Last December, photographs of Priyanka Gandhi carrying a boutique handbag with Palestine written on it were widely circulated. They were taken when the member of parliament from Congress, and one of the party's general secretaries, was attending the Lok Sabha.

Since then, Gandhi has been speaking out on the matter of Palestine more sharply than before and explicitly named Israeli atrocities in Gaza as 'genocide' recently. She has also criticised the Modi government for its perfunctory support for Palestinians as it stands by, silently watching Benjamin Netanyahu-led Israel confine and starve to death an entire population and annihilating an entire nation.

The heaviness of being in Karnataka

However, the Congress party, in power in Karnataka, is doing the exact opposite of what Gandhi claims to stand for. Public meetings – indoor or in open spaces – in support of Palestine are not allowed in the state. And in Bengaluru, with the exception of a corner outside Freedom Park – a spot that has truly poor visibility – open-air public meetings on any topic, including and especially those on Palestine, are not allowed. Displaying the Palestinian flag is prohibited and cases have been filed against many people for having organised such meetings.

Even after people had obtained official permission for holding meetings in support of Palestine at in-door venues, the police force has, unofficially, intimidated and harassed the owners of those places, warning them against lending their premises for such gatherings.

In many cases, the meetings simply had to be cancelled. And their organisers —  harried, and feeling hounded — had to hunt for other venues at the very last  minute. Sometimes, they have had to meet almost clandestinely at new venues for fear of police harassment.

Unbearable forgetting, no laughter

The Karnataka government and its police seem to have forgotten that India has stood by the rights of Palestinians since before independence. Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was a great friend of India and hero to many of us.

In 1974, we recognised PLO as the official and sole representative of the Palestinians. In 1988, when Palestine proclaimed its independence and sovereignty, its swatantrata and swarajya, India was the very first non-Arab country to recognise it.  

However, in the decades that followed, successive governments have shaken hands with Israel, each more warmly and vigorously. After the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government came to power 11 years ago, those handshakes have gone on to become a bear hug. India’s conscience lies crushed, and its support for Palestine flattened — all by its own, apathetic, amoral hands. And so, although our official position on Palestine, as declared in the past, has not changed, it has withered away into words of mere formality. 

Reassertion: Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction

Today, the only way to reassert our position on Palestine lies in chanting and putting these three mantras into action: Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction (BDS). We must completely boycott Israel, including severing all import-export as well as cultural, scientific, and educational exchanges; withdraw any money that Indian companies may have invested in Israel; reduce or completely cut off our business with individuals, organisations and countries that have relations with Israel either in full or in different proportions, as deemed appropriate. 

There are nine companies in Bengaluru that manufacture and supply weapons, or some of their parts, to Israel. Chief minister Siddaramaiah, deputy chief minister D.K. Shivakumar, and health minister Dinesh Gundu Rao participated enthusiastically in the India-Israel Business Summit held in Bangalore last year.

When the head and the deputy head of the office of the Consulate General of Israel for South India went to meet Shivakumar, he welcomed them with a warmth that far exceeded official requirements and celebrated it all by sharing photos of the bonhomie on social media.  

It should now be the most urgent task for Gandhi and other leaders of Congress to change both the policy of the state government and the conduct of people like Shivakumar. If Gandhi's stand on Palestine is genuine, she must do the following: 

• First and foremost, she must publicly urge the governments of Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh, where her party is in power, to take back the ban on public meetings in support of Palestine and, instead, encourage people to hold them.  
• Second, she should call on members of her party, and the public at large, to organise open meetings in support of Palestine in those states and in the rest of the country. She, along with her party leaders, should also participate in them.  
• Third, she should demand that the Modi government take the BDS measures listed above, urgently.
• Fourth, she must get the governments of Karnataka and Telangana to withdraw the concessions they have given to companies sending weapons to Israel, and get those companies to move out of the two states.  
• Fifth, she should do all of this by joining hands with the Left parties. She should, also, pull into this effort, all other organisations, movements, and institutions that are working for public good. 

Without these actions, her words against Israel’s neo-nazi fascism will not amount to much more than those of the presidents and prime ministers of the European countries, and the kings and emirs of the Arab countries. 

The Big Bully and the playactors

These European states did nothing while Israel bullied, crushed and ghettoised Palestinians and stole their land, starting in 1948, the year of the Nakba.

And now, after Israel has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza; after it has bombed and flattened everything that the people there have – their hospitals, their schools, their systems of water supply and their sewerage and left them with nothing to eat and drink; at a time when it has deigned to open less than a handful of food-aid centres for these hungry, starving people, reduced now to the state of being living skeletons; at a time when it has, grudgingly, called upon these beleaguered but proud and self-respecting people to come with  begging bowls to collect some food and drink and then, when they come, caring not a jot that its bullets are killing women, children and the elderly, is gunning them down; at a time when it is gleefully starving infants to death; at a time when 6,000 trucks loaded with 170,000 metric tons of food have been waiting for weeks at Egypt’s border for permission to enter Gaza; and, at a time when, even if the people of Gaza do get something to eat and drink, it would do little to revive their bodies and their internal organs, all shrivelled beyond repair; at such a time as this, after all is over and irreparable damage done – only now  have these states and their leaders begun to show a little sympathy, and are, at last, making some weak noises about imposing a few limited sanctions on the Big Bully. And even that, softly, sheepishly, hesitantly. Do not forget: Big Bully it is that they are threatening — in their polite, cowardly way. They know that: they are playacting.

Now, as a poet of the theatre, I must say this: in true theatre, one always seeks and plays the truth, or attempts to do so. Playacting there is noble and truthful. For these states, playacting is an act of lying. It is Trump’s Truth Social: bravado. 

Therefore, one must not be left feeling that there is little or no shadow between those playactors and Priyanka Gandhi, with that boutique bag slung on her shoulder; and that there is, either by commission or omission, a thick, dark shadow between her own words and deeds. 

Raghunandana is a Kannada poet, playwright and stage director.

This is a translation and an expanded version of an article originally published in the  Kannada daily Prajavani. The Kannada article can be read here.

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