The horrendous Hamas incursion into Israel which targeted civilians, including women, children and the elderly, will remain in global consciousness as a crime against humanity.
What swiftly followed those brutal assaults of October 7 was the unremitting aerial bombing of Gaza, killing thousands of unarmed people, including women, children and the elderly, as part of Israel’s drive to seek “justice”.
There is a back story here of colonisation, forced expulsion of Palestinians and the capture of their land. It has remained a blot on the West which had sought to assuage its guilt over the Nazi atrocities perpetrated on the Jews by making the Palestinians, who had no role in the Holocaust, pay the greatest price for it through the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel on Palestinian soil. Over time, Israel evolved into a settler colonial apartheid state, capturing more and more of Palestinian land through untold, militarised repression until it has become what it is today: a nuclear power with one of the world’s most powerful armies, enabled by the steady drip of $3.8 billion from the US pouring in as military aid every year.
There was a time when this back story was known in India; there was a time when the Indian political establishment extended solidarity to the Palestinian cause. That time has long passed and nothing indicated this better than India having abstained from a UNGA resolution on October 27, calling for an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza. Remember, that three-day visit to Israel that Narendra Modi made in 2017 – the first Indian prime minister to do so? And how he followed it up with a three-hour visit to Ramallah the next year? The brevity of the latter visit and the statement which emanated from it signalled to the world that the careful balance India had hitherto maintained in its relations between the two entities had ended. Today, India is one of Israel’s most crucial trading partners. More relevant, it is the largest purchaser of Israel-made arms, apart from surveillance technology (‘Import Data Shows IB Bought Hardware From Israel Matching Kit Used for Pegasus, OCCRP Says’, The Wire, October 20, 2022). It has also emerged as the Indian establishment’s most favoured model for military and police deployment.
Cultural and media ties between the two countries have grown apace. The Mumbai attacks of 2008, which included strikes on the Chabad Lubavitch establishment, were something of a tipping point. That story had many facets which resonated in the country. An Indian nanny who rescued a toddler from the attackers became a major news point. Even more pervasive was the projection of the “common threat of terror from hostile neighbours”. The Modi years have seen this slant acquire a seriously communal tone, playing as it does to the anti-Muslim ideological project of Hindutva. It is this trope that once again seems to be reflected in Modi’s tweet on October 7: “Deeply shocked by the news of terrorist attacks in Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with the innocent victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour.”
Israel was quick to respond to this warmth and before long ‘India is with Israel’, was not just trending on X (formerly Twitter) but came to reflect a larger global common sense. Despite a later attempt at publicly acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinians, and the dispatch of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the well-defined reality is that ‘India is with Israel’.
This has been deepened by two layers of media coverage: first, the social media blitzkrieg in support of Israel after the October Hamas attacks and second, the embedding of major television channels within the Israeli army information machinery.
Coming to the first aspect, the surge of pro-Israeli, pro-bombardment sentiment from online Indians signals a major internationalisation of the Hindu nationalist troll. The Wire analysis, ‘How Pro-BJP WhatsApp, Facebook Groups Are Using the Israel-Hamas War to Stoke Islamophobia’ (October 25), points to four broad trends in their posts and tweets. They range from “dehumanising Palestinian suffering and delegitimising support for them, to making the Israel-Gaza war relatable by drawing historical Indian comparisons to it, to warning Hindus about an Islamist attack and pitching the BJP and Modi as the country’s only hope to fight this.”The last aspect is particularly important in this pre-election phase of Indian politics, where the ruling party is seizing every opportunity to expand Modi’s personal appeal.
Disinformation is a crucial ingredient in these posts. De-contextualised videos are central to the campaign. Instances have been cited of old videos repurposed for anti-Palestine propaganda, as for instance one of young girls in Jerusalem framed as “sex slaves”. The success of such efforts hinges crucially on the receptivity of their audiences. A Wire comment (‘As Israel Kills Thousands of Palestinian Civilians, We Need to Pay Attention to the Language of ‘War’’, October 26) underlines this: “Pernicious hatred for Muslims is the glue which binds them with the Israeli narrative.”
The question I want to ask, while coming to the second aspect, is this: When did channels like Times Now and India Today get embedded in the Israeli army? Some 20 days after the October 7 attack, when Gaza was witnessing genocide, they were still flogging the broken window panes and rotting potatoes left behind in a deserted kibbutz. There was some kind of competition between these two channels: if one had discovered the potatoes earlier, the other reported there were potatoes and fruit left behind. Their coverage could have been termed pure burlesque if it hadn’t been so dangerously the media equivalent of Nero.
The script they used sometimes appeared to be expanded social media posts. “What really happened? Because of the heavy rocket fire from Hamas… look at the glass, look at the roof. This means they tried to target each and every person in the house… Look at the condition here. The streets are almost deserted. Nobody is here… Some shoes are lying here, uniforms…”
Flags of Israel and Palestine. Representative image. Photo: Ted Eytan/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
There were some truly cringe-worthy moments as well. One correspondent while interviewing Israeli MP, Sharren Haskel, slipped in a little speech about how “India has been a victim of Pakistani terror too.” He then went back to ask her what Israel was doing to strike at the root of Hamas. Haskel, nothing loathe, launched into a description of Iran as the “head of the snake”.
The coverage was so over-the-top; so out of whack with journalistic methods and ethics, that it appeared at times to be pure, old-fashioned paid news. In fact, their own script indicated that all the information they were putting out came directly from Israel Defence Forces (IDF) sources. The Times Now reporter revealed that he had been given a manual by Israel with images which were televised promptly for Indian audiences. His India Today counterpart was handed over a tape comprising 43 minutes of footage of the Hamas attacks. Going through it, he said, was one of the most harrowing experiences of his life. He then proceeded to describe each frame, the chants of “Allahu Akbar”, the killing of a black Labrador, a man being killed before his two sons… “What I saw – completely charred infants. Women with gunshot wounds…” An audio tape of a Hamas operative talking excitedly to his parents about having killed ten Israelis and the father congratulating him was telecast over and over again, just as were the visuals from the Kibbutz Be’eri and the site of the Tribe of Nova Music Festival. What was striking about them was that they were essentially vignettes – the entire flow of each event was completely lost to the viewer.
This is not intended to underestimate the horrendous nature of the October 7 attacks, but as an argument for reporting the story as it needed to be reported, because even as these gentlemen told their recycled news stories, day after day, Gaza was being bombed to a stage when living, breathing people were visibly at death’s door. Yet the horror in Gaza remained a small sideshow in their news tableaux.
We understand that these channels could not report from Gaza, but what stopped them from uprooting themselves from Kibutz Be’eri and talking to the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, for instance? The media of even Israel’s closest allies never stooped to this level of completely one-sided coverage. The Western media were controlled without doubt, they were deeply biased towards Israel clearly, but somewhere journalistic professionalism was not completely abandoned.
A time will come when the Indian media will be left facing a deeply uncomfortable question: What were you doing when a genocide was playing out in Gaza?
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Release Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakravarty
Does every generation have to face an emergency? This is a question raised by Prabir Purkayastha in his new book (written before his recent incarceration), Keeping Up The Good Fight From the Emergency to the Present Day. The emergency then and the situation now, he describes, as a “destructive situation that develops if the political dispensation of the time erodes people’s fundamental rights in numerous ways”. The erosion can take several forms. Yet, if you want to “muzzle a million or more people, you cannot use the Emergency instrument, which was direct censorship… The new censors – official and unofficial – make an example of a few to create a chilling effect.”
This precisely was what the swoop on nearly 50 journalists and associates of the news portal, NewsClick on October 3, aimed to do. It revealed to us once again that the “new censors” – in this case the Special Cell of the Delhi Police – are riding roughshod over the fundamental rights of citizens with absolute impunity in order to send out their chilling message.
Violation of privacy was arguably one of the most distressing aspects of that raid. Here we are speaking not just about their personal privacy – the incursion into their homes, the ransacking and seizure of books, documents and personal papers – but their digital privacy. Devices like mobile phones, laptops, and desktops – critical for journalistic work and the protection of sources – were taken away. The asymmetric power between police personnel and the ordinary citizen is so stark that most of those so raided surrendered without demur sensitive information like pin numbers and passwords of their digital devices, along with the devices themselves.
The standard practice is that once seized, devices are rarely returned. This was why the recent court judgment in The Wire case, ordering the police to release devices taken from the homes of its editors and managers a year ago, is so important. The court ruled that devices, for which mirror images were anyway available with the police, cannot be kept indefinitely by the investigating officer “only on the speculation of an uncertain future event/discovery.”
What is at stake here is a violation of the Puttaswamy verdict delivered by a nine-judge Supreme Court bench in 2017, which recognised digital privacy as well:
“Most modern notions of privacy in the digital age use the term ‘privacy’ as shorthand to refer to a bundle of several concomitant rights over personal information – the right of access, the right of erasure, the right to have a say in the manner of its processing, the right of accuracy, the right of control of third-party access, etc.” (‘Device Seizures Are Making a Mockery of The Supreme Court’s Landmark Privacy Ruling’, October 17).
Madhavi Goradia Divan, in a recent newspaper comment, cites the Virendra Khanna vs State of Karnataka judgment, which set down how mobile records must be investigated. It ruled that the investigating officer must first seek court directions and emphasised that there must be reasonable ground for believing that it is necessary to carry out such a search.
The NewsClick raids only make more crucial the issues raised in the Puttaswamy and Virendra Khanna verdicts. Now a petition by five academics is slated to come up before the Supreme Court in the first week of November. They have urged the court to draw up norms under which search and seizure operations by the police and law enforcement agencies can be conducted.
Meanwhile, the chilling message sent to journalists by those raids continues to linger. A Delhi court has ordered that Prabir Purkayastha and human resources department head Amit Chakravarty, who is disabled and suffering gravely, remain in police custody in a completely fallacious case accusing them of spreading Chinese propaganda.
Journalists across the country are following both cases very closely because it is a matter of their human and professional rights.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
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Readers write in…
Newsclick case appalling
Radha Kumar, policy analyst and author, comments on the repression against NewsClick: “The appalling arrests of Prabir Purkayastha and Amit Chakrabarty under the UAPA is the latest of a series of attacks on the freedom of the media. I hope all opposition parties will now pledge to defend the independence of media, such as NewsClick, and withdraw the UAPA and similar laws that are used to victimise human rights defenders.”
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Solidarity with Palestine
Khushi Kabir, advisor, sent in this statement of Sangat, a South Asian Feminist Network: “Sangat, a feminist network representing women from different countries in South Asia, stands against the genocide in Gaza. Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed by the aggression carried out by Israeli Occupation Forces.
“We acknowledge and share the pain and horror of the families, victims, and hostages of the October 7 violence by Hamas. This action by Palestinian resistance has to be seen in light of the atrocities the citizens of brutally occupied Gaza have been subjugated to in all these years. It has been nothing but an open prison with severe restrictions on food, water, livelihood, and mobility. Palestinians in Gaza have been treated as less than humans, totally violating their human rights.
“We are alarmed by the support of various heads of state for the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his declared strategy for eradicating and annihilating the Palestinian people through an immoral war. We are particularly concerned about the genocidal pitched statements from Netanyahu and his lawmakers and the extremely racist and dehumanised language used to describe the Palestinian people and the ongoing wanton military assault on the people of Gaza…
“We call for an end to the offensive of the Government of Israel on innocent men, women, and children. We demand an immediate end to what is a humanitarian catastrophe and reiterate that intentional starvation of the civilian population is a crime against humanity, which is being committed against the people of Gaza with total impunity. A humanitarian corridor must be opened immediately, and electricity and water must be reinstated.
“We urgently demand that the leaders of nations supporting Israel understand that what is unfolding is a genocide. There can be no excuse ever for violence with this intent. Support for it is clearly indicative of a brutal colonial mindset. Revenge is not justice… We call for the institution of proper mechanisms for accountability and justice to end this culture of immunity and impunity for violations of International Humanitarian Law.
“Sangat believes that the feminist struggle for social justice, equality, human rights, and peace includes a people’s right to self- determination, and we join our Palestinian sisters, brothers, and allies across the world in condemning this ongoing genocidal war and call for an immediate ceasefire by the Israeli Government.”
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Sathyanand from the CPI Bangalore District Committee: “Protestors of the Left parties speaking out against Israel atrocities in Palestine were arrested by Bangalore police in Freedom Park. The permission was denied on the pretext of lack of space in Freedom Park. However, the real reason is that the police have been instructed to stop any protests in favour of the Palestinian people. We condemn the high-handed attitude of the State government to stifle all voices in favour of the Palestinian people. We condemn the Central government’s support of Israel and the dilution of our historic support for Palestine. We stand firmly in favour of an immediate ceasefire and the immediate implementation of the two-state formula.”
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The real reason for October 7 attack
M.K. Shah sent this in: “According to Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the think tank of the American Council on Foreign Relations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad want to stop the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and launched the October 7 terrorist attacks. This may be true but they may have also signed their own death warrants as well as those of thousands more Palestinians.”
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How can Indians behave this way?
Pradip Biswas writes in: “Today, I feel afresh, that cricket matches between India and Pakistan are nothing but a way to spark wild frenzy which could end up in communal clashes. The way our idiot boxes play the occasion in order to raise hate against the Muslim community is a direct fallout of the fundamentalism being practised by the RSS and BJP. This vexes me to the bone. If a cricket match between India and Pakistan sparks such mental ‘fury’, nothing can be more inhuman. When such ghastly scenes are beamed all over the country for a game, a sport, what can one say? We boast of being a federal democracy but what is shown is the barbarian psychology of our people at its worst. I lose hope.”
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.
