[Book Review] Hostile Homelands: Drawing Parallels Between Hindutva And Zionism In Historical and Present Day Context

“For so many Indians, the events at Pahalgam is when history begins. Never mind 500,000 troops occupying Kashmiris. Never mind mass graves, enforced disappearances, torture camps & extrajudicial killings. Tourists expect to be safe where residents don’t have any human rights.” -Azad Essa

At the time I wrote this article (May 14, 2025), the news coming out of India, Pakistan, and Kashmir continues to churn rapidly. On April 22, an attack in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, killed 28 civilians, mostly Hindu tourists and one Muslim tourist. India blamed The Resistance Front, linked to Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, though the group later denied involvement. In retaliation, India launched Operation Sindoor (precision missile and drone strikes across Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Punjab), claiming to target militant camps. Pakistan accused India of hitting civilian areas, including mosques, and responded with its own strikes on Indian military sites under Operation Bunyan-un-Marsous. What followed was the first large-scale drone war between the two nuclear states, claiming dozens of civilian lives. 

Though full-scale war was avoided and a tentative U.S.-brokered ceasefire was reached on May 10, it exposed India’s increasing reliance on the “Israeli model”: striking alleged “terrorist infrastructure” with broad impunity, even at the cost of civilian lives, bolstered by a slick propaganda machine that cast the strikes as surgical, moral, and necessary.

Many, from across the subcontinent to the Middle East to mosque pulpits in America, have used the language associated with analysing Zionism to make sense of the violence. This parallel is not incidental. As journalist and Al-Jazeera columnist Azad Essa argues in his book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, the ideological and tactical convergence between Zionism and Hindutva has created a shared architecture of war crimes with impunity. Essa, a South African journalist of Indian descent, provides readers with an incisive recounting of history; how India has increasingly mirrored Israel, not just in military strategy, but in its ethno-nationalist project, legal repression, and media manipulation.

A Survey of Zionism and Hindutva Parallels

The book opens by laying out the ideological foundations of Zionism and Hindutva. Both movements emerged with the goal of defining their respective homelands – Israel and India – as ethno-religious states. Israel’s apartheid regime in Palestine functions not only through military occupation but via a matrix of laws, bureaucracies, and land policies designed to erase Palestinian identity.

India, however, originally refused to recognize Israel at the United Nations in 1948 and voted against its admission. This was part of India’s anti-colonial foreign policy, which viewed Zionism as a settler-colonial movement akin to European imperialism. But public sympathy for the Palestinian plight began to erode in the 1990s, particularly after the 1991 Gulf War and India’s economic liberalization, where the formal establishment of full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992 marked a sharp turning point. Even as India began purchasing Israeli weapons (which Essa details extensively), it continued symbolic support for Palestine at the UN; a dual stance that persisted until the Modi era, where open admiration for Israel and right-wing Zionism replaced older rhetoric entirely.

Yet, even during India’s officially pro-Palestine decades, the ideological roots of Hindutva grew. The RSS and Hindutva movement have long envisioned a Hindu Rashtra – a nation purified of what they consider “foreign” elements. For example, Essa quotes M.S. Golwalkar, who in 1939 insisted that “foreign races” in Hindustan “must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.”¹ Likewise, in Israel, views like that of Ze’ev Jabotinsky (founder of the expansionist Revisionist Zionism) paved the way for an ethno-state (“Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”). Essa traces these ideological convergences, noting how India’s BJP and Israel’s Likud are not aberrations but extensions of their founding logics, both seeking demographic engineering.

Palestine, Kashmir, and Dissent

Essa draws a direct line to India’s own efforts in Kashmir: the revocation of Article 370, the introduction of new domicile laws, demographic engineering, and the repression of dissent, all under a framework that mirrors Israeli mechanisms of control. In both cases, civilians are cast as potential terrorists, and state violence is sanitized through the language of security and sovereignty. He draws a direct comparison to the Nakba and its subsequent erasure of Palestinian villages, noting that India has similarly renamed Kashmiri landmarks, flooded the region with military personnel, and introduced new “domicile” laws to enable non-Kashmiris, mostly Hindus, to settle, mirroring Israeli settlement strategies in the West Bank. 

Perhaps most jarring alongside Israel’s blatant disregard for international law is India’s similar manipulation of legal frameworks to criminalize dissent. Laws like the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) have been used to jail activists, journalists, and students without trial: Catholic Priest Stan Swamy, student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam among them. In March, the UAPA was invoked to silence protests in solidarity with Palestine. Indian police often demolish homes in Muslim neighborhoods under the pretext of punishing rioters, an echo of Israel’s punitive house demolitions. In both cases, the goal is to break the will of the population and warn others against defiance.

Ultimately, Essa argues that the alliance is not merely about ideology or weapon sales -though those are significant, evidenced by India’s extensive use of Israeli drones in the current conflict- but about exporting a model of control. He warns that the Israel-India partnership is a test case for a new form of authoritarianism masked by democratic veneers. India has learned to deploy soft power -tech, Bollywood, yoga- to mask its fascist tilt. During Operation Sindoor, Indian media seamlessly echoed government lines, with a female Muslim officer paraded in press conferences to deflect accusations of bigotry. Within this framework, the deaths of 28 tourists in Pahalgam become pretexts for escalating a settler-colonial logic already decades in motion – one now increasingly backed by Gulf capital and Western complicity.

The Precarity of Indian Muslim Identity

One of the strengths of Essa’s work lies in its critique of the political dynamics within India. The acknowledgment that it was not under the BJP but the Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi that certain pivotal actions occurred, such as the reopening of the Babri mosque for Hindu worshippers, and the normalization of ties with Israel, underscores the non-partisan nature of anti-Muslim hatred: “Whereas the political and social foundation of Hindutva had been laid by Hindu nationalists, it was the Congress party who had helped normalize the ideology. It follows, naturally, then, that when Rajiv Gandhi took over in 1984, the idea of normalizing ties with Israel had become tangled with the very demand of progress, liberalism, and technological advancement of India.”² It dispels the notion that these issues are confined to a particular political party, instead, far more entrenched in the evolution of the country itself.

Given the above, the comparison between India and Israel, Kashmir and Palestine, makes the current moment a particularly volatile one for using this framework of analysis for Hindutva and Zionism. As an Indian-American Muslim, I do wonder if these parallels do not implicitly make those unfamiliar with the history put Indian Muslims at a crossroads. In other words, some analyses view Indian Muslims as analogous to collaborators, sell-outs of the Ummah. This misreading flattens history and regional contexts, and overlooks India and Pakistan as state-on-state warfare, wherein Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with its own record of military coups, political repression, and U.S.-aligned operations. Imran Khan continues to languish in inhumane jail conditions.

Additionally, for all their similarities, there do exist distinctions between Zionism and Hindutva. Their origins, logics, and conceptions of indigeneity can differ in critical ways. Zionism emerged as a nationalist movement to establish a homeland for Jews, a diasporic people historically persecuted across Europe. Zionism is centered on a restorative settler-colonial logic, where Jews, regardless of origin, are defined as indigenous to the land of Israel. Hindutva, by contrast, does not imagine an exiled people returning but rather an indigenous majority reclaiming dominion over a homeland allegedly corrupted. As Essa outlines, Hindutva treats native Muslims and Christians not as external enemies but as internal contaminants, descendants of conquerors or converts who have betrayed the authentic civilizational essence of India. Hindutva does not seek partition but purification. In other words, Zionism and Hindutva converge in form but differ in origin.

Indian Muslims, far from being state proxies, are themselves targets of a majoritarian ethno-nationalist project. Of course, it is a moral imperative that those who can afford to voice opposition do so, or at the very least avoid echoing Hindutva jingoisms or cheering state violence, especially when it targets civilians, no matter what side of the border. But we must also acknowledge the structural precarity Indian Muslims live under, many of whom have sacrificed livelihoods, safety, and even their lives in pursuit of justice.

Conclusion

The dust has yet to settle after the ceasefire; the region remains taut. The violence of the past weeks are not anomalies, but manifestations of an ideology that rewards majoritarian cruelty and reframes it as righteous duty. These geopolitical conflicts are not insular. What followed after the Pahalgam attack is not a break from history but proof that the convergence Essa traces has never been theoretical.

May God preserve all innocent life, grant justice to the oppressed, and may we resist, always, the temptation to cheer power over principle.

Related:

– The Graveyard Of Normalcy – New Report Uncovers Egregious Human Rights Violations In Indian-occupied Kashmir

– Perpetual Outsiders: Accounts Of The History Of Islam In The Indian Subcontinent