against Indian Muslims. Amidst the rubble of Gaza and the cheers for the Sangh's centenary celebrations, India's Muslims are left with the chilling realisation that their struggle for dignity is not just national but global, fought against an ideology that transcends borders, sanctifies violence and describes itself as civilisational.
Mohammad Aaquib is a Kolkata-based writer and researcher. He works on communalism, political violence, and Muslim identity in contemporary South and West Asia. He can be reached at maaquib8th@gmail.com. His Instagram account can be accessed here.
Source: Scroll
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