When I read about India’s abstention on the UN resolution regarding the International Court of Justice’s decision to start hearings on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I was shamed as an Indian. But when I read India’s cringeworthy Explanation of Vote [EoV], I felt humiliated as a human being.
I doubt that there has been a more mealy-mouthed opening sentence in any EoV that matches that of our permanent representative (PR). After the world (and ICJ) have witnessed nearly a year of the inhuman massacre of some 40,000 non-combatant Palestinians (and the revenge killing of a handful of Hamas militants), and the brutal repeated displacement of close to a million civilians being driven under fire from one part of the tiny Gaza Strip to another, while being denied food and water and health services on so horrific a scale of inhumanity that the usually sober, restrained ICJ has found itself with no alternative but to investigate whether Israel is in violation of the Geneva convention on genocide, all our PR is permitted by the Modi government to say is—I quote, “Today’s voting takes place in the backdrop of the ongoing conflict in Gaza”!
No, mate, it takes place in the background of the ICJ determination to investigate genocide by Israel. One hundred and twenty-four member-states applaud the decision; 43 don’t. India does not know whether to annoy Modi’s role model, Benjamin Netanyahu, or abandon the Palestinian cause we have supported since Mahatma Gandhi’s time. And so, having lost our moral compass, we dither. Our government neither applauds nor boos. It just steps aside. That is the tragic point to which the Modi cohort has brought Jawaharlal Nehru’s independent foreign policy, a policy that, till Modi’s arrival, constituted a national consensus. Nonalignment is now neutrality.
Our PR’s EoV goes on with the revelation that the “conflict”—as if we are talking of one of those incidents that brings in Yogi Adityanath’s bulldozers—has been going on “for more than eleven months”. Really, eleven months, counted to the last decimal point by Aryabhata’s descendants? Yes, eleven months during which we have been adding to Israel’s firepower while dishing out cliches to the Palestinians. Our PR is not to say ”genocide”; so, he restricts himself to “humanitarian crisis”. What, however, is being voted on is the question of ‘Genocide’.
Forty-three countries have the guts to say they will not accept an investigation into genocide whatever the ICJ may say. They comprise mainly the European countries who mercilessly committed outrage after outrage on the Jewish people for millennia, ending in the Holocaust. No Arab nation was involved in the Holocaust. Indeed, it was only when Muslims ruled Andalusia (modern Iberia) for 781 years (711-1492 CE) that the Jews lived in peace and honour. ‘Holocaust’ is a European disease extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. And the poor Palestinians are being made to pay the price of giving the opening to Europe to rid itself of its Jews.
The PR ended the oration written for him in Delhi with the ringing words, “Our efforts should be directed to bringing the two sides closer, not drive them further apart”. Wah! Wah! Mashallah. The viswaguru-cum-mitra is going to bring the butcher and the animal for slaughter closer by cowering on the knife’s edge. Abstention? Faugh!
Meanwhile, on the ground, Israel, strengthened by the negative western vote and the pusillanimity of the Indian position, has resorted to what one commentator has characterised as “the violent choreography of incremental escalation”. With pagers and walkie-talkies exploding in crowded places, killing hundreds of Lebanese (and a handful of Hezbollah militants), West Asia and Iran are being dragged by the rogue state of Israel into a frightening apocalypse. Yahweh alone can save us.
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.