New Delhi: Israeli diplomats have been cultivating ties with the Hindu Right in India since the early 1960s, with Jan Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party members allegedly collaborating to organise rallies and protests across the country, as per unclassified documents from the Israeli foreign ministry.
In the 1970s, records indicate that an unexpected guest at the Israeli consulate was Gopal Godse, seeking assistance in printing and disseminating his speech in defence of his brother, Nathuram Godse, who had killed Mahatma Gandhi. The request was denied.
Based on foreign ministry documents released to the national archives in last two years, a detailed report by human rights and freedom of information activist Eitay Mack, published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, chronicles Israel’s relationship with the far right in India, particularly the BJP and its predecessor Jan Sangh.
The diplomatic telegrams show that while Israeli diplomats explicitly referred to the far-right members as “fascist” and noted that the ideology was based on a hatred of Muslims, the relations with the far right were carefully maintained.
India had recognised Israel on September 17, 1950, but full-scale diplomatic ties, with the opening of embassies in capitals, only took place in 1992. During those 40-0dd years, Israel was represented in India with a consulate in Mumbai.
The Haaretz report cites telegrams dating back to June 1965, when then-consul in Bombay, Peretz Gordon, wrote back to the Israeli foreign ministry that “to this day and in the future, the Hindu fears and hates the Muslim the same”. He further claimed that the opposition BJP and in the right-wing circles of the Indian National Congress, “this finds expression in various forms and even openly”.
Less than a year later, Gordon wrote on April 26, 1966 about recommendations for strengthening ties with India, which included “secret communications with oppositional elements for the purpose of organizing demonstrations hostile to the government”.
Two months later in June 1966, he observed that Indians could observe that the existence of Israel “constitutes a wedge between the Arab states that prevents the establishment of an Arab empire”. “India is not interested in establishing such an empire, neither led by [Egyptian President] Nasser nor by anyone else,” he added.
On the day of India’s independence anniversary on August 15, 1966, the head of the Political-Economic Planning Department, Ilan Aryeh, suggested at a meeting of the foreign ministry that there should be “cautious contact with the Jan Sangh party (perhaps through the Mossad)”.
During the meeting, another foreign ministry official said that the Israel consul was already in contact with the Jan Sangh party, but doubted that there was “any room for tightening ties with an extreme nationalist party that has no chance of coming to power or a coalition”.
On March 14, 1967, the Israeli consul wrote in a telegram that the Jan Sangh had included a demand for full diplomatic relations with Israel in its manifesto. Two months later, the Israeli ambassador to Nepal, Moshe Arel reported to Tel Aviv on May 22, 1967 that he had met with a Jan Sangh lawmaker, M.L. Sondhi, in Kathmandu.
As Sondhi was the MP from New Delhi, he said that “local government in the Delhi region had passed onto the hands of Jan Sangh”. Sondhi explained, as per the Israeli diplomatic telegram quoted in Haaretz, that “It is now possible to put the Indian government to various tests in the Israeli context, the result of which will be the undermining of the existing anti-Israel policy.”
A few months later in January 1968, Sondhi was in Phnom Penh, where he met with the Israeli ambassador to Cambodia, Raphael Ben Shalom, who wrote that the Indian lawmaker told him that he was ready to organise a “protest of hundreds of thousands” in support of full diplomatic ties with Israel.
In addition, through the same middleman, the consulate “coordinated queries with lawmakers from Jan Sangh designed to criticize and embarrass the New Delhi government on the issue of its abnormal relations with Israel”.
In his advice to Israeli diplomats, Sondhi also reportedly suggested that Israel should replace its “fixer in India as he was also a middleman for Taiwan”.
However, Israel seems to have continued with the same middleman to arrange local contacts for several years. In 1973, the head of the Asia department in the Israeli foreign ministry wrote to the consulate that their middleman is “strongly identified with the far right”. “He also serves as a middleman for Taiwan and is very active in all kinds of anti-communist organizations and activities that smell of the right and the CIA,” added deputy director Yaacov Shimoni in his telegram.
Haaretz wrote that during the ’70s, the consulate, through the same middleman, “coordinated queries with lawmakers from Jan Sangh designed to criticize and embarrass the New Delhi government on the issue of its abnormal relations with Israel”.
Over a decade later, another telegram from the Israeli consulate to the foreign ministry on October 30, 1985 refers to a middleman who organised meeting with the far-right parties “who used to receive large payments from us”.
Besides Jan Sangh, the Israeli consul in Mumbai, Reuven Dafni, also kept contact with the Shiv Sena party. A 1968 telegram by Dafni, who had been active underground in Hungary to save Jews during the Holocaust, described the Shiv Sena as “obviously demagogic fascist” and said that it held demonstrations in “the style of the Nazis in the ’30s in Germany and Austria: breaking windows of mainly foreign shops, removing foreign workers from various workplaces, etc”.
He repeated the parallels in another telegram in February 1969, where he said that Bombay riots was instigated by the Shiv Sena, which had “clear fascist foundations”.
During the October 1973 Yom Kippur, a rally was held in Bombay in support of Israel with participation from the Shiv Sena and Jan Sangh “in coordination with the Israeli consulate”. The Israeli consul, Joshua Trigor, wrote back that Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and a Jan Sangh MP gave speeches in support of Israel.
Referring to a meeting with the president and vice president of Hindu Mahasabha, Trigor wrote in November 1973 that the leadership gave him a detailed report on how they had made pro-Israeli speeches and demonstrations during the Yom Kippur war.
While the Hindu Mahasabha’s political power may have waned, Trigor felt that “it’s good that they also sympathize with us – even if one of the reasons for this is their hatred of Muslims”.
Emboldened by the outreach to the Hindu Mahasabha, the Israeli consulate received a “surprise guest” – Gopal Godse, brother of Nathuram Godse, the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi. Gopal Godse had also been convicted with a life sentence, but released in 1965.
In his report, Israeli diplomat Gideon Ben Ami said that he hadn’t known in advance of Godse’s visit, but since “it was already too late for its cancellation, I politely listened to his words…”.
Godse apparently spoke “passionately about his hatred of Muslims”. He also inquired whether the consulate would “lend its help in printing the defense speech of his brother who was executed [in 1949] and spread it in Israel”.
“Ben Ami wrote that he had firmly rejected the proposal and avoided entering into an ideological polemic with Gopal Godse. His embarrassment was due to the fact that the brother of Gandhi’s murderer had visited the consulate, not the consulate’s connection with the far right,” said the Haaretz article.
In the continuing saga of Israeli diplomats meeting with the Jan Sangh leadership over the decades to hear about their sympathy for Tel Aviv and disapproval of the Union government’s position, Israeli consul Trigor wrote that he “personally heard this from party president LK Advani at our meeting in Delhi in 1973”.
During the Emergency years, Israeli diplomats had difficulty in maintaining contacts with the Jan Sangh and other right-wing parties, as their leaders had gone underground or been arrested.
But when the Janta coalition swept to power in 1977, the Jan Sangh came to the centre.
A senior US diplomat, National Security Council’s Thomas Thornton, informed the Israeli ambassador in Washington David Turgeman that “those who pursue a less hostile line to Israel are organized within the framework of Janata”. Turgeman wrote in his telegram dated March 25, 1977 that Thornton told him that the “right-wing Jan Sangh, because of its anti-Muslim Hindu nature, is a supporter of Israel”.
A profile of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the new foreign minister in the Janta government, mentioned that he had once led a demonstration against the PLO representatives landing in Mumbai, which led to their plane being diverted to Delhi, an internal Israeli diplomatic telegram noted in April 1977.
As per another telegram, a US official in the State Department also explained to his Israeli interlocutor that the success of the Jan Sangh was due to “its close ties with the Hindu religious militia movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh”. He also noted that the electoral success was due to the RSS doing “wonders in recruiting voters in the elections for Janata”.
This was also being reported back by Israeli diplomats from India, with consul Haim Divon writing in 1979 that the Jan Sangh’s main strength was the “exemplarily organized extremist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh”, adding that its members were “fascists”.
Following the breakout of communal violence, a July 1977 telegram from Bombay consulate noted that “since the sectarian riots – that is, the attacks on the Muslim minority in various parts of northern India – increased in the last year, accusations have been made against Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, against its Jan Sangh patron and, indirectly, against Prime Minister Desai for not demanding that some members of Janata sever their ties with the group and for not coming out firmly against them”.
After the Bharatiya Janta Party was formed in April 1980, then Israeli consul Haim Divon wrote in a telegram that the new party “is actually (despite its denials) Jan Sangh in disguise”.
After the fall of the Janta government, it came to light that Israeli foreign minister had made a secret visit to India and met with Prime Minister Moraji Desai in 1977.
In July 1981, Israeli consul Yosef Hassin reported back that he had asked Ram Jethmalani, lawyer and then vice president of the BJP, to write an internal party paper on relations with Israel.
“Hassin reported that Jethmalani asked if he could prepare a working paper and arguments for him for a “balanced and fair position toward Israel” to be presented at the party’s conference. Hassin noted that he willingly complied with the request. Jethmalani was also one of the organizers of the abovementioned rally in support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, in coordination with the consulate,” the article stated.
In another telegram, Hassin observed that “most of the supporters and friends of Israel in India come from among its ranks – on the basis of hatred of Haman more than love of Mordechai”. He was referring to the story of the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible in which Haman, the grand vizier of the Achaemenid King, plots to have all Jews in Persia killed after Mordecai, a Jewish man, refuses to prostrate before him.
In an overview of Israel’s relations with India, a report written by the Isreali foreign ministry’s Asia department in June 1982 observed that the “factors working in our favour” included “the existence of the Hindu-Muslim conflict, which was a deep and sharp rift, and the formation of the anti-Muslim right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party”.
In the same month, Hassin was forced to leave the country after the Indian government declared him persona non grata after he attacked the Indian government for its pro-Arab policy in a news interview.
