Israel, India and the limits of diaspora lobbying
As the first cracks emerge in the pro-Israel lobby's iron control over American public opinion, I examine what this means for Indian foreign policy.
“Who is Bella Hadid?” is a question I’ve heard more than once from friends over the age of 45 this week. The answer: Bella, 24, and her sister Gigi, 26, are hugely successful American models. They walk the ramp for top fashion houses, appear on the cover of Vogue magazine and boast of 42.6 million and 66.5 million Instagram followers respectively. They are also the daughters of Mohammad Hadid, a Palestinian businessman, whose family was forced out of their homeland in the 1948 Nakba, and are two of the most vocal celebrity supporters of the Palestinian cause today. While the Hadid sisters have always been clear about their stance on Palestine, they have in the past faced strong backlash for their opinions. As recently as in 2018, Gigi Hadid, faced harsh criticism from pro- Israel groups, after a tweet on the role of Israeli greed in the Palestinian question. Hadid was forced to tweet that she would keep her political opinions to herself going forward.
This week however indicates that in American public opinion at least, the iron grip of the pro-Israel lobby seems to be slipping. On May 16, a rally in New York City decrying Israeli air-strikes on Gaza drew thousands of protestors, including Bella Hadid. Bella and Gigi have both used their huge social media platforms to highlight what is happening in Palestine to great effect. Across the world, their followers have been reading up, and organising themselves to make Palestinian voices heard. And it isn’t just supermodels who are putting their careers at risk by speaking out. Palestinians and supporters of the Palestinian cause in academia and many other fields have come out to publicly voice their opinions on the issue in a manner unthinkable even a few months ago. While American media houses have by and large minimised coverage of these protests in the US, the use of social media, especially by journalists based in Gaza or the occupied territories hasn’t let this silencing of opinion work like it usually does.
As ethno-nationalist vigilante groups, backed by armed Israeli forces, began to displace Palestinians settled in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah last month, Palestinians took to social media to document what was happening to them. Posting predominantly in English, and using the hashtag #savesheikhjarrah, their story and videos began to circulate — not just across the Arab world, but in the US as well. In a now viral interview with CNN, a 23-year-old Palestinian writer and activist, Mohammad el-Kurd, termed Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism. These are not voices or opinions which any major American news network has in the past given space to. His words have since found their way to placards and posters across the United States. The New York Times has done articles on el-Kurd and his colleagues and their use of social media to change the narrative in the West.
Last night, el-Kurd and some of his colleagues hosted a discussion on Twitter Spaces (a discussion platform, accessible to any Twitter user with over 600 followers) where they were heard by and answered questions from a whole array of American journalists with verified Twitter accounts. Despite the scratchy audio and frequent hanging of the platform, the message was clear. Palestinians had found a way to use social media to subvert the iron control on US media networks exercised by the pro-Israel lobby in the US.
This isn’t good news for Hindu nationalists in India, or Prime Minister Narendra Modi. When Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, he was cheered on by a growing section of the Indian diaspora in the United States. The Hindu diaspora, as they now began to term themselves, saw in Mr. Modi the possibility to push for neoliberal economic “reform” in their home country as well as a vehicle to articulate a new aggressively Hindu identity, a venture that they felt had been stifled by the left leaning secularist discourse that had dominated Indian media and academic circles for decades. Mr Modi was quick to cash into this sentiment — in the first 55 months of his tenure as prime minister, he spent a staggering Rs. 2,021 crores to visit 92 countries (In comparison, Manmohan Singh visited 93 countries over a 10 year tenure and Indira Gandhi visited 113 in her 15 years as prime minister). He invited the diaspora to be a part of the India story, and they responded enthusiastically.
In some ways, this deployment of the diaspora to influence foreign policy was very much based on the Israeli model, and to some extent it worked, at least for Mr. Modi personally. The reputation of Mr. Modi, who was denied a visa to the United States in the aftermath of the Gujarat riots of 2002, was steadily rehabilitated by a group of Hindu Indian expats. In 2014, a triumphant Mr. Modi visited America as the newly elected Prime Minister of India, and in an unusual move, addressed a packed Madison Square Garden. Sadanand Dhume, a prominent Indian American columnist, who was among the 20,000 strong crowd, writing in the Economic Times described it as “among the warmest welcomes ever accorded to a foreign leader on American soil.” This personality cult has, at least until the recent coronavirus crisis, by and large, endured. In September 2019, a 50,000 strong crowd of Indian Americans in Houston cheered on as Mr. Modi egged them on to vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
However, attempts to turn this personality cult and newly minted more aggressive Hindu identity into a relevant factor in foreign policy have not been as successful. And the reasons are obvious. First, India is still an avowedly secular state. The ‘first past the post’ system and a multiparty parliamentary democracy often hide the fact that Mr. Modi’s thumping electoral majority is still, in absolute terms, a minority. He received 32% of the vote in 2014 and 37% percent of the vote in 2019. While this is more than enough to deliver an electoral victory, it also indicates that support for ideas like that of a Hindu rashtra are not yet truly majoritarian in the sense in which support for the Zionist state is in Israel. This diversity in opinion is reflected in the diaspora as well, albeit in a muted form — the most recent example being Democrat politician Pramila Jayapal sponsoring a resolution calling on the Indian government to restore the internet in J&K and ensure religious freedom for all residents. While the resolution didn’t garner much support, the Indian External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar’s rather childish refusal to meet with a group of U.S. lawmakers that included Jayapal, publicly demonstrated that there was no one “Indian” diaspora opinion on the issue.
Second, the quest for a culturally homogenous “Hindu” identity has, more often than not, involved the erasure of caste discrimination and the imposition of an upper caste cultural hegemony. Legal attempts to address caste discrimination in the UK just five years ago were swiftly branded as “Hinduphobia”, in a manner very reminiscent of any criticism of Israel being termed “anti- Semitic”. This is changing — the last decade or so has seen Bahujan led anti-caste activism making its presence felt in American academic circles, which has ensured that allegations of Hinduphobia are subject to more meaningful scrutiny.
Third, the Hindu diaspora simply does not wield the kind of financial and cultural might in the United States that the pro-Israel lobby does. While Hindus in America may be financially well off, they do not exercise the kind of control over the financial world, the news media, academia and Hollywood that the pro-Israel lobby does. And as the events of the farmer protests have taught us, social media makes it difficult for even the most expensive artificially constructed narratives to prevail. Social media has ensured that rights violations, wherever they occur, are likely to be seen.
Conclusion
It is increasingly clear that using the diaspora to lobby our way out of the foreign policy consequences of muscular nationalism hasn’t worked out for India in the manner in which it has for Israel. And the events of the last week have demonstrated that even countries like Israel, for whom this model has worked for decades, are now struggling with managing the global public perception of their violence. The sort of iron curtain that one could create by controlling the western media and western academia is cracking.
Some of Mr. Modi’s most ardent supporters from 2014 now acknowledge that the country and its international stature have both taken a severe beating in the last seven years. Which leaves us with the question, what next? The obvious solution is to return to the quieter, more pragmatic approach to international relations of the Manmohan era, and in India’s statement at the UNSC on Palestine, there are some shadows of this. The challenge with this approach however is that India’s age old game of supporting liberty outside while suppressing it within the country under the tag of “internal affairs” may no longer be viable.
As we have seen over the last two weeks, global public tolerance for hypocrisy in international relations is currently in short supply. If we intend to engage with the world as a promoter of liberty and freedom, we have no choice but to address areas of human rights, unfreedom and oppression within our borders. From Kashmir to Bastar, justifying human rights violations by saying “it’s complicated” or “this is our internal affair” is no longer going to be enough. And that is no very bad thing.