mondoweiss | Large-scale protests have been roiling Indian cities since earlier
this month, when the country’s parliament passed the Citizenship
Amendment Act, CAA. It offers citizenship to any refugees from the
neighboring (majority-Muslim) countries of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
Bangladesh who are members of non-Muslim “minority” communities in those
countries—but notably not to any Muslims. Prime Minister Narendra Modi
had introduced this clearly discriminatory measure as part of a package
of anti-Muslim steps he has taken since his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
won an increased majority in the Lok Sabha (parliament) last April.
The BJP was founded in 1980 as a party that proudly and explicitly
pursues “Hindutva” (Hindu power) in a country that, throughout the 50
years after it won Independence from Britain in 1947, had remained
committed to the determinedly non-religious form of civic equality
envisaged by the Congress Party and key independence-era leaders like
Mahatma Gandhi and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Congress Party
is now but a shadow of its earlier self. In the April elections, the BJP
won 303 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 elected seats.
Democrats and progressives around the world have been united in
protesting the BJP’s radically pro-Hindutva (or “saffronizing”)
policies. It is instructive, therefore, to note the many parallels
between the BJP’s policies and the classic kinds of policies Zionists
have pursued both on the ground in Palestine and in the lavish p.r.
campaigns they have run worldwide. Modi, it turns out, can teach us all a
lot about Zionism. Here, in a nutshell, are Modi’s step-by-step lessons
for how to create and defend an exclusivist,
ethno/sectarian-nationalist state:
