(Image source: Sam Fine/In These Times)

During the 2025 New York City Marathon, runners and spectators wore bibs and carried signs that read “Runners Say Free Palestine” and “#DropTCS,” a reference to the Indian multinational technology company The Tata Group, and its subsidiary, Tata Consultancy Services. Activists argued that Tata’s stated commitment to “health and wellness” erased the company’s “central role in enabling genocide” in Palestine. In a report titled “Architects of Occupation: The Tata Group, Indian Capital, and the India-Israel Alliance,” activists detail Tata’s connections with Israel through weapons manufacturing, digital infrastructure, and financing.

The link between Indian capital and the occupation of Palestine is not new, according to journalist Azad Essa, who covers #DropTCS and similar solidarity campaigns. However, many in the United States are unaware of the longstanding connections between India and Israel. The story we often hear in the media about the relationship between the two states goes something like this: the government of India was historically pro-Palestine on the grounds of a shared commitment to anti-colonial struggles against the British. More recently, this narrative goes, the Indian government shifted to a pro-Israel alliance that came with the rise of the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), particularly with the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014, which led to a “sea change” and “radical shift,” resulting in explicit military, economic, and political alliances between the two countries.

In his 2023 book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, Essa argues that this narrative erases both overt and covert state relationships that date back to the Cold War. While the information may not be new for those familiar with India-Israel foreign policy, Essa makes it accessible to a general audience. “At its core,” Essa writes, the book is about “the ideas we carry about India and Israel and their connection to each other.” While “one of India’s biggest exports” is the idea of a Gandhian, nonviolent freedom fighter, Essa draws on military records, policy documents, diplomatic archives, and political speeches to reveal a different vision of India—a heavily militarized state complicit in genocidal violence.

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became a leader in the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of 121 countries that did not formally align with either the United States or Soviet Union during the Cold War. He established political relationships with Arab states, publicly criticized the Zionist movement’s collaboration with Britain, and opposed the partition of Palestine. However, in 1962 following a border dispute with China, he needed weapons for the Sino-Indian War. He reached out to world leaders, and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to supply them. Nehru asked Ben-Gurion to deliver the weapons in ships that did not fly the Israeli flag. But Ben-Gurion said no. Nehru nevertheless accepted, and the weapons were delivered under the Israeli flag.

For Essa, this moment exemplifies a longstanding contradiction between the Indian government’s public-facing words and private backchannels. He does not frame Nehru’s decision as an individual moral failing, but rather as a structural consequence of postcolonial state-building within British-drawn borders. Even though India lost to China in 1962, the war established Israel as a reliable arms supplier. Nehru’s Indian National Congress government continued to receive support from Israel at key moments when the U.S. or Soviet Union had withdrawn military aid, including the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan. Over time, India relied on Israeli technologies for border disputes, the occupation of Kashmir, and to counter guerilla land struggles within India.

These arms deals remained quiet. Publicly, India was the first non-Arab government to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as “the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” and supported a 1975 UN resolution that defined Zionism as racist. While the Indian National Congress consistently offered words of support and charity to the Palestinian people, Essa argues that India had become part of an emerging “global pacification industry,” which voiced support for Palestine while normalizing Israel’s occupation.

For Essa, this is not a contradiction, but a “symbiotic” relationship typical of state diplomacy. For Israel, the relationship with India offered a market for their emerging weapons industry. For India, along with military aid, they received Israeli investment in agriculture, technology, and security—with “technology” and “security” serving as neutral-sounding covers for racism targeting Muslims, tribal communities, and other minoritized groups.

Over time, these collaborations evolved into joint terror commissions and military exercises, with implications beyond India and Israel. For example, Essa reports meeting UN peacekeepers from the Israeli-trained Jammu and Kashmir infantry in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who had been hired to use their experience “hunting militias in the mountains of Kashmir.” This example shows how the militarization of Palestine and Kashmir transformed them into training grounds for occupying forces. Whether the India-Israel relationship was overt or covert, both states stood to benefit.

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As India and Israel built their military and economic ties, religious rhetoric established an affinity between Zionism and Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist political ideology at the foundation of the BJP’s politics. Both Hindutva and Zionist political movements tapped into long traditions of ethnonationalism that relied on tropes of ancient Jewish and Hindu civilization under threat by Muslim invaders. In India, this narrative stretches back over 100 years, to the multiple visions for its independent government. While the Indian National Congress party upheld secular democratic politics, concurrent Hindutva organizations argued for an explicitly Hindu nation. In 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) formed, drawing inspiration from European fascist ideas of national unity. The RSS became the “ideological mentor” for the parties that eventually consolidated into the BJP. Essa’s focus on the longstanding power and presence of the RSS reminds readers that the targeting of Indian Muslims is not new, even if media today is more likely to report on its contemporary manifestations—for example, accusing Muslim men of “love Jihad,” or forced conversion; home demolition; hijab bans; and editing Muslim history out of textbooks.

The two nations went public with their ties in 1992, when India established full diplomatic relations with Israel and opened an Israeli embassy in New Delhi. With the fall of the Soviet Union, India could no longer rely on them for arms support. There was also a rightward turn in both the Indian and Israeli governments: Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel in 1996, and the BJP formed the National Democratic Alliance government in India in 1998. After the U.S. sanctioned India over nuclear tests, Israel supplied India with satellite and drone technology in the 1999 war with Pakistan. In a shift from the 1975 UN resolution on Zionism as racism, at the 2001 UN Conference on Racism in South Africa, India refused to equate both Zionism and the caste system with racism.

Essa demonstrates that the U.S. played a key role in this shift. Following 9/11, the U.S., India, and Israel aligned and collaborated on counterterrorism initiatives, particularly after the 2001 attack on Indian parliament and the 2008 attack on Mumbai. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, large public-facing events have cemented a MAGA/BJP alliance. These include the 2019 “Howdy Modi” event in Houston, which featured speeches by Trump and Modi, celebrated the U.S. and India’s state partnership as well as Indian-American immigrant achievements, and drew over 50,000 people. In 2020, a “Namaste Trump” event was held in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, as a response to “Howdy Modi,” with over 100,000 people in attendance.

These right-wing alignments, according to Essa, have been years in the making. He traces how the Hindu nationalist diaspora recognized the power of the Zionist diaspora, and mirrored it through direct financing and weapons deals, lobbying in Washington, watchdog organizations against academic work critical of Hindutva, research centers shaping how journalists cover Indian politics, cultural practices like yoga and naturopathic medicine, and corporate partnerships like Tata’s endorsement of the NYC marathon.

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In Hostile Homelands, Essa successfully intervenes in the idea that the Indian state was ever truly pro-Palestine. The book was published before October 7, 2023. In the context of the continued genocide in Gaza, Essa asks us to pay attention to the parallels between Palestine and Kashmir, such as Jewish- and Hindu-only settlements and the citizenship, land, and corporate laws that further land dispossession from Palestinians and Kashmiris. He also orients us to deepening state collaborations around counter-terrorism; the 20,000 Indians recruited to fill labor shortages in occupied Palestine; and Modi and Netanyahu’s public friendship (which media consistently refers to as a “bromance”).

Though the book is framed around India and Israel, it is more accurately a rendering of the relationship between the government centers of Delhi, Tel Aviv, and D.C., at a moment when the right wing has taken power in all three. There are, of course, multiple worlds beyond these city centers and their hegemonic political parties—a range of land struggles, regional frameworks, and diasporic movements. The book could highlight, even briefly, relationships between the Israeli government and South Asian governments beyond India. Israel also supplied weapons and training to the Sri Lankan Army in its genocide against the Tamil people, and sent military aircraft supplies to Myanmar after the 2021 military coup, aiding its genocide against the Rohingya people. A singular focus on the Indian state also constrains the book’s capacity to unearth multiple visions of liberation for both occupied Palestine and the subcontinent, beyond individual references to diasporic pro-Palestine or anti-Hindutva protests. It also limits the degree to which readers might gain an understanding of the rise of far-right international ties among Modi and Trump supporters. While activists are intervening in the international corporate ties of the Tata Group, how are they also responding to the wave of support for the far-right among working people?

However, Hostile Homelands does not aim to offer a social or regional history; it is a progressive journalist’s intervention in the contemporary media landscape. Essa’s Substack, “Hostile Homelands: A Newsletter about India and Israel,” keeps his readers up-to-date on the everyday people engaged internationally in pro-Palestine and anti-Hindutva organizing. As state collaborations deepen, so must solidarity work.

Vani Kannan is an associate teaching professor in the Emory University Writing Program.