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A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Firstpost here.

Why is Singapore so rich? One of the fundamental reasons is that Singapore understood how to take advantage of its geography. The Port of Singapore, located at the choke point over the Straits of Malacca, is the second busiest in the world. About one third of global maritime trade passes through these straits. This includes a third of all the oil that is carried on the high seas. This is the trade route that connects Europe and the Middle East to the coasts of China and Japan in the far east. In other words, the Straits of Malacca join the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean is supposed to be our zone of influence.  So what are we doing about it?

This year, India made a daring move. We have just secured support from Singapore for the Indian Navy to jointly patrol the Straits of Malacca. Did you know that 80 percent of China’s crude oil supply passes through these straits? The Chinese are certainly aware of this. As far back as 2003, then Chinese President Hu Jintao had called it China’s “Malacca dilemma.” This is the main reason China is always looking for a toehold in the Indian Ocean. Such as on Coco Island in Myanmar. And if possible, to crowd the Indian Navy out of the Bay of Bengal by reaching out to Bangladesh. Somewhat comically, China does not even seem to like the term ‘Indian Ocean.’ They have been trying subtly for a while on international forums to get it labeled as the “Asia Pacific.” 

But now, India is set to do something bigger. Pick up a map and take a close look at the Indian Ocean region. Right at the entrance to the Straits of Malacca, just 170 km from the northern tip of Indonesia, lies Great Nicobar Island. It is here that India is building a vast new transshipment port, as well as an international airport. This new container terminal will compete with the existing ports of Singapore and Malaysia. The Indian Navy, operating out of the base at Campbell Bay on the same island, will seal India’s control over these crucial straits. Now ask yourself: what kind of people would want to stop a project like this?

How big is the container port being built on Great Nicobar Island? Its capacity is supposed to be 14.5 million TEUs (Twenty-foot equivalent units). This would immediately put it at par with Hong Kong, and among the ten busiest ports in the world. A township is being built for at least 60,000 people to live and work on the island. Along with a full fledged international airport. Other countries make millions of dollars bringing tourists from all over the world to island retreats. Why should India miss out? 

Of course, a project as large as this will always give rise to concerns. The concerns about the environment need to be taken seriously. But here is the story in simple numbers. The total area that will have to be cleared out for the project is not even 2 percent of the forest cover of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Surely, this can be made up by planting forests somewhere else in the country, as it should. 

And what about the local tribal population on the island and their centuries old way of life? Again, only 73 square kilometers of tribal land has been set aside for the project. And this will be made up by adding 76 square kilometers elsewhere. In effect, the tribal reserve loses nothing, and actually gains a little bit in area. Besides, presenting development as a ‘threat’ to tribal populations is a false choice. It is deeply patronizing to our fellow Indians who live on these islands. And frankly, somewhat insulting. Our people on these islands want the same things we all do: jobs, growth, and progress. Why are ‘activists’ presenting people from tribal groups as different from the rest of us? 

We have to remember that ports are the way for a country to become a key part of the global supply chain. And ports make a nation rich. When Dubai was developing rapidly in the 1970s, the Sheikh borrowed a lot of money to build their new port. Today, the port of Jebel Ali in Dubai is the 9th busiest in the world. Incidentally, China has 8 out of the top 25 busiest ports in the world, not counting Hong Kong. For comparison, India has just one. It is Mundra port in Gujarat, owned by the Adani group. This might be one reason Indian liberals consider Adani to be the worst person in the world. 

The control over shipping routes is one of the great drivers of world history. The Suez canal links the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. So when Egypt blocked the Suez in 1956, the Europeans and Israel went to war against Egypt. The United States intervened in the Colombian civil war and created an entirely new country called Panama, just so it could build the Panama canal in 1904. That would create an ocean route between the eastern and western coasts of the United States, as well as link the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Why did Japan attack the United States in World War 2? Because the Philippine Islands, controlled by the United States, were blocking the route for shipping oil to Japan from its newly acquired colonies in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).  

Why is the United States the world’s biggest superpower? Because whoever rules the oceans also rules the world. Once upon a time, it used to be Britain. If there is an exact date for the end of the British Empire, it has to be February 15, 1942. That is the day the British surrendered the fortress of Singapore to the Japanese. From that day onwards, Britain was finished as a power on the high seas. And finished as a superpower. We are talking about control of these same Straits of Malacca, where India is building the port on Great Nicobar Island. This is where world history is made.  

Significantly, India’s own glorious maritime past is also tied up with the Straits of Malacca. The town of Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has recently been renamed as Srivijayapuram. The Srivijaya empire was great because it controlled the Straits of Malacca. Also the famous Chola Empire, which held sway over the entire eastern coast of modern India, along with most of the coast of Myanmar, all the way up to these straits between Indonesia and Malaysia.  

One of the things that has held India back since independence is land based thinking. Our neighbors are not just Pakistan, China and Bangladesh. Our real neighbor is the Indian Ocean. And the countries along its rim, stretching from the horn of Africa, the Gulf countries, the island nations such as Mauritius or Maldives, to the Straits of Malacca. Our cultural connections in this area run deep. The opportunities for trade are endless.

The idea is simple. To build India, we have to build our ports. Back in 2014, the average time for a ship to turn around from an Indian port was 4 days. Now it is down to 2 days. Trade goes hand in hand with diplomacy and national security.  India is particularly vulnerable because our north-eastern states have no access to the sea. Their only connection to the rest of India is through the narrow Siliguri corridor, the so-called “chicken’s neck.” But in 2023, India opened up a shipping route into Sittwe port in Myanmar, down the Kaladan river that flows out of Mizoram. The Prime Minister of Mauritius has just invited India to provide the vessel carrying him to the Chagos Islands, which were returned to them this year by Britain. 

In many ways, the opposition to the Nicobar Island port reminds us of what happened with Vizhinjam port in Kerala. It was said that the deep sea port would damage the coastline, causing erosion. It was said to be a threat to fishing communities. Local church groups also joined the protests. But now that the port has been built, there is a political battle to take credit for its success. Even the Communists and the Congress insist it was their “dream.”  That’s okay. Good that these dreams have turned into reality in the Modi led era.

In the case of the Nicobar port, the usual tussle had been going on for a while. Between the government and the usual crew of NGOs, activists, and those known for filing PILs. But the matter has taken on a much bigger national dimension ever since Sonia Gandhi herself wrote a highly publicized op-ed against it. Something about her piece, its tone and its strident opposition, just seemed off. Coming around the time Rahul Gandhi was rumored to be in South-East Asia, it also felt like bad form. Either way, it is time to tell the Indian people why the project is in supreme national interest. We should go ahead and build.

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

In November of 2011, the Indian Communist leader Sitaram Yechury traveled to Britain. There he would give a memorial lecture at the Perse school of Cambridge University, in honor of one its most notable alumni: the historian Rajani Palme-Dutt. That name may not be too well known outside academic circles. But in the words of historian Irfan Habib, the “first major Marxist work on modern India” was R P Dutt’s 1940 book India Today. These comments by Habib appear in his 2010 essay on the development of Marxist history in India. That article is still available today on the official website of the CPI(M).

So why is Indian Marxist historiography so bad? Because it was started by a British Indian Communist who was coordinating with Adolf Hitler. Born in England in 1896 to a Bengali father and a Swedish mother, and distantly related to future Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. So here is Rajani Palme-Dutt in November 1939, at the outbreak of World War 2, telling what some might say is the lie of the century:

“Poland was used as a decoy duck by Chamberlain to draw on the Nazi troops, with the expectation that their onward sweep might lead them into conflict with the Soviet Union. This plan was defeated by the swift action of the Soviet Union in occupying the Eastern areas of Poland. The only help to the suffering Polish people, betrayed by their corrupt and tyrannous rulers, was given by the Soviet Union. The liberation of the people of Western Ukraine and Western White Russia will be welcomed by every democrat and socialist.” 

To understand how big a distortion this is, we need some context. We all know that the Second World War began when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. So if Poland is the victim, how come Dutt is calling them tyrants? And how exactly are the Communists helping the Polish people by ‘liberating’ what Dutt calls ‘Western Ukraine’ and ‘Western White Russia’ (Western Belarus)?

This is classic Communist propaganda, and it is chilling. Actually, Hitler had signed a deal with the Soviet Union to divide up Poland. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west on Sep 1, 1939. Seventeen days later, the Communists invaded from the east, and occupied Eastern Poland. This culminated in a joint Nazi-Communist victory parade at the city of Brest-Litovsk on Sep 22, 1939. The videos of that joint celebration are still available on Youtube.

But Dutt cannot admit to this deal, because then he would have to accept that Nazis and Communists were actually allies. As ‘historian’ and loyal Communist foot soldier, he has the official spin ready. In his world, the Communists were actually fighting the Nazis, not allying with them. And according to him, Eastern Poland is not a real place. It is actually the Western part of the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus. So the Communists had to invade and “liberate” Eastern Poland, so that they could save it from Hitler!

This is fake news at its finest And it is about the start of the Second World War, arguably the biggest event of the 20th century. And it carries the scholarly stamp of approval by Rajani Palme-Dutt, the father of Indian Marxist historiography. Now ask yourself this question. This is how Communist ‘historians’ make up stuff from thin air.  And this from 1939, for which the videos are still available.  Now can you imagine what Communist historians have done with 5000 years of Indian civilization?

But it gets worse. Because ‘historian’ R P Dutt was more than just your typical academic leftist. The father of Indian Marxist historiography was also an active politician. And a very successful one. When Hitler and Stalin signed the deal on Aug 23, 1939, many Communists were unhappy about it. But not R P Dutt. And therefore, Stalin had to get rid of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Instead, Stalin handpicked R P Dutt to become chief of the CPGB and coordinate the Communist alliance with Hitler.

Are we not glad that our history was written by “scholars” such as this? This is the legacy that the Indian left is trying to protect from a supposed assault by ideologically motivated historians who are said to be close to the BJP. And from the wider influence of “Whatsapp University.” 

Incidentally, Stalin also got rid of R P Dutt later on as head of the Communist Party of Great Britain. That was in 1941, when relations soured between Nazis and Communists, and Hitler ended up invading the Soviet Union.

For what it’s worth, it would be interesting to make a note of the date: Aug 23. That fateful day in 1939 when Nazis and Communists became allies, laying the plot that led to the Second World War. In a remarkable coincidence, it was exactly nine years later, on Aug 23, 1948 that the Soviet Ministry of higher education put out a decree banning the teaching of the “bourgeois pseudo-science” of genetics across the Communist empire. Thousands of scientists were put in labor camps for believing in evolution. Many were executed, some starved or worked to death. But that is a story for another day. Another story that is not as well known as it should be. You know the reason: Marxist historians and their “scientific temper.”

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

We must all be shocked at the recent scandal at the Delhi High Court. An accidental fire at the home of a sitting judge has thrown up piles of burned cash. And also some burning questions. When it comes to the inner workings of our judiciary, how much do we really know? What do we know about their system of appointments, or their vetting process? How can the public hold them accountable? Do we even have basic transparency? 

Not really. Across India, less than 7 percent of high court judges have even declared their assets. Even in those rare cases, some of these declarations are hopelessly out of date, like ten or eleven years old. In 18 high courts, not even a single judge has declared their assets. 

How about the Supreme Court then? For the hopeful, the Supreme Court website maintains a page called “assets of judges.” Except when you click on it, all that it says is that you have no right to see these declarations on the website. If these declarations exist, they might be on file somewhere, making it harder for the public to find.  How up to date are these declarations? We don’t know. For the judges, it is all voluntary. 

This might make you wonder. For elected politicians, we can look up their assets any time we want from the website of the Election Commission. Even for candidates and their spouses. But why is there no law that judges of the high courts and the Supreme Court should declare their assets? As it turns out, the story here is bizarre.

Have you ever wondered if it is possible to file a case against the Supreme Court itself? Apparently you can, just as you could sue any other legal entity, such as a person, a corporation, the Railways or the Government of India. In fact, the Supreme Court can even file an appeal in the Supreme Court itself. This is exactly what happened in the case of assets of judges. The Supreme Court heard an appeal against itself. And the Supreme Court actually lost its case. But in such a clever way that the judges actually won! Let us find out how. 

It began in 1997. That is when the Supreme Court collegium decided that every judge must declare their assets. Not to the public, mind you. But to the office of the Chief Justice, where it would be kept secret. But at least it would be on file. Also, there were no penalties for failing to disclose. So it was really just voluntary. Still a step in the right direction. It was still better than nothing at all.

But then along came the Right to Information Act of 2005, or the RTI. And almost immediately, someone put in an application asking the office of the Chief Justice to disclose what it had on file. 

This is where it gets interesting. Now there are limits to what information you can get under the RTI. Could you ask the government to give out Indian Army positions along the Chinese frontier? No, that request would be denied on grounds of national security. Could a nosy neighbor file an RTI to find out the board exam marksheet for someone else’s kid? Again, that would be denied.

So who decides what information should be available under RTI? That is the job of the Chief Information Commissioner, or CIC. And when the application came in about the assets of judges, the CIC said yes. Accordingly, the CIC asked the office of the Chief Justice to open up their files. That was in the year 2009.

What happened next is almost surreal. The Supreme Court said no to disclosing the information. And then the Supreme Court went to the Delhi High Court against the order of the CIC! Apparently, that is possible. And then the Supreme Court even lost its case. In September 2009, a judge of the Delhi High Court ordered the Supreme Court to disclose the information. 

But the Supreme Court would not give up so easily. They challenged the order of the single judge before an entire bench of judges of the Delhi High Court. The Delhi High Court bench then decided to refer the case to the Supreme Court itself. So the case would take up even more time. That was 2010. We checked and found that at this point there were over 3 crore cases pending in various courts across India. But those can always wait. 

From then onwards, the Supreme Court would hear its own case. First, the case was heard by a two judge bench. The two judge bench decided to refer it to a three judge bench. The case dragged on before the three judge bench for almost eight years. Finally, the three judge bench made up its mind. They decided that the matter should be heard by a five judge bench. This is for real.

The decision came in November 2019. We were relieved to find out that the five judge bench did not refer the matter to a seven judge bench. Instead, they gave a final verdict. The Supreme Court had lost, in the Supreme Court itself! The office of the Chief Justice would have to open its files and disclose the assets of the judges.

So all’s well that ends well? Not exactly. Look closely at what the Supreme Court actually decided. They never ordered the judges to disclose their assets. They only asked the office of the Chief Justice to show the information that it had on file. Now remember the part where the judges putting their assets on file with the office of the Chief Justice was basically voluntary? So if the judges do not come forward voluntarily with their assets, there is nothing to show. And there is absolutely nothing anywhere about making the declarations public on a website. The situation at various high courts around the country is basically similar. 

For common citizens, it feels hopeless when we find out that this is how the “system” works. The judiciary is one of the main pillars of our democracy. We look to them, sometimes as a last hope, to protect our rights and freedoms, and ensure justice. Even when we know that there are over 5 crore pending cases, and our turn might never come. We need the judiciary to reward our trust by putting systems of accountability in place. It always begins with transparency. 

An edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

So a section of Indian liberals is upset at how the story of the Maratha king Sambhaji was shown in the recent blockbuster movie Chaava. For them, the movie creates a simple Hindu-Muslim binary. Aurangzeb the Muslim zealot, cast as the villain against a Hindu king. The reality they say is far more complicated. They say that a number of Hindu kings worked with the Mughals, including Aurangzeb himself, and occupied important positions throughout the Mughal empire. 

Fair enough. History is indeed complex. We can see it right now in Ukraine. But the real problem here is that Indian liberals are trying to have it both ways. All history is complex, not just that of the Mughals. Many Indian historians are mythmakers for the old Congress-Left establishment, and the Nehru-Gandhi family in particular. They have had a free run for 75 years calling forces such as the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha as traitors, fascists, Nazis and worse. Savarkar spent over 10 years in Andaman Cellular jail, but they still call him a traitor. They love creating simple binaries when it works to their propaganda advantage. But when someone does the same to Aurangzeb, they argue that history is “complex.” 

If you want to embarrass one of the mythmakers of the Nehru-Gandhi family, ask them this. Did Nehru really defend the soldiers of Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) when the British put them on trial at the Red Fort in 1945-46? The trial lasted for months, but Nehru attended for just 3 days. He spent the rest of the time touring the country, milking it for publicity. Nehru was a politician after all, not a hero. 

As for the INA itself, it was originally under Rashbehari Bose of the Hindu Mahasabha. So how does this fit the “secular” narrative that the Hindu right played no role in the struggle for Indian independence? Subhas Bose was handed over command of the INA when he arrived in Japan much later in 1943. And here is one bitter fact. After 1947, a number of high ranking Muslim officers of the INA betrayed Netaji, betrayed India, and went over to Pakistan. The Pakistani attack on Kashmir in 1948 was led by Habib-ur-Rehman, who had been Subhas Bose’s chief of staff in the INA. History is complex, they said.

Now put yourself in the place of Savarkar in 1942, who foresaw the danger clearly. By then, everyone knew that the British empire was set to collapse. Indian independence was coming anyway. Can you imagine what could have happened in 1947 if the Indian Army, fully trained, heavily armed and hardened by World War 2, had been a majority Muslim force? So it made sense for Savarkar to call on Hindus to join the Army, and get the training and weapons while the British were giving it for free. But no “secular” historian will give you this context. They seize this opportunity to create a simple binary. Nehru as the patriot, and Savarkar as the “traitor.” 

You must have heard the charge that the RSS is “fascist” and that its founders were “admirers of Hitler.” Let us look into this. Indeed, Golwalkar does praise the Nazis in his 1939 book. The historians of the Congress-Left establishment have used this fact to embarrass the RSS for 80 years. But open Nehru’s Glimpses of World History, and you see him doing much worse with the Armenian genocide. In his book, Nehru treats it as a two way conflict between Turks and Armenians, a standard genocide denial tactic. All this to justify the support of the Congress for the Khilafat movement, and Nehru’s personal admiration for Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the Turks. At another point in his book, Nehru expresses relief that Turkey had been “freed from its racial problems.” This after the Turks had murdered 1.5 million Armenians, close to 1 million Greeks, and expelled all their other minorities. By the standards applied to Golwalkar, Nehru would certainly qualify as an apologist for genocide.

Equally chilling is Nehru’s radical support for Stalin’s famines in the Ukraine, which took 3.5 million lives in 1932-33. Nehru calls it a case of the Soviet government acting against “saboteurs” and “counter-revolution.”  Stalin did to the Ukraine what Churchill did to Bengal. And Nehru took the side of Stalin. 

So if Hindutva has a problematic history, so does everything else. The Indian National Congress was blinded by its support for the Khilafat movement. The intellectual heroes of socialism, such as George Bernard Shaw, or Bertrand Russell, were all supporters of eugenics, the race (pseudo)science that came to be associated with the Nazis. In fact, George Bernard Shaw wanted each human being to be put on trial before a government death panel every 5 years. Unless you could prove your utility to society, they would have the power to kill you. In other words, there is a straight line that runs from socialism to the death camps at Treblinka, or the gas chambers at Auschwitz run by the National Socialists.

Incidentally, the nickname “Nazi” came in handy to cover up the fact that Hitler and his party members only ever called themselves “National Socialists.” Hitler never used the word Nazi, only National Socialist. Just like Hitler never used the word “Swastika” either. But the West would rather say “Swastika” instead of admitting that it was the “hooked cross.” While we are on the subject of the “cross,” let us remember that the Church endorsed Mussolini. And that Catholic priests ran forcible conversion/death camps during World War 2, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs were murdered. But you would never hear about this from Indian leftist historians, who see the Christian missionary network as their ally against the BJP. 

History has always been told selectively. In India, the left became used to having a monopoly over popular imagination. They used this monopoly to create a number of simple binaries that worked well for them. RSS bad, Communists good, socialists good, Christian missionaries good, and Nehru as the best of all. But now the establishment in India is changing. The new establishment perhaps wants to see history through its own favorite Hindu-Muslim binary.  Now the deposed leftist Tsars say that history is complicated and cannot be reduced to binaries. Well, it is too late to complain now. And too hypocritical. 

Now if you want to embarrass a Communist historian, ask them this. Is it not true that Lenin was in the pay of the German emperor? Lenin played no role in overthrowing the Tsar. The Germans smuggled him into Russia to overturn democratic elections, and then betray his country by signing a surrender to Germany. So if Savarkar is to be shamed for getting a pension from the British, what do we say about Lenin? Was the world’s greatest socialist revolutionary a German imperial agent? 

For 75 years, the Congress-Left establishment has lived in a glass house, throwing stones at everyone else. But now the glass is shattering. Serves them right. 

This article appeared on Firstpost here.

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. A week later, on May 8, the Germans formally surrendered. The war in Europe was over. All across France, people marched in celebration of “liberté.” On the same day, the local Algerians marched in the town of Sétif in French North Africa, demanding independence. The French authorities called in the air force. Over the next few days, at least 6000 Algerians were massacred. So where was the “liberté” for them?

Almost everyone in India knows that Netaji went to Germany to take help from Adolf Hitler. Does that make Netaji a “Nazi collaborator?” Most Indians would say no. We would say that Netaji was just fighting for Indian independence. But how will we explain this to a foreigner? If joining hands with Hitler does not make you a Nazi collaborator, then what does?

To make sense of this, we have to think about how Netaji would have seen the Second World War. Germany was Britain’s rival. For generations, Indian nationalists had looked towards the Germans for help. During the First World War, they had hatched what came to be known as the Hindu-German conspiracy. It was a plot to bring down the empire through a revolt in the British Indian Army, from Lahore to Singapore. Netaji was simply doing the same thing during WW2. From his exile in Japan, Rashbehari Bose had written to Savarkar about the opportunity to liberate India with outside help. Savarkar showed these letters to Netaji, when the two met in Bombay in 1940. By the time Netaji arrived in Tokyo in 1943, Rashbehari Bose and others had formed the Indian National Army. Netaji then took charge of the organization. 

The challenge then is this. Where is the Indian view of the war? While they call it a “world war,” others look at it only from a European point of view. And the European version makes the Europeans look good, as much as possible. In their story, Hitler comes out of nowhere. He fools the Germans and makes them do terrible things. So all other Europeans get together and fight a war against Hitler. After the war, the Germans quickly realize their mistake. And thus the Germans become good and noble Europeans again.

But the real story is a lot more complicated. For one, we can barely tell who was on which side during the war. Were the Communists fighting against Hitler? For the first two years of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was actually an ally of Hitler. The affinity between Communists and German imperialists is nothing new. The Soviet revolution of November 1917, including Lenin himself, had been funded by the German imperial government. But the Communists had to switch teams in 1941, when Hitler suddenly broke their pact and invaded the Soviet Union.

But the Communists were by no means the only ones playing the game of constantly shifting alliances. We are told that France was one of the victors of the war. But that is mostly made up. From 1940 to 1944, France was ruled by a pro-Nazi regime, with a dictator rather similar to Hitler. In Philippe Pétain, France had its own fascist dictator. France also deported Jews to Nazi concentration camps. The fascist government of France had been recognized  by everyone from the United States to the Soviet Union, and even the Vatican. 

Especially the Vatican, in fact. Hitler and Mussolini were just two of several Catholic dictators in Europe at the time. There was the fascist Pétain in France, Franco in Spain, Schuschnigg in Austria,  Salazar in Portugal, and Pavelic in Croatia. And all of them had some kind of arrangement with the Catholic Church. In Slovakia, the dictator Josef Tiso was a Catholic priest himself. In Croatia, the fascist Ustase murdered half a million Serbs and forced hundreds of thousands of people to accept Catholicism. In 1929, Mussolini had personally handed over control of Vatican City to the Pope. The crowning achievement of the Vatican was its accord with the Nazis in 1933, after the Catholic Party voted in German Parliament to make Hitler dictator. The Vatican’s ambassador to Nazi Germany was crowned the next Pope. 

Why was the Catholic Church doing this? Because they saw fascism as a bulwark against Communism. As a result, these dictators were quite popular in other parts of the world with large Catholic populations. Such as in Ireland, where the Irish Republican Army collaborated with Nazi intelligence. The Kennedys, who were both Irish and Catholic, were sympathetic to Nazi Germany. In Canada’s Catholic and French speaking province of Quebec, there was a strong support base for the ideals of Franco and Mussolini. As a student activist, Pierre Trudeau, the future prime minister of Canada, had led one such fascist youth organization. 

But the goodwill for Hitler and Mussolini was not limited to Catholics. Mussolini had been in power since 1922, and Hitler since 1933. During this period, both enjoyed a large following on the world stage. Many of the infamous Nazi race science theories, including segregation and mass sterilization, did not begin in Germany. They were developed by American thinkers in the early 20th century. From there, they became popular among European elites. The prince of the Netherlands joined the Nazi party. One of the most embarrassing episodes in British history is the mad scramble to stop their own King Edward VIII from joining hands with Hitler after leaving his throne!

Other members of the British aristocracy who were admirers of Hitler included Lord John Reith, the founder of the BBC. Popular authors such as P G Wodehouse and public intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw were equally supportive. The lyrics of the wildly successful 1934 musical ‘Anything Goes’ provide a glimpse of popular culture at the time: “You’re the top! You’re Mussolini.” Even across the Atlantic, Mussolini had an admirer, in President Roosevelt himself!

The attitudes towards fascism did not change completely even after the war began in 1939-40. When the Americans landed in North Africa, they appointed an admiral from Pétain’s fascist government to run the French colonies. In place of Mussolini, they propped up Badoglio to rule Italy. Another fascist who had been responsible for the genocide of 1,50,000 Africans in Libya and Ethiopia. Can there be good fascists and bad fascists? If you ask the Americans, yes. Also if you ask the Communists, who promptly joined the government of the fascist Badoglio.

By 1944-45, the Germans were clearly losing the war. And almost everyone who had been with Hitler was claiming to have fought against him in some way or another. Romania, France, Hungary, Finland, everyone. Even Austria, though it was Hitler’s own country of birth. By then, the world was divided into two new camps, a Soviet camp and an American camp. And whichever superpower you signed up with would believe your story. Even East Germany claimed to have been fighting against Hitler all along. They put that in their school textbooks. As for West Germany, their new President had personally voted in Parliament to make Hitler the dictator of Germany. But now, he too was “clean.” 

Today, we often speak as if Nazism and Fascism are exactly the same thing. But they were two separate political forces, who formed an alliance in 1939. Before that, they had often been bitter enemies. For example in 1934, when the Nazis assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss, the fascist dictator of Austria. Finally in 1938, the Nazis managed to overthrow the fascist government in Austria and take power. Ironically, Hitler’s effort to take over Austria had been supported by the left wing social democrats. Mussolini and his fascists were furious. But they realized it would be better to forget all about it and form an alliance with Hitler anyway. 

After the war, the fascists were mostly left alone. Franco continued to rule Spain till 1975. Salazar’s Portugal was welcomed into NATO at its founding in 1949. The head of the Catholic Church during the fascist regime in Croatia was honored at the European Parliament in Brussels even in 2o23. On the other hand, the Nazi government in Germany was removed. This was despite objections from Churchill, who had planned to join hands with remnants of the Nazi government to fight a new war against the Soviet Union. 

This is the recurring theme of the 1930s and the 1940s. Alliance, war, betrayal, and then alliance all over again. In these conditions, imagine trying to judge Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, who was just trying to free his country of 330 million people from colonial rule.

There is also a lesson here for Indians today. The great war was just another chapter in the power struggles between expansionist global forces: Communism and the empires in the Christian and Islamic world. During the First World War, the Ottoman Turks had allied with Germany and Austria. But before that, the Ottomans and the Austrians had been enemies for five hundred years.  Hitler himself was an ardent fan of Mustafa Kemal, the father of modern Turkey.  As part of its power struggles, America has allied with radical Islam before, such as in Afghanistan, against the Communists in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, America became an enemy of radical Islam. But as the wheel of history keeps turning, they are likely to ally with each other again. Perhaps we are already seeing this in our neighborhood in Bangladesh.

Who always suffers in this unending power struggle between Christian, Islamist and Communist forces? People like us Hindus. And the Jews. This might explain the natural sympathy that many Indians feel for Israel. If that was not enough, these global forces pounce on us with insulting labels from their own power struggles and factional fights.  They constantly accuse Indian nationalists of being “fascists” or “Hindu Taliban.” Incidentally, they do the same to those who long for a Jewish homeland. But terms like “fascist” do not apply to the Indian context. Apparently, Hindus should not express their sense of nationhood because of factional fights between Catholic authoritarians in Europe, radicals in the Muslim world, and Communists. 

Because what is “fascism,” really? It is a conservative Christian political force. Sometimes, they are allies of Communists against other Christian empires. Sometimes, they are allies of Britain and America against Communism. And what is Taliban? Sometimes an ally of Western liberals, sometimes their enemy. What could Hindus possibly have to do with this? 

The shaming of Bose as a “Nazi collaborator” follows a similar path.  Indians are supposed to bear the moral burden for the unending power struggle between Christians, Islamists and Communists. And we should never let that happen. 

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared on Moneycontrol here.

Have you ever heard of the “Compulsory Deposit Scheme?” In the 1970s,  you had to deposit a percentage of your income, sometimes up to 18 percent, with the government. This was for a period of 3-5 years. It was not a tax. You had to do this on top of paying income tax. The idea was simple. At the time, inflation was running at an astounding 29 percent. So if people were forced to deposit almost all their money with the government, they would have nothing to spend. This was supposed to bring down inflation. And who was the Chief Economic Adviser to Indira Gandhi at the time? It was Dr. Manmohan Singh.

This may surprise some people. Because Dr. Manmohan Singh has always been described to us as the great reformer of 1991. And he certainly was. But Dr. Singh has a much longer record of service to the nation, in every decade from the 1970s to 2014. As we remember our former Prime Minister, can we look at these periods one by one, perhaps a bit differently from the usual lens? 

First the 1970s, when Dr. Singh was Chief Economic Adviser, including for a while during the Emergency. This was the time when India made a turn towards the hard left.  Over two decades had passed since independence. India was still in crushing poverty, with no end in sight. As it often happens in such situations, the people at the top were looking for someone to blame. The wealthy, the middle class, foreign companies, local shopkeepers, anyone. The top income tax rate was raised to 97 percent. The middle class had to pay into the “Compulsory Deposit Scheme.” Foreign companies were all but chased out of India by the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) of 1973. And when the country began to run out of food, the government banned private traders and took over the sale of wheat. 

It was a disaster. As mentioned before, inflation soared to 29 percent. The GDP growth fell to just 1 percent by 1974. As a result of its defeat in the war of 1971, Pakistan’s per capita GDP had fallen below that of India. But just four years later, the average Pakistani was again richer than the average Indian. In India, there were protests everywhere. In 1975, Indira Gandhi decided to crush them all by declaring the Emergency. 

Dr. Manmohan Singh continued to serve as Chief Economic Adviser until 1976, when he was appointed Secretary in the Finance Ministry. His rise continued in the 1980s, during which time he served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and later as Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. This was the fateful decade, when Communism was failing all around the world. In India, Nehruvian socialism was entering its final crisis. So while we are all grateful to Dr. Manmohan Singh for the economic reforms, it would only be fair to ask: Whose economic policies did he reform in 1991? 

And what made those reforms possible? Let us quote from a September 2010 report in The Indian Express: “It’s open to the public now. Declassified documents from the World Bank show how it and the International Monetary Fund chivvied and cajoled India into economic liberalisation in the summer of 1991. Significantly,it blamed the poor macroeconomic policies under the Congress regime of the 1980s for India’s eventual external sector debacle. The new Congress government with finance minister Manmohan Singh was presented a stark choice by the two institutions. It will either have to undertake reforms that will promise the needed external support, or brace itself for a disorderly and painful transition that will significantly reduce growth for years to come.” 

So it was the poor policies of the Congress in the 1980s that caused the crisis. The time when Manmohan Singh was promoted to a number of important positions, from RBI Governor to Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. And in 1991, India either had to reform, or it would get no aid from the IMF and the World Bank. With not enough money for even a month of imports, what choice did India have? 

It may be confirmed now with the release of official documents. But everyone knew even back in 1991 that these reforms had been forced by the IMF and the World Bank. A cartoon at the time by R K Laxman shows Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh coming out of the IMF office, with their arms all twisted. The caption reads: “If anyone asks, just say nobody twisted our arms. We twisted them ourselves.”  But perhaps, the historians never asked.

The period between 2004 and 2014, when Manmohan Singh served as Prime Minister, was a period of high growth for India. But what happens when we put this economic growth in context? If we look at India’s BRIC peers, China expanded its GDP by 440 percent between 2004 and 2014, Brazil by 267 percent, and Russia by 223 percent. In contrast, India’s GDP increased only by 182 percent. At the per capita level, the same story repeats. Between 2004 and 2014, the per capita GDP of China increased by 406 percent, that of Russia by 243 percent, and that of Brazil by 233 percent. Again, India was the worst performing BRIC economy between 2004 and 2014, managing to increase its per capita GDP only by 150 percent.

In other words, India grew fast during the UPA years, but other countries grew even faster. In fact, take the 150 or so countries classified as emerging and developing economies by the IMF. In 2004, India’s per capita GDP was about 35 percent of the per capita GDP of these developing economies. By 2014, it had declined to 30 percent.

The most severe fall came with respect to China. In 2004, the size of India’s economy was about 37 percent that of China. By 2014, it was nearly cut in half, to just 19 percent. The period from 2004 to 2014 is when India fell decisively behind China. In almost everything from economic size, to building infrastructure to geopolitical influence. It may seem hard to believe today, but back in 2004, India used to have a small trade surplus of about $1.75 billion over China. By 2014, we were running a trade deficit of $38 billion.

There can be absolutely no doubts about the commitment of Dr. Manmohan Singh. From his humble origins in a small village in Punjab, to being a partition refugee, he became one of the most important figures in India’s political history. And as India rose on the world stage, he became one of the most important figures in the world. And so we deserve to have a full account of his career, as Chief Economic Adviser in the 1970s, at the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Finance Minister in the 1990s and finally as Prime Minister in the early 2000s. For instance, after the UPA left office in 2014, our banks were in such bad shape that the RBI had to put 11 out of 21 public sector banks under its Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) framework, to save them from failing. 

As with all historical figures, the debate on the economic legacy of Dr. Manmohan Singh should continue. But in examining this legacy, there can be no place for mythmaking.

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

Were Indians colonizers? Yes, says Nehru. Was India conquered by Hindu imperialism? Again, Nehru says yes. Okay, then would you say that someone like Mahmud Ghazni, who destroyed Somnath temple, was a Muslim imperialist? Stop right away, Nehru tells you. That would be going too far. The motives of Mahmud Ghazni were political, not religious.

This festival season, I sat down to read again Nehru’s Glimpses of World History. The 1000 page book is truly awe inspiring as the work of one man. Where else could you learn about things from ancient Byzantium, to the Shang dynasty in China, all the way to the struggle between the US dollar and the British pound in the 1930s? On almost every page, you learn something new and interesting. Here is an example. The city of Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, has recently been renamed as “Srivijayapuram.” Nehru tells you in detail about the Sriviijaya empire, from the 7th century to the 11th century, which he says was not very different from the British empire. 

But this is where Nehru begins to make you uncomfortable. For a whole chapter, he describes Indians as colonists, exploiting the people of what is now mostly Malaysia or Indonesia. According to Nehru, these were the “Hindu colonies of the east.” The colonizers he says are mostly Tamils from the Pallava kingdom. But he speculates that some might have also been from Odisha, Bengal, and even Gujarat. 

“Another Chandragupta arose in Pataliputra and started a period of aggressive Hindu imperialism,” Nehru writes. He repeats the charge of “Hindu imperialism” at least three times in his book, which has a chapter dedicated to “Hindu imperialism under the Guptas.” While many Indians see the reign of Chandragupta Vikramaditya as a golden age, Nehru is a lot more dismissive. He notes that such periods of “aggressive imperialism” have little importance in the long run. Nevertheless, some good art and literature came out of the Gupta period, and he says that we can take some pride in that.

The charge of “Hindu imperialism” seems particularly harsh. And politically unwise, written at a time when India was engaged in a great anti-imperialist struggle. And Nehru was supposedly leading that struggle. If Hindus are also imperialists, on what basis can we oppose the British? But then, maybe Nehru was the kind of person who could say things that make people uncomfortable. In that case, would Nehru be willing to say the same about Muslim empires?

Not at all.  When it comes to Mahmud Ghazni, Nehru refuses to identify the former as a Muslim imperialist. About Mahmud, Nehru writes, “He was a Muslim, of course, but that was by the way … He came to India to conquer and loot, as soldiers unfortunately do, and he would have done so to whatever religion he might have belonged.” In the next paragraph, Nehru quickly switches to describing Mahmud’s love for beautiful gardens. About the actual destruction of Somnath temple, Nehru takes a mocking tone. Some 50,000 people were massacred, but that was because they had gathered in the temple in hope of divine protection, “waiting for the miracle which did not happen.”

The modern reader will recognize in these writings the beginnings of Indian “secular” thought. In the eyes of the state, all religions are equal, but some religions are more equal than others. 

Some of the things in Nehru’s book are truly bizarre. Take this passage, for example: “Among the ancients, we do not find the scientific method in Egypt, or China, or India. We find just a bit of it in old Greece. In Rome again, it was absent. But the Arabs had this scientific spirit of inquiry, and so they may be considered as fathers of modern science. In some subjects, like medicine and mathematics, they learnt much from India.”

Of course, that’s just wrong. How could someone possibly believe that a mathematician like Aryabhatta, or a physician like Sushruta, the Chinese who invented gunpowder, or the Egyptians who built the great pyramids did not have a spirit of scientific inquiry? Second, can anyone even follow Nehru’s logic here? So the Arabs learned medicine and mathematics from Indians, but somehow Indians had no understanding of the scientific method? Nehru then goes on to say that the Arabs invented the mariner’s compass (wrong again). Let’s just say that “Whatsapp University” might be older than you would think.

Nehru’s fondness for Muslim empires also leads him down some of the darkest alleys of history. For about 600 years, the Ottoman empire had existed in West Asia, and its subject peoples had been the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Armenians, the Serbians, and most of the southern Slavs. Between 1915 and 1917, during the First World War, the Ottoman Turks carried out the systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians. Much like the Germans did to the Jews during the Second World War. Even today, the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide. But among historians, there is no debate. No serious scholar would deny either the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.

But Nehru tells the story differently. In a version that plays straight into the hands of Turkish apologists, Nehru writes that the Armenians were a “tool” of foreign powers to weaken the Ottoman empire. Instead of calling it mass murder, Nehru describes it as a conflict between the Turkish government and the Armenians, which he says resulted in “bloody massacres.” 

Even before the events of 1915-17, the Turks had carried out a massacre of 300,000 Armenians in the 1890s. But Nehru refuses to see the difference between empire and its subjects. He says that the Turks and Armenians had “mutually killed each other.” At another place, he writes that the “Armenians were as guilty of massacring Turks as the Turks were of massacring them.”  The two groups “embraced and shed tears of joy” he writes, describing the rise to power of The Young Turks, the Nazi like organization that ultimately carried out the Armenian genocide of 1915. 

The Nazi comparisons are not incidental. Through the 1920s and the 1930s, the Nazis always looked up to the Turkish example as a model of what they wanted to do in Germany. Mass deportation and murder of minorities, which would allow the Germans to have lebensraum (living space). The Fuehrer himself was a fan of Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish leader who had given himself the title of Ataturk, meaning Father of the Turks. “Who, after all, speaks today about the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler asked rhetorically on August 22, 1939. This was ten days before he started the Second World War. 

In a particularly embarrassing passage, Nehru admits to celebrating when the Turkish army in 1922 pushed the Greeks to “Smyrna and the sea.”  While he does mention the burning of Smyrna (today Izmir in Turkey), Nehru glosses over the fact that Mustafa Kemal’s forces entered the city like Genghis Khan in the middle ages, massacring 100,000 Greeks and Armenians. In Nehru’s account, the Turks are either victims of the Greeks, or merely responding to provocation. He also refers to the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, but maintains that it happened at the request of the Greeks. Again, Nehru leaves out the fact that the Turks had massacred 900,000 of their Greek subjects during the First World War. Just like they had massacred 1.5 million Armenians. 

Interestingly, Nehru does criticize Turkey and Mustafa Kemal, but for their atrocities on the Kurds, who were also Muslims. Perhaps oppression matters to him only when the victims are from a certain special religion.

If Nehru downplayed the crimes of Muslim empires, his treatment of the Communist empire reads like pure propaganda. In 1932, the Soviet effort to force people onto collective farms led to a terrible famine, which killed over 3.5 million people in the Ukraine. Speaking like a brainwashed Communist foot soldier, Nehru seems to think the famine was some kind of conspiracy by the victims themselves. He writes about how the government had to take “drastic steps” against “sabotage,” “stealing of communal property” from collective farms and “counter-revolution,” which were all punished by death.  

Nehru is talking here about Stalin’s party thugs, who went on a rampage, torturing peasants, raping women, and executing anyone they suspected of hiding grain. For failing to meet official production targets, thousands were sent to gulags to be worked to death.  

And what were these acts of “sabotage” and “counter-revolution” that Nehru was referring to? In his book Bloodlands, historian Timothy Snyder describes Stalin’s twisted logic: “A peasant slowly dying of hunger was, despite appearances, a saboteur working for the capitalist powers in their campaign to discredit the Soviet Union.” The sight of starving children in the streets became an embarrassment to the Communist regime. The police were supposed to pick them up and send them to death camps. “About twenty thousand children awaited death in the barracks of Kharkiv at any given time,” Snyder writes. 

This reminds me. Every year on November 14, we Indians celebrate Nehru’s birthday as Childrens’ Day. Sure, go right ahead.

This article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared in The Financial Express (Oct 25, 2024)

Is it possible to have 2+2 =5 ? Of course it is. Just imagine that the second “2” is contributing more to the addition than the first “2.” Did you think that makes no sense? In that case, why would you or anyone else believe the Oxfam report that says the poorer half of India pays almost two-thirds of all the GST collected by the government? 

That Oxfam report has been out in public for almost a year now. And it has been repeatedly debunked. But of late, there has been a renewed effort to make it viral again on the internet. A careful calculation by Vidhu Shekhar shows that the bottom half of the population pays closer to 10 percent of all the GST collected, instead of the 64.3 percent claimed by Oxfam. But the Oxfam report is wrong for a much stronger reason. It is mathematically impossible.

Think about it. The GST is a consumption tax. The GST rate on an item is the same no matter who buys it. The Oxfam report divided the population of India into two equal parts: the poorer half and the richer half. So if one half of the population is paying more GST than the other half, it must also consume more than the other. 

Now is there any item that you think the poorer half of the population is consuming more on a per capita basis than the richer half? Perhaps shirts, shoes, cars, food, toothpaste, travel, entertainment, anything? Not really. That means it is impossible for the poorer half of the population to pay more GST than the richer half. 

Wait a minute, you might say. Are there not more poor people than rich people? So even though poor people might consume less per capita, they would still consume more overall, and hence have to pay more GST. But read carefully what Oxfam said. They divided the population into two halves, the richer half and the poorer half. Believe it or not, the poorer half of the population has exactly the same number of people as the richer half. Just like the taller half of Bengaluru has the exact same number of people as the shorter half of Bengaluru. Just like a kilogram of cotton weighs exactly the same as a kilogram of steel. 

You might want to add here  that GST rates on “luxury” items are higher than on “essential” items. This is of course true, but less important to the argument you might think. Again, take any item, say cars. Who buys more cars per capita, the poor or the rich? Evidently, the rich. Hence, the richer 50 percent pays more than half of the GST collected from car sales. The same reasoning works for every item, including toothpaste and soap. The richer 50 percent are buying at least 50 percent of all the soap consumed in India. And hence, the richer half of the population pays at least 50 percent of the GST collected from sales of soap. Observe that the exact rate of GST on cars or soap does not matter here. 

Now there are some items which you could argue that the poor would consume more on a per capita basis. Railway tickets, for instance. But once you put this inside a larger category such as “travel,” the confusion goes away. The richer half of the population spends more on travel than the poorer half. So even if all kinds of travel were taxed at the exact same rate, the richer half would pay more. 

In conclusion, Oxfam’s claim that the poorer 50 percent of the population pays 64.3 percent of all the GST collected in India is not just unlikely, but mathematically impossible. It is time for basic arithmetic to put an end to this rumor, once and for all.

A lightly edited version of this article, written with Karuna Gopal, appeared in News18 here.

Have you ever heard of the biggest ship disaster of all time? Six or seven times worse than the Titanic. On Jan 30, 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff left the Baltic Sea port of Gotenhafen in northern Europe, now in Poland. They were carrying a number of German military officers. But ninety percent of those on board were German refugees, fleeing the horrors of World War 2. The Soviets spotted the ship, fired three torpedoes, and all of them struck. That night, ten thousand people drowned in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. For comparison, 1500 people died when the Titanic sank. 

This is what happens when someone like the Nazis or Hamas mixes the military among the civilians. It is sad. But such is the harsh reality of war. So why the outcry against Israel over the high civilian death toll in the war in Gaza?

As the war in Gaza makes headlines in India, several commentators have been feeding us with a simple explanation for what is happening. They say that Israel is occupying Palestinian land. The Jews are oppressors, the Arabs are victims. Therefore, we must side with the Arabs. 

But the history is a lot more complex. The Arabs started the war in 1948-49, which Israel won. After that, Israel took 78 percent of the land, as opposed to the 55 percent given to them by the UN partition plan. But what happened to the rest of the land? Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied the West Bank in the exact same war! So the Arabs snatched land from their fellow Arabs in Palestine. Do the Arabs ever talk about that? No, because it does not fit their narrative.

So when Israel was again forced to fight the Arab countries in 1967, there was no Palestinian state anywhere. In the 1967 war, Israel overcame the combined forces of five countries: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. They attacked Israel from all sides, but Israel still won. In that war, Israel captured large amounts of territory. But almost all of it was given back to these countries in return for them giving diplomatic recognition to Israel. The enemies of Israel could hardly have asked for a more fair deal.

But what about the 700,000 Palestinian refugees? Yes, they had to leave their homes. And it was very unfortunate. But that is what happens when you lose a war of annihilation. The Germans launched a war of annihilation against the Soviets in 1941. So when the Germans were defeated in World War 2, the Germans lost a lot of land. As many as 12 million Germans had to flee their homes in Eastern Europe, from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. At least 1 million of them died. Do the Germans also get to call this a “nakbah,” or whatever is the German word for “catastrophe”? 

The Arabs launched three wars of annihilation against the Jews (in 1948, 1967 and 1973) and lost them all! This means that the Arabs must come to terms with losing some territory. Unfortunately, that is what happens in war. For instance, the city of Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia, had been a German city for 800 years. Today, it is part of the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad. At the end of the Second World War, the Russians expelled the Germans from Konigsberg and took the city. Why should it be any different if Israel wishes to annex the West Bank or Gaza tomorrow?

In fact, those who single out the plight of Palestinian Arab refugees do not seem to know how the borders of countries everywhere were redrawn after World War 2. At the time, the universal formula for peace seemed to be that of forming ethnically homogeneous states. For example, Ukraine was given territory from Poland, and the Polish minorities were expelled from Ukraine. In turn, Ukrainian minorities were expelled from Poland. While the Polish had to leave Lithuania and Belarus, the Lithuanians and Belorussians had to leave Poland. Also, Poland was given land from Germany, and the Germans were expelled from Poland. Many Hungarians had to leave from the Transylvania region of Romania. The Italians were expelled from what is Croatia today. In May 1945, the President of Czechoslovakia called on his people to “eliminate the German problem.” Nearly 2 million Germans were expelled from the country, and thousands of Germans died in the process. 

When seen in this light, the victimhood of the Palestinian Arabs is real, but hardly exceptional. In fact, they seem to be the most privileged of all ‘victims’ in the world, perhaps the only refugees that the world still cares about. Has anyone ever asked about a right of the Italians to return to Croatia? Or a right of the Poles to return to Ukraine? So what makes the Palestinian Arabs special?

We all know the answer to that last question. The Palestinian Arabs are Muslims. And we have all become used to treating Muslims as special. But there is no logical reason for this. 

The Jews themselves were the worst victims of World War 2. If anyone deserves a state, it has to be them. So they were given a state in their most ancient homeland, where the Jews had lived long before anyone else. How could anyone have a problem with that? 

And for what it’s worth, let us not forget that the Arabs have done a “nakbah” on the Jews several times over. Once upon a time, Egypt had 80,000 Jews. Today there are less than 10. What happened to the Jews of Algeria or Libya? In the 1950s and 1960s, the Jews were forced to leave all the Arab lands. In any case, where is “Arab land”? The original inhabitants of Algeria or Libya are the Tuaregs, the Kabyles, the Chaoui peoples and others that the Arabs classify as Berbers (barbarians). They were all colonized by the Arabs long ago. So everyone can find a grudge against everyone else if they go back far enough. That is what history is. 

For the Palestinian Arab refugees, the best thing to do is forget and move on. The Germans moved on. Their country is flourishing today. Their economy is the biggest in Europe, indeed the third largest in the world. A million French were expelled from Algeria in 1962. They started new lives in France and flourished. The Arabs have everything. They have land, and a young population. And so much of the world’s oil. They could achieve so much if they got over their obsession with fighting Israel.

For the rest of the world, here is a reality check. You may not like to be called “anti-Semitic” simply for criticizing Israel. But what else is it when you obsess over finding fault with one tiny Jewish state, and ignore everything else? At least 500,000 people have died in the Syrian civil war since 2011. Since 2020, Azerbaijan has forced 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee the Artsakh region, but how much world attention did that get? Perhaps because there was no way to blame the Jews for it? 

Yes, there are a number of Jews (including numerous Israelis) who disagree with the policies of the State of Israel. But that is to be expected in a democracy. The correct question to ask is not why so many Israelis disagree with what their government is doing. Instead, one should ask why Muslim societies everywhere seem so united on the issue of Israel. Why the uniform show of hostility towards Israel by one community from the streets of Lucknow to the streets of London and Michigan? 

Israel is not perfect. But its enemies are far worse than Israel in almost every way, In terms of civil liberties, freedom of expression, scientific inquiry, minority rights and democracy. If the Muslim world could get over its grudge against Israel and move on, the world would be a better place. And the “liberal” intellectuals who back them could think of more worthy causes that might need their attention.