Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

From political rallies to television debates to drawing room conversations, the Maharashtra state Assembly elections seems to be dead rubber. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has made Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who died in 1966, an election issue in 2019 and a lot of the media as well as the opposition seem to have fallen for the trap. However, there are enough issues which the opposition could have capitalised on the voter dissatisfaction. But as the campaign comes to a close, the dispirited opposition failed to offer even an alternate narrative, and has showed much less gusto in providing leadership against the Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP government in the state. As the leaders dwell on the glories of the past, the state’s population, which is reeling between drought and deluge, is worried about their future. These are some of the issues in which the people of Maharashtra have suffered under the current establishment. Auto sector slowdown hits Chakan in Pune Maharashtra has been one of the worst victims of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/slowdown-plunges-august-auto-sales-to-lowest-since-1997-98/articleshow/71055961.cms">economic slowdown</a>. In Pune, hundreds of thousands have lost jobs in the auto sales drop resulted in slashing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/indian-auto-manufacturers-have-laid-off-350000-jobs-in-four-months/articleshow/70563890.cms">millions of jobs </a>of both temporary and permanent workers. Auto sector employees who are amongst the most well compensated of blue collar workers, are now roaming around in the auto hub of Chakan in Pune—doing<a href="https://theprint.in/economy/in-pune-auto-hub-an-engineer-is-selling-paan-another-is-roaming-around-with-his-cv/290816/"> menial jobs</a>. Former Congress party president Rahul Gandhi was one of the few to point out to the issue. He commented that Modi is showing youth the moon taking a dig at Chandrayaan 2 mission, even as the auto sector “remained shattered”. BJP, in its manifesto, however promised one crore jobs to people, but lacks details on how they plan to reverse the situation, which only seems to be worsening. Burdened with loans and low support prices-farmers resort to suicides Farmers are in no better position either. In the last five years, around 16,000 farmers have committed suicides said <a href="https://www.timesnownews.com/india/maharashtra-news/elections/article/people-suffered-worst-16000-farmers-committed-suicide-over-the-past-five-years-under-sena-bjp-sharad-pawar/504721">Sharad Pawar</a>, the leader Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) at his election rally in Anushakti Nagar. The septuagenarian criticized the government for not waiving loans of farmers who are hit by drought, even as thousands of crores to corporates are being written off as non-performing assets. The state government did waive off loans but it covered only 30% of the affected. These last five years have been tough for farmers in the state as they claim to be hurt by its policies which did not increase the minimum support prices. Around 15,000 farmers marched from Nasik to Mumbai not once but twice in the last five years—asking the government for aid. In fact, in a shocking protest in 2017, the state’s farmers emptied milk onto the streets leaving the government red faced. The state has a new crime capital in Nagpur The state also has another problem that is ballooning—increasing crime in Nagpur. The constituency of the ruling chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has turned notorious for organized and unorganized crime. On an average, over 700 cases are registered in the city which shares a border with Madhya Pradesh. Apart from increased organized crime and racketeering, the city has also<a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/cops-got-cracking-to-remove-nagpurs-crime-capital-tag/articleshow/71283462.cms"> turned infamous</a> for prostitution, murder and attempted murder cases, amongst others. Fadnavis has been trying to turn around the extensive crime using stringent laws against anti-social elements. This started in 2015, but there has only been a slight change in the number of crimes. Mumbai’s creaky infrastructure Mumbai and its suburbs too have been many burning problems for which India the opposition provided only lip service to. The repeated lack of preparation leading to loss of lives during flood, which is a predictable annual occurrence in the city, has been a major source of discontent. The city’s commute has worsened in the last few years as metro and other construction have weighed only the already-snaking traffic. Even if one were to look at it as a temporary pain towards a better, it does not help that even the roads are filled with potholes. The Aarey Colony mess As the state approved the chopping of over 2,000 trees for the construction of a metro car shed at Aarey colony, a large citizen protest ensued but never turned into the poll issue it could have been. The protesting citizens were defeated in a court case and it sure left a bad aftertaste for those who detested the chopping of trees amidst a rising awareness around the terrible impact on the environment it would have. The protests were also diluted by a large number of people who came in support of the metro car shed as it would make commuting easier for millions of Mumbaikars. The opposition parties were conspicuous in their absence on ground over the issue and thus, it never took a political dimension. The dynasty debut The issues which find a pulse with young voters could have been handled by a young politician <a href="https://scroll.in/article/940621/behind-the-aditya-thackeray-campaign-in-mumbai-is-the-quiet-work-done-by-another-shiv-sainik">like Aditya Thackeray </a>from the state’s most-popular political family. But, seven years after the demise of the charismatic Bala Saheb Thackeray, his successors, including Aditya’s father Uddhav, have lacked Bala Saheb’s gravitas. Instead, Aditya got ridiculed for sporting a lungi, a South Indian attire, as his detractors cited his grandfather’s attacks on South Indian migrants a few decades. He was also caught on the wrong foot endorsing the <a href="https://rajkaran.com/aadtiya-thackeray-gets-trolled-for-his-mumbai-best-aahe-tweet/">BEST bus service</a>, and his refusal to address issues like a toddler <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/mumbai-news/video-shows-rescue-operation-of-mumbai-boy-who-fell-in-drain-2-days-ago-2068380">slipping down the </a>drain--did not go down well with the electorate. An acid test for the BJP government The politicians of the ruling party which is the BJP and Shiv Sena combine, seem to be taking it slow on campaigning this year. In fact, the CM Fadnavis also said that there is no<a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/pehelwans-panzies-and-nikammas-maharashtra-elections-rallies-keep-the-drama-high/articleshow/71610174.cms"> pehelwan or a great opponent</a> this time. A lot more believe that this state election is a foregone conclusion mostly because the Parliamentary elections in April and May this year have shown that there is a strong BJP wave. Yet, a lot has changed since Modi came to power the second time. For one, the economic slowdown has become a grim reality and painful reality—which the central government has been slow to react to. Maharashtra’s election outcomes often mirror the general elections that have preceded them in recent years but surprises are born out of complacency. But for that, there has to be a credible intent, palpable energy, and effective communication from the opposition.

Maharashtra state elections 2019: These are the issues the opposition could have capitalised on but didn’t

In 1906, in a lodging house for Indian students in Highgate, a pleasant area of north London, a young lawyer called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi dropped in on a law student called Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who happened to be frying prawns at the time. Savarkar offered Gandhi some of his meal; Gandhi, a vegetarian, refused. Savarkar allegedly retorted that only a fool would attempt to resist the British without being fortified by animal protein.
The meeting is said to have begun hostilities between the two young Indian nationalists; whether or not the story is apocryphal, there were real reasons for antipathy.
The two men had very different approaches to the struggle against Britain. Gandhi, who became leader of the Indian National Congress (INC), was a pacifist with an inclusive attitude towards Muslims and Christians. Savarkar, who would lead the Hindu Mahasabha, was a right-wing majoritarian who spawned the idea of hindutva, or Hindu-ness--the belief that the Hindu identity is inseparable from the Indian identity. Congress eclipsed the Mahasabha and, since history belongs to the victors, the story of India's independence movement became one of non-violence. But the strand of thought that Savarkar represented was more important than is generally recognised, and is enjoying a revival.
A member of the Mahasabha broke away to form the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or national volunteer organisation, in 1925, modelled, some say, on the British army. A social rather than explicitly political organisation, it presented itself as the world's largest non-governmental group, in which like-minded, khaki-uniformed men could gather for dawn calisthenics. It recruited boys at an impressionable age, as the Jesuits did, the better to inculcate them with discipline and with passion for the cause. One such was the eight-year-old Narendra Modi. The future prime minister attended training sessions with the RSS, was subsequently inducted as a cadet, and in 1985 was assigned by the RSS to its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which he rose to lead.
Mr Modi is India's strongest leader since Indira Gandhi, and its most controversial. The source of controversy is his failure in 2002, when chief minister of Gujarat, to avert a massacre of Muslims, which opponents attribute to a hostility to Muslims born of the ideology that Savarkar spawned. Mr Modi has never apologised for the massacre, though he said last year that he felt regret over them, as he would at seeing a puppy run over in the street. Nor has he made any attempt to distance himself from the RSS.
The RSS, meanwhile, is becoming more overtly political. Mohan Bhagwat, its current leader, is somewhat in the mould of Savarkar, paraphrasing his beliefs and promoting Hindutva. In August this year Mr Bhagwat directly echoed Savarkar by saying all who live in "Hindustan" are in fact Hindus, whatever Muslims, Christians or secular Hindus might say. More striking, the RSS leader has switched the organisation's methods. Now, far from eschewing party politics, the group has become an enthusiastic and effective actor within it. The RSS's millions of members and volunteers (no one knows just how many active ones there really are) played a big role in electing the BJP by a landslide in 2014. At least 19 ministers in government, including Mr Modi, have a background in the RSS. Its leaders are seconded to senior posts in the party too. So the ideas of the man who inspired the RSS matter more than ever before.
<h3>The naked jumper</h3>
The lawyer described by a British official in 1906 as "a small man with an intelligent face and a nervous manner" does not sound like the muscular hero that Indian nationalists crave, but Savarkar clearly had a certain dash. In 1910, while he was in London, he was charged with conspiring to wage war against the king and with providing weapons used to assassinate a Briton in the Indian civil service, sentenced to two life terms--50 years--in jail and sent back to India. While the steamship "Morea" was berthed in Marseille harbour, he slipped away from his guards, leapt, almost naked, into the sea and swam ashore. Unfortunately for the eulogists, he was promptly caught by French police and bundled back to the ship.
His daring did, however, win him fame, and also created legal history. France's government, annoyed that Britain had overseen an arrest on its territory, wanted Savarkar returned. Britain refused so the matter went to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. It ruled his arrest was indeed "irregular", but decided Savarkar might as well stay in India. The case was one of the earliest heard by the tribunal.
Savarkar's next stop was the Andaman Islands--a group of islands in the Bay of Bengal. This palm-fringed tropical paradise served as a penal colony for the British. Cellular Jail in the capital, Port Blair, is now a memorial for freedom campaigners. In a park opposite stands a row of statues of independence heroes. One is of a slender man with a pinched face behind round spectacles. A pen protrudes from his jacket pocket, one hand rests on a part-furled umbrella and the other wags a finger at the sky. You might mistake him for a prissy bank manager, but a plaque identifies him as Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The park is named after him.
Ranjit Savarkar, his great-nephew, who runs the Savarkar trust, says that he showed great fortitude in jail. A trained yogi, he overcame thoughts of suicide. Other inmates nicknamed him "Barrister Babu", for his London legal training. Already a published historian and poet, he used Cellular Jail to work on his writing--literally: he wrote on its walls. He spent a decade there before being moved to the mainland in 1921. He was subsequently freed, after pledging to keep out of politics--a promise which the ideology he was developing in jail suggests he did not intend to keep.
A fierce nationalist, he adored Guiseppe Mazzini, who fought for the unification of Italy, writing about him in the hope of inspiring resistance to the British in India. Savarkar believed that India is really composed of, and must only be run by, Hindus. In his 1924 book, "Hindutva", he drew on cultural, philosophical and religious practices of ancient Hinduism, a rich faith that allows immense variety in how it is followed. But he also distinguished the ideology of hindutva--an attempt to unite disparate Hindus in a political project--from the religion. He himself was an atheist, and disapproved of aspects of traditional Hindu belief, dismissing cow worship as superstitious--a stance that would upset many today. He was an early outspoken opponent of caste discrimination. In the 1920s and 1930s others among the emerging Indian political elite opposed "untouchability", the rejection as sub-human of those considered "below caste". But Savarkar went further, saying modern India should drop altogether the idea of dividing people by caste.
His attitude towards Muslims, who made up a quarter of the population before partition, and other non-Hindus was less liberal. He regarded them as alien and separate, in effect not as real Indians. He was fiercely opposed to the formation of Pakistan and what his great-nephew calls the "appeasement" of Muslims. He believed that they, along with the Europeans, had crushed Hindus for a millennium--a sentiment echoed by Mr Modi in an address to parliament after his election this year, when he spoke of ending "1,200 years of slave mentality" in India.
Aside from his view of Muslims, the big difference between Savarkar and the nationalists in the INC lay in their contrasting attitudes to violence. He also wrote one of the first Indian accounts of the uprising in 1857, centred in Delhi. Known as the "Mutiny" to the British, it is referred to by many Indians as the "first war of independence"--echoing the title of Savarkar's book, "The Indian War of Independence". It was a gruesome episode, in which hundreds of thousands were killed, but Savarkar was untroubled by the violence, and seemed to justify the murders of British women and children. His works are steeped in a desire for revenge against those who have humiliated Hindus, and his frustration with the passivity of his co-religionists: "I want all Hindus to get themselves re-animated and re-born into a martial race." In his early years, he circulated manuals on bomb making. He approved of--and probably assisted in--the assassination of colonial administrators. He was suspected, for example, of encouraging a student radical who shot dead Sir Curzon Wyllie, a government official, one summer night on a Kensington street in 1909.
<h3>Rewriting history</h3>

Today, some Indians adulate him. On the day your correspondent called in at Cellular Jail, a party of jovial men in their 80s and 90s, an official "Eminent Committee of Freedom Fighters", was also visiting. Among the last surviving veterans who battled the British in the Quit India movement in the 1940s, they raised gnarled fists to chant "Jai Hind", posed for pictures and praised Savarkar as strong. The local MP called veer (brave) Savarkar a "ferocious, dangerous man who frightened off the British". Rashida Iqbal, the jail's curator, assessed him as "one of the most important freedom fighters". Port Blair's airport, like the park, bears his name. Some 2,000km away, in his native Maharashtra, a street and a park in Mumbai also each carry his name. (In London a blue plaque identifies his former home in Highgate.)
Savarkar's enthusiasm for violence sits uncomfortably with conventional ideas of how India got its independence. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and then the Congress party (successor to the INC) promoted a pacifist narrative of history, the idea that Gandhi and the likes of B.R. Ambedkar, a social reformer who inspired the Modern Buddhist Movement, triumphed through non-violent resistance. That meant downplaying the bloodshed of 1857, in which atrocities were perpetrated by both sides, and also the roles of Savarkar, Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel.
Bose, the Bengali leader of an Indian National Army against the British in the second world war and an ally of Hitler and imperial Japan, led some 40,000 soldiers against the British. (He didn't get far, though the Japanese briefly handed him control of the Andamans.) Patel, the "Iron Man of India", had the Bismarckian task of uniting the country. He oversaw the integration of 562 princely states into India, threatening and using military force. Operation Polo in 1948, a five-day conquest of Hyderabad, a wealthy and Muslim-run state in the south, was bloody indeed. Official estimates, only made public in 2013, suggest the fighting and subsequent Hindu-Muslim clashes there killed between 27,000 and 40,000 people. Some historians claim the real toll might have been five times higher.
The way the story of Indian independence is told is beginning to change. Mr Modi and the BJP are keen to celebrate muscular, nationalist figures. Patel is likely to have a much higher profile in future: in the national budget, in July 2014, the government set aside $32m to erect a statue of him in Gujarat, twice the size of the Statue of Liberty, by 2018. And while Mr Modi frequently invokes Gandhi's name and beliefs, he refers almost as often to Swami Vivekananda, a 19th-century nationalist who revived Hinduism and promoted it abroad. Mr Modi is said to be named after him (the swami was originally called Narendra Nath Datta) and frequently poses before his photograph. Vivekananda's ideas on invigorating Hinduism foreshadowed Savarkar's hindutva project.
Savarkar's profile is lower, but is also rising. Educational comics, hagiographies and patriotic films retell parts of his life story. In 2008 Mr Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, inaugurated a website (savarkar.org) that promotes a man "largely unknown to the masses because of the vicious propaganda against him and misunderstanding around him that has been created over several decades", and in 2012 he launched a Gujarati-language biopic. A previous BJP-led government put Savarkar's portrait in parliament. On his birthday this year, May 28th, the prime minister paid homage to him there. Mr Modi tweeted about Savarkar's "tireless efforts towards the regeneration of our motherland". Ranjit Savarkar's group plans various events to mark the 50th anniversary of Savarkar's death in 1966. (Aged 83, he submitted to what he called atmaarpan--refusing food, water or medicine in order to die. It took 20 days.)
Yet Savarkar remains immensely divisive. He was a fiercely outspoken critic of Gandhi, still India's top national hero: he called Gandhi weak, a "sissy" and far too willing to collaborate with Britain. Gandhian talk of man's common humanity he regarded as utopian to the point of naivety. In articles from the 1920s to the 1940s Savarkar lambasted Gandhi as a "crazy lunatic" who "happens to babble...[about] compassion, forgiveness", yet "notwithstanding his sublime and broad heart, the Mahatma has a very narrow and immature head." Gandhi promoted ahimsa, a Buddhist rejection of violence which Savarkar called "mealy-mouthed". He said Gandhi was a hypocrite for supporting violence by the British against Germany in the first world war. Nor did he cheer Gandhi's prominent backing for the Ottoman Caliphate Movement, designed to win Indian Muslims to oppose British colonial rule.
Over the years, Savarkar was eclipsed by his rival. During the 1920s and 1930s, the INC benefited from its ability to claim plausibly that it spoke for Muslims as well as Hindus, which made it a more credible interlocutor with the colonial authorities. Perhaps more important, it had an impressive organisation and, in Gandhi and later in Nehru, accomplished political leaders.
By the mid 1940s Savarkar and his supporters in the Mahasabha (which he led until his death) had a new gripe against Gandhi. They were enraged at the prospect of Pakistan seceding from India. Gandhi, in their eyes, did nothing to stop that "vivisection". Worse, he seemed to favour Pakistan when it sent forces to violently seize Kashmir, evidence to Savarkar that warlike Muslims were again crushing passive Hindus. When Nehru applied economic sanctions on Pakistan (refusing to pass on its share of central-bank funds from before independence), Gandhi launched a fast in protest and forced him to back down. To Savarkar's followers in the Mahasabha, that constituted national betrayal.
On January 30th 1948 Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi. The killer, Nathuram Godse, was a member of the Mahasabha, edited its newspaper and was an associate of Savarkar's. Godse's explanation of his actions echoed Savarkar: he said he murdered Gandhi for his "false notions of Hindu-Muslim unity" and in fury over the secession of Pakistan. Savarkar was arrested and tried as a plotter in the murder. He denied all and was acquitted. That did not convince everybody. As the leader of the Mahasabha, who had praised the efficacy of violence and railed against Muslims, it was reasonable to suspect he had at least inspired Gandhi's killer. A.G. Noorani, author of a book on Savarkar and Godse, goes further. He draws a parallel to the Kensington murder of Wylie in 1909, saying the elder man had twice pressed others to pull the trigger. "I would definitely call him complicit in the assassination of Gandhi," he concludes. He points, too, to an official commission of inquiry into Gandhi's death, in the late 1960s, which drew on testimony unavailable at the original trial. It found the evidence was "destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group". Following Gandhi's murder the RSS was also banned, for a year. Yet the final reason why Savarkar should remain unacceptable in modern India goes beyond suspicion over Gandhi's murder. It lies in his attitude to his fellow, non-Hindu, Indians. In his own writing he relates joyfully how as a 12-year-old boy he led a gang of schoolmates to stone his village mosque and smash its windows and tiles, in the aftermath of Hindu-Muslim riots. Relating how "we vandalised the mosque to our heart's content", he adds that when confronted by Muslim boys, he and his pals wielded knives and sticks and chased them away.
Throughout his writing he sets out Muslims as savage, immoral, sensual and eager to destroy the Hindu way of life. In 1937 he wrote of there being "two antagonistic nations living side by side in India", an idea that relies on using religion as the defining characteristic of any Indian, one utterly against the secular constitution of India. And while he occasionally wrote admiringly of the political and religious fervour of Islam, or rather of Muslim political leaders, he did so to encourage his fellow Hindus to match or exceed it.
In India today the fear of communal clashes--between Hindus and Muslims--should not be overblown. But it is never far away. Especially before elections, parties exploit religious tensions. Those who promote hindutva and echo Savarkar whip up stories of "love jihad", alleging that Muslim men convert large numbers of Hindu women by seducing them. Earlier this month a BJP parliamentarian praised Godse as a "patriot" equal to Gandhi. Members of the increasingly influential RSS feel emboldened. Such majoritarian politics, when a larger religious group sets out to absorb or flatten a minority, is utterly destructive. One need only look at the failure of Pakistan as a reminder of that. Sarvarkar could be a brilliant, eloquent and progressive leader. He could also be extremist, violent and divisive. If his influence grows, India's tolerance and moderation will be at risk.
"Notwithstanding his...broad heart, the Mahatma has a very narrow and immature head," wrote Savarkar
&#xa0;
Savarkar (back row, second left) was arrested and tried as a plotter in Gandhi's murder. He was acquitted
&#xa0;
Click <a href="https://subscriptions.economist.com/nwcd">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist

Narendra Modi's Mentor Thought Gandhi Was A Sissy

Amid a tight schedule and loads of time-consuming PR blitzkrieg organised by the Indian diaspora, Prime Minister Narendra Modi found time to meet his Israeli counterpart <keyword id="6358722" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Benjamin-Netanyahu">Benjamin Netanyahu</keyword> and the <keyword id="278300" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="20" keywordseo="American-Jewish-Committee">American Jewish Committee</keyword> during his recent visit to the US. This is a stark shift from India’s policy stance towards West Asia two decades ago when it refused even to keep an embassy in <keyword id="6355882" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="israel">Israel</keyword>. 
 In fact, India’s sour relationship with Israel dates back to 1938 when Mahatma Gandhi wrote that formulation of a Jewish country in the Middle East would be ‘a crime against humanity’. In 1949, the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru voted against Israel joining the UN and in 1974 India became the first non-Arab country to acknowledge Palestine Liberation Organization (<keyword id="150229" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="PLO">PLO</keyword>) as the representative body of Palestinians. India also consistently supported PLO till the end of the Cold War. 
 
Till two decades ago, India’s West Asia policy was solely driven by a few economic and political reasons. The country depends on Arab countries for oil and the remittances worth billions of dollars sent by Indians working in Gulf countries are a boost to the country’s GDP. 
 
Successive Congress-led governments gave more weight to the reported perception of the Middle East crisis as a religions issue (and not a regional or diplomatic one) by around 170 million Muslims in India. In a sense, this involved a reductionist political logic that clearly supporting Israel and overtly opposing the Palestinian cause would mean loss of millions of Muslim votes. 
 
The shift in India’s policy approach towards Israel began when it started realigning more closely with the US (which in turn has been supporting Israel) after the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Subsequently, in 1992, the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao took initiative to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries. 
 
Over the last two decades, India’s engagement with Israel has grown significantly, especially in the fields of defence and trade. In 2012, of Israel’s arms exports worth $7 billion, India accounted for military equipment worth $1.5 billion. Today Israel is the second-largest supplier of military equipment to India, behind Russia. The military cooperation between the two countries became obvious when Israel supplied artillery shells during the 1999 Kargil conflict with Pakistan. 
 
Trade between the two countries too surged from $200 million in 1992 to close to $4.5 billion in 2013, and in the process India also emerged Israel’s 10th largest trading partner. 
 
Apart from growing military and trade alliances, India’s policy shift towards Israel is also marked by the resurgence of the political right-wing in India represented by BJP which is more ideologically sympathetic to Israel than Palestine. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had supposedly believed that both Hindus and Jews should be empathetic to one another as both shared a history of oppression under Muslim rulers. The supporters of Israel in India also perceive the two countries mired in a common fight against Islamic terrorism. The BJP government is known to be keen on leveraging Israeli expertise in countering terrorism-driven problems within India and across its neighbourhood. 
 
While Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj insisted in July that “India supports the Palestinian cause while maintaining good relations with Israel,” the BJP government’s policy preference towards the Zionist state became apparent when it refused to bow to pressure from communist and Congress lawmakers to censure Israel in the Parliament for its recent siege of Gaza that has been decried by human rights activists across the globe. 
 
While Israel is suspicious about India ties with Iran and India remains uncomfortable about Israel’s relationship with China, the meeting between Modi and Netanyahu implies that Modi, who visited Israel as chief minister of Gujarat in 2006, is poised to take bilateral relations between the countries to newer heights. 
 
 Image: timesofisrael.com

India-Israel Ties To See An Upswing Going Ahead!

Maharashtra State Elections winner and leading candidate list 2019

Mumbai coronavirus micro containment-zone has 717 areas in 24 wards — here’s the entire list

You Searched For "vinayak damodar savarkar" and got 5 results

Maharashtra state elections 2019: These are the issues the opposition could have capitalised on but didn’t

Katya Naidu

Narendra Modi's Mentor Thought Gandhi Was A Sissy

The Economist

India-Israel Ties To See An Upswing Going Ahead!

Preetam Kaushik

Maharashtra State Elections winner and leading candidate list 2019

BI India Bureau

Mumbai coronavirus micro containment-zone has 717 areas in 24 wards — here’s the entire list

Navdeep Yadav

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides