Azad Essa, who is of Indian origin, was born and grew up in South Africa when the boycott and opposition of apartheid was growing. He was proud of India’s role in speaking up about apartheid as well as India’s historic role in supporting Palestine.
But then he traveled to Kashmir in the early 2000s and was shocked to see what had been happening there: an occupation, a militarized zone of little space for liberty for Kashmiris, Kashmiri disappearances and deaths.
He struggled to square this with his idea of India that spoke of itself as anticolonial, part of the non-aligned movement, that talked about non-violence and sold this as its “brand.”
He visited Kashmir multiple times, studied the situation there and in India, looking to understand what he was seeing against what he thought he knew.
And then, as he says in this interview, he became a journalist and traveled to Palestine and immediately saw the connections between it and Kashmir: the lack of freedom of movement, the military occupation, local leaders used to control the population, surveillance and more. But no one wanted to know or talk about it.
Essa says that changed when Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India in 2014 and began to build on India’s relationship with Israel.
Beginning with increasing already substantial Indian arms purchases from Israel and then with looking at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and finding a role model, Modi begins to remake the Indian state using the Israeli template.
Essa details this process in his book and as Palestinian journalist Linah Alsaafin writes, “demonstrates that the India-Israel alliance spells significant consequences for democracy, the rule of law and justice worldwide.”
