Against Fragmentation: Dalit-Muslim Solidarities, Palestine, and Imperial Divisions

On 26 January 2020, Republic Day, at a road junction in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, three women hoisted the Indian national flag together. One was Bilkis, an elderly Muslim woman who had been sitting in protest at Shaheen Bagh for weeks, her body a refusal of the Citizenship Amendment Act’s1 (CAA) logic that Muslims do not belong in India. The second was Radhika Vemula, the mother of Rohith Vemula, the Dalit2 PhD scholar whose institutional murder by caste discrimination at the University of Hyderabad had shaken the country four years earlier. The third was Saira Bano, the mother of Junaid Khan, a sixteen-year-old Muslim boy lynched to death in a communal mob attack on a train. Two communities marked for erasure by the same nationalist project, one through the grammar of untouchability, the other through the grammar of religious exclusion, stood together on that road in Jamia Nagar and refused the fragmentation that Hindutva had spent years trying to enforce between them.

The refusal of fragmentation was necessary because the forces working to enforce it have never been stronger. Across geographies, imperial and nationalist formations rely on the same basic mechanism: they keep the communities they target from recognising a common cause, by giving each community’s exclusion a different name. In India, Muslims and Kashmiris are surveilled and prosecuted as security threats, and counted and legislated against as a demographic to be managed. Dalits are treated as a source of pollution to be kept physically apart and untouched, and when Dalit politics organises itself into assertion, it is prosecuted using the same anti-terror laws used against Muslim dissenters.

In this vein, Palestine is rarely named in accounts of Dalit-Muslim solidarity in India, and it may not be obvious why it should be. Treated as a separate foreign-policy question, its connection to caste and communal politics within India is easy to miss. But the same security apparatus that surveils Dalit activists, criminalises Muslim dissent within India, and maintains an indefinite military presence in Kashmir, also supplies and is supplied by the apparatus that occupies Palestine, which is why these cannot be treated as separate.

Since 2014,3 the Hindu nationalist project has pursued two goals at once: rewriting the history and institutions of anti-caste politics, and building the legal and administrative architecture of Islamophobic nationalism. Each goal depends on the other succeeding. Hindu nationalism requires Dalits to accept a subordinate place within a single Hindu identity, while it requires Muslims to be excluded from that identity altogether. It is seen most concretely through the “Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens” (CAA-NRC) framework, which writes that exclusion directly into who counts as belonging to India. Both goals are underwritten by a third shift: India’s deepening neoliberal alignment with Israel is ideological, rooted in a decades-old kinship between Hindutva and Zionism as ethnonationalist projects. It is also material; built through arms contracts, surveillance technology, and corporate investment, it is applied most directly in Kashmir, where Indian officials have openly called for the adoption of an “Israeli model.”

Politics of Difference: Caste, Islam, and the Grounds of Solidarity

Any discussion of solidarity across communities requires the crucial task of differentiating the various social realities within them. As Iris Marion Young states in Justice and the Politics of Difference, “it is more empowering to affirm and acknowledge in political life the group differences that already exist in social life,” rather than build solidarity on an assumption of sameness (1990, p. 169).

A similar exploration of intra-community difference in India, vis-à-vis the Hindu caste structure, shows the persistence of caste within both Hindu and Muslim communities.4 For centuries, Dalits, subjected to untouchability and excluded from the caste order altogether, and lower-caste communities5 such as the Julaha (weavers), Dhuniya (cotton carders), Teli (oil pressers), and Badhai (carpenters), had converted to Islam to escape the graded humiliation of caste (Ansari, 2023).

South Asian scholars disagree on why caste persisted in Muslim communities after conversion. Some treat it as a Hindu social structure that converts carried with them; others treat it as something Muslim society reproduced on its own, independent of Hindu influence (Deshpande and Bapna, cited in Ansari, 2023, p. 124). Ali Anwar, the Pasmanda6 movement’s founding figure, locates part of the answer in Islamic textual history itself: he points to fourteenth-century jurist Ziauddin Barani’s treatise Fatawa-i-Jahandari, which used Quranic reference to justify Ashraf social superiority, and to Maulvi Ashraf Ali Thanwi’s volume Beheshti Zewar, which ranked Sayyids above Mughals and Pathans, and both above weavers, barbers, and washermen (Ansari, 2023, p. 129). Caste in Indian Islam, on this account, was reproduced through two routes, according to Ansari: one inherited from Hindu social structure, and another reinforced from within Islamic textual tradition itself, through religious texts that ranked lineage and occupation much as caste did.

Islam’s stated rejection of hierarchy based on lineage or descent has not prevented comparable hierarchies from forming elsewhere in Muslim-majority contexts, shaped instead by the societies Islam took root in. Across much of the Gulf and the Levant, the kafala labour sponsorship system divides society between nationalities meant to serve and nationalities meant to be served, producing what scholar Sumayya Kassamali (2026) calls a structure of “national servitude” rather than mere sponsorship. In both regions, a religion that rejects hierarchy in principle has still absorbed and reproduced hierarchy in practice. While the hierarchies functioning here are quite distinct from the workings of caste in South Asia, and from the codification caste has undergone within Indian society over centuries, Kassamali’s account points to something structurally similar. Kafala can be understood as “the violent insertion of servitude into the anticolonial vision of Arab, Asian, and African solidarity” (Kassamali, 2026, p. 217), a disintegration of that solidarity and a reproduction of hierarchy along new lines.

As for Hinduism, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar,7 the architect of the Indian Constitution and the foremost intellectual of the anti-caste movement, had a critique of caste Hinduism that was total and unsparing. Caste, he argued in Annihilation of Caste, “is not merely a division of labour. It is also a division of labourers,” a system of graded inequality enforced through birth, maintained through violence, and sanctified by Brahminical religious authority (Ambedkar, 1936/2014, p. 233). When Ambedkar ultimately converted to Buddhism in 1956, alongside nearly half a million Dalits, it was an explicitly political act, a mass refusal of the Hindu caste order and its Brahminical legitimation. Buddhism was chosen because it offered, in Ambedkar’s reading, an egalitarian social philosophy. But the logic of that conversion – that exit from Hinduism is an exit from caste, that religious conversion can be an act of political liberation – is similar to the logic employed by people escaping the Hindu caste order by converting to Islam. That exit did not always deliver a clean break: caste has persisted on the other side of conversion too, reasserting itself within the very communities that sought to leave it behind.

The tension between Islamic egalitarianism as principle and caste hierarchy as practice within Muslim communities is not a reason to abandon the project of solidarity. It is a reason to be precise about what that solidarity must be built upon. Kanshi Ram, one of India’s most formidable anti-caste organisers, encountered this tension directly. After meeting fifty Muslim leaders while building his movement, he recorded his astonishment: “Islam teaches us to establish equality and struggle against injustice, but the leadership of Muslims is dominated by so-called high castes like Syeds, Sheikhs, Mughals, and Pathans. The latter do not want the Ansaris, Dhuniyas, Qureshis to rise to their levels” (Kumar and Ansari, 2022). He concluded that solidarity built on religious identity rather than caste position would always serve Ashraf interests at the expense of Pasmanda and Dalit communities alike.

The Dalit-Pasmanda movement solidarity across religious lines can be understood in this light. Its most clarifying slogan cuts through the Hindu-Muslim binary entirely: “Dalit-peichada ek saman, hindu ho ya musalman (all Dalits and backwards are alike, whether Hindu or Muslim).” This is a call for class and caste solidarity across religious lines, grounded in the recognition that 80 to 85 per cent of Indian Muslims are Pasmanda, socially and economically similar in condition to Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs). As for the political representation of Muslims by Ashraf elites, it serves the same function as upper-caste8 capture of Dalit political movements, managing subaltern energy in the interests of those at the top of the hierarchy (Kumar and Ansari, 2022).

The elite capture is measurable, though it sits inside a broader problem. Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament) has long been low relative to the Muslim share of the population: from 1952 to 2004, Muslims averaged about 11 per cent of the population but held only 5.1 per cent of seats. Disaggregating that figure by caste reveals a sharper inequality still. Upper-caste Muslims made up just 1.65 per cent of India’s population but held about 4.5 per cent of all Lok Sabha seats; lower-caste Muslims, more than five times as numerous at 9.35 per cent of the population, held only 0.8 per cent. Of the roughly 400 Muslim MPs elected across those decades, 340 were upper-caste (Ansari, 2023, p. 135).

Read only as a story of religious underrepresentation, these numbers understate what is actually happening. Muslims as a whole are underrepresented, but within that underrepresentation, upper-caste Muslims still carry a political and symbolic currency far beyond their numbers, while the lower-caste majority carries almost none. Electing more Muslims to Parliament would not fix this. The problem is caste, and this means the Muslim community cannot be analysed as a single undifferentiated bloc. These intra-community differences had always produced solidarities against not just the Hindutva social order but also against the elite capture mentioned above – solidarities that political analysis was slower to name. The Bhim-Meem coalition9 that emerged in Maharashtra gave this understanding a genuine political form: a prominent Dalit party and a Muslim-rights party formally allied in 2018 to contest Maharashtra’s seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, organising across the same caste and communal lines that Hindutva depends upon keeping divided.

The stakes of this organising were clear. A young Dalit man was forcibly reconverted by Bajrang Dal10 activists in Uttar Pradesh in 2018; he had converted to Islam precisely because upper-caste people denied Dalits a decent life, and Hindutva’s violent response to that exit tells us everything about what it fears. The reconverted Dalit is being told: there is no exit. Your body belongs within the Hindu caste order, and Islam is not a door out. Jean Drèze (2020) has argued that “the surge of Hindu nationalism in India can be seen as a revolt of the upper castes against the egalitarian demands of democracy.” The violence visited upon the Dalit convert is the rage of a hierarchy defending its structure against those who refuse their assigned place within it.

Solidarities That Refuse: Shaheen Bagh and the Grammar of Shared Struggle

In December 2019, the Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, granting fast-track citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, while explicitly excluding Muslims. Opposition leaders, constitutional scholars, and human rights organisations immediately read it as a legislative attempt to render Muslims constitutionally second-class and write their belonging to India as conditional. The protests that erupted thereafter were led by Muslim women, most visibly at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, where a sit-in occupation lasted a hundred days. Shaheen Bagh, though, became something more than a Muslim protest.

On 26 January 2020, Shaheen Bagh saw the alternative Republic Day ceremony where Bilkis, Radhika Vemula, and Saira Bano stood together and hoisted the national flag (Sharma and Singh, 2023, p. 8). It was no coincidence – three women, three losses, each produced by the same structure of violence that the state was now legislating into citizenship law. Neither was the naming of the neighborhood’s protest library after Fatima Sheikh and Savitribai Phule. Phule was a lower-caste social reformer who opened the first school for girls in India in 1848; Sheikh was her Muslim neighbour and collaborator. Sheikh sheltered Phule and her husband when upper-caste Hindus drove them from their home for the transgression of educating lower-caste girls. Their friendship was an act of solidarity before solidarity had a political name (Sharma and Singh, 2023, p. 10). The women of Shaheen Bagh, in naming their library after both of them, were locating themselves within a history of Dalit and Muslim women forging links between them when those in power insisted it was impossible. They maintained that the CAA’s explicit exclusion of Muslims and Hindutva’s erasure of Dalits were not separate violences requiring separate responses.

This grammar of solidarity is what made Shaheen Bagh politically threatening. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Hindu nationalist forces understood it immediately. Home Minister Amit Shah made Shaheen Bagh the centrepiece of his election campaigning, asking voters to choose between Narendra Modi and those who backed the protest, framing the site as anti-national, Pakistani, foreign.11 When a four-month-old child died from cold exposure while the mother was protesting, right-wing media painted the women as callous rather than ask why Muslim women in India felt compelled to sit on a freezing road for a hundred nights to defend their children’s citizenship. The violence that followed in February 2020, which killed 53 people, two-thirds of them Muslim, was the direct consequence of this incitement.12 To call it a riot is to ignore that it was a targeted assault against communities that had dared to insist on their belonging to the nation.

Shaheen Bagh built something that could not be undone, a solidarity in the sense bell hooks means, taken here beyond her feminist framework into cross-community organising. hooks (1986) argues that radical commitment to political struggle carries with it the willingness to work across difference constructively, using the shared experience of being targeted by the same power as the grounds for political practice rather than waiting for unity to arrive fully formed. Iris Marion Young describes something similar in her account of coalition politics: unlike a traditional coalition, which submerges internal differences in the name of unity, in a Rainbow Coalition “each of the constituent groups affirms the presence of the others” (1990, p. 188), each retaining the specificity of its own experience rather than dissolving it into the whole. Shaheen Bagh was exactly that: a practice of solidarity under pressure, built by communities that had every reason, given their histories with each other, to remain separate, and who chose otherwise.

The material basis for this recognition runs deeper than any single protest. Food, for instance, has become one of the most lethal sites of shared targeting. For certain Dalit communities,13 the skinning of dead animals has always been a caste-assigned occupation: because it is essential to sanitation and to the leather trade, it is work dominant castes have always relied on but have refused to perform themselves, assigning it instead to Dalits and then treating the act of doing it as proof of pollution. This marks Dalit bodies as untouchable, outside the bounds of human dignity. For Muslims, beef consumption has become grounds for death, with lynching mobs operating under the banner of cow protection (Jaffrelot, 2021). The state enforces a single logic across both communities: that what these bodies eat and what they touch makes them undesirable to the nation.

Residential segregation is another example of material recognition. Dalit and Muslim communities are pushed to the physical margins of Indian cities; they are denied access to water, sanitation, and schools, and live in spaces marked by the state and by dominant-caste society as inferior, dangerous, criminal. Their encounter with the police is shaped by the same dehumanising bias. A 2025 report14 on Indian policing found that 68 per cent of Gujarat police believe Dalits are naturally inclined to commit crimes, while 62 per cent of Delhi police hold the same view of Muslims. Such widespread views reflect the institutional common sense of a state apparatus that has internalised the same hierarchy it is supposed to govern. 54 per cent of Muslims fear the police, compared to 24 per cent of Hindus, but lower-caste Hindus, particularly Dalits, also report disproportionate fear, living the same relationship to state violence through a different communal door (Jaffrelot, 2021, p. 421). The data therefore describes one structure of marginalisation, operating through two doors.

One Structure, Two Doors: Hindutva and the Joint Mechanism of Domination

Hindutva targets Dalits and Muslims through each other rather than separately, and this is central to its method. Nishant Upadhyay has argued that what is claimed as Hindu culture is in fact dominant caste culture, and that any assertion of Hinduism as inclusive is an oxymoron and a normalisation of caste violence (2020, p. 464). Islamophobia and casteism are not parallel prejudices that happen to coexist within the same political movement. They are structurally interwoven, each deployed to reinforce the other, each made more effective by the presence of the other. Hindu nationalism is, at its core, “a revolt of the upper castes against the egalitarian demands of democracy” (Drèze, 2020). What that revolt requires, above all, is that the communities most capable of challenging upper-caste dominance, Dalits and Muslims, remain divided, suspicious of each other, and unable to recognise their shared position within the hierarchy.

The legislative architecture of this project is now extensive. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), India’s primary counter-terrorism legislation, has functioned as an instrument of pre-emptive incarceration applied systematically to both communities. The pattern among Muslim men is documented across decades. Umar Khalid, a student activist and scholar, has spent years in prison under UAPA on charges related to the anti-CAA protests, and was repeatedly denied bail while the state presents no credible case against him. The same legal architecture was turned against Dalit and Adivasi rights defenders in the Bhima Koregaon case, where sixteen activists, among them the labour rights lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, the academic Anand Teltumbde, and the eighty-three-year-old Jesuit priest Father Stan Swamy, were arrested and charged under UAPA. Father Stan Swamy, who had spent decades defending Adivasi land rights in Jharkhand, was denied even a sipper cup to manage his Parkinson’s tremors while in custody. He died in prison in 2021, still awaiting trial (Frontline, 2021). Kashmir shows this logic of pre-emptive incarceration is not confined to a single statute: in the weeks following the 2019 revocation of the region’s semi-autonomous status, a detention15 drive swept up thousands, some no more than boys, who were transported to jails nearly 1,500 kilometres from their homes (Essa, 2023, p. 152).

The charge in both cases follows the same logic: one is accused not of what one did, but of what they are. Ole Wæver’s theory of securitisation describes this mechanism. He argues that by uttering the word “security,” a state actor “moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it” (Wæver, 1995, p. 55). A Muslim, a Dalit, or an Adivasi rights activist becomes a threat to the state through this act of naming. The claim doesn’t need evidentiary support because its force comes from who is making it. The state has the institutional position to make a designation stick. It does not even need to prove the act. It only needs to name the threat.

The Uttar Pradesh anti-conversion ordinance of 2020 reveals this joint mechanism with particular clarity. Promulgated ostensibly to prevent “love jihad,”16 the ordinance criminalised conversion for marriage unless prior sanction was obtained from the state, and gave police full freedom to act on their own authority.17 When the Allahabad High Court was forced to intervene to protect couples facing violence from relatives, its own language was instructive: it directed police to protect those “facing threat to life and liberty from relatives on account of their marriage outside caste/religion” (Jaffrelot, 2021, p. 441). Caste and religion were bracketed together, as though the state itself understood they were the same social order being defended. The state of Uttar Pradesh admitted to “trying to preserve the social order, which meant the caste system as much as the separation between Hindus and Muslims” – two boundaries that the ordinance treated as equally non-negotiable (ibid.).

The political erasure of Muslims from democratic life runs alongside this legislative violence. By 2019, for the first time in Indian history, the BJP, having won a general election with a sweeping majority, had no Muslim MPs whatsoever in its parliamentary group. Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha had declined from 49 seats in 1980 to 25 in 2019, even as the Muslim share of the population grew (Jaffrelot, 2021, p. 414). It would be a fallacy to read this as democratic underperformance. Jaffrelot documents that the BJP’s decision not to field Muslim candidates was a deliberate strategy “to liberate the party entirely from the Muslim vote,” a construction of parliament from which an entire community has been systematically removed (ibid.).18

Simultaneously, the BJP moved to weaponise caste within Muslim communities, with Modi in 2022 asking his party to reach out to Pasmanda Muslims, appointing Danish Azad Ansari as Minister of Minority Welfare, and deploying the language of lower-caste Muslim uplift to fracture Muslim political unity. The BJP’s increasing use of the Pasmanda category risks transforming how the latter is perceived, endowing it with new meanings and turning an anti-caste assertion into an instrument of communal division (Azam, 2023). This mechanism works from two directions: Islamophobia deployed to pull Dalit Hindus toward Hindutva, and caste hierarchy weaponised to fragment Muslims internally. Ultimately, these political manoeuvres on the BJP’s part show that the party is deeply aware of the caste divide within the Indian Muslim community and understands caste as an organising hierarchy within India, and is willing to exploit the issue of underrepresentation of Muslims in general, and lower-caste Muslims specifically, as documented in the sections above, thereby converting this existing inequality into a political strategy.

Muslims in India may well be the country’s new Untouchables. The pattern is visible in the rejection of Muslim bodies from Hindu spaces during COVID, the segregation of Muslim patients into separate hospital wards, and most importantly, their spatial exclusion from neighbourhoods, and the marking of Muslim presence as contagion. The spatial  manifestation of residential segregation functions very similarly to the treatment meted out to Dalits for centuries. For decades, systematic communal violence has coerced hundreds of thousands of Muslims into segregated enclaves as a survival strategy, while Hindu populations have retreated into exclusive neighbourhoods, consolidating a landscape of physical division previously unseen across India’s northern and western regions (Hansen, 2024, pp. 283-284). This process of urban partitioning does more than merely isolate communities; it constructs what Hansen identifies as the “abstract Muslim,” a depersonalised figure of enmity subject to assault by any member of dominant-caste society (2024, p. 284). Within this logic, individual actions are irrelevant; the target is interchangeable because the violence is directed not at a specific person, but at the religious and caste category they represent.

Therefore, Hindutva has always understood caste and communal division as instruments of the same rule, applied through different but related mechanisms against different but related communities. That rule does not stop at India’s borders. The political project that marks Dalit and Muslim bodies as threats to the Hindu nation has found its most powerful international ally in a state that marks Palestinian bodies through the same logic of elimination.

Anti-Colonial Reckoning: India, Israel, Kashmir, and the Imperative of Solidarity with Palestine

Any conversation about Dalit-Muslim solidarity in India must reckon with India’s relationship with Israel. This relationship traces the arc of a postcolonial nation that once anchored its foreign policy in Third World solidarity and anti-colonial commitment, and has since abandoned that inheritance in favour of imperial alignment, arms deals, and ideological kinship with an ethno-nationalist state built on the dispossession of another people and their land.19

From the 1930s through to the 1980s, India’s political and nationalist leadership held a near-complete consensus in support of Palestinian self-determination. The Indian National Congress in 1936 bemoaned that Jews in Palestine had aligned themselves with British imperialism, a position of consequence given that the Congress, home to figures like Gandhi and Nehru, would go on to form India’s first government after independence. Moreover, India, at the United Nations, opposed the partition of Palestine in 1947 and argued for a federal solution. This demand came out of a commitment to anti-colonial politics, grounded in the understanding that Palestinian national aspiration was identical in character to India’s own freedom struggle. Only one formation dissented: the Hindu nationalists, whose politics was marinated in hatred against Muslims. Since many Palestinians were and are Muslim, the Hindu nationalists favoured their oppressors (Prashad, 2017, pp. 99-100).

However, it would be an oversimplification to reduce India’s relationship with, and support for, the Zionist state to the anti-Muslim hatred of Hindu nationalists alone, or to conclude that the close relationship between India and Israel is a phenomenon solidified only after 2014, when the BJP, led by Narendra Modi, won the people’s mandate. This alignment was years in the making, built through a decades-old intelligence backchannel, a security and surveillance partnership, a direct ideological lineage between Hindutva and Zionist thought, and, more recently, corporate investment on both sides.

The first rupture in India’s commitment to Third World solidarity and anti-colonial politics, vis-à-vis Palestinian statehood, was the formal recognition of Israel. India lost the Soviet Union as its main arms supplier in 1991, just as economic pressures were pushing it to liberalise. Together these drove India toward closer ties with Washington, an alignment that entailed a corresponding shift in posture toward Israel. India accorded Israel full diplomatic status in 1992; it is worth noting, as Moaswes (2023) points out, that this happened over two decades after the two countries’ intelligence agencies had already begun working together. India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), created in 1968, cooperated with Israel’s Mossad on a backchannel basis from its founding, a partnership driven more by shared alarm over Pakistan’s growing ties to China and North Korea than by any position on Palestine (Moaswes, 2023).

The material relationship that makes the Palestinian struggle the natural extension of Dalit-Muslim solidarity is India’s wholesale adoption of the “Israeli experience:” a homeland-security expertise refined through the occupation of Palestine and packaged for export (Moaswes, 2023). India bought in fully. While this was framed as investment in India’s internal and external security, the admiration for Israel and its security apparatus is hard to ignore: Mumbai’s own police commissioner publicly called for the country to adopt Israel’s “killer instinct,” and India’s Central Monitoring System, built with the Israeli firm Verint, extended mass surveillance over private communications without judicial oversight (ibid.).

By 2017, a $2 billion defence deal between the two countries included Pegasus spyware, later reported on the phones of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, journalists, and activists across India, including in Kashmir (Moaswes, 2023). This buy-in has since scaled dramatically, and India is now Israel’s largest arms customer, absorbing approximately 34 per cent of its total arms exports, purchasing surveillance technology, drones, and weapons systems used in Gaza and deployed against Kashmiri civilians (SIPRI, 2025). Therefore, the Dalit activist beaten by police using Israeli-supplied equipment and the Palestinian family bombed by an Israeli airstrike are bound together by the same supply chain.

The ideological kinship between Hindutva and Zionism traces back to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its founding ideologues. In the 1920s, Vinayak Savarkar, the man who coined the term Hindutva, wrote that the realisation of Zionist statehood in Palestine “would gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends” (Savarkar, cited in Alsaafin, 2023, p. ix). By 1939, RSS ideologue M.S. Golwalkar was writing that non-Hindus in India “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,” language that echoes the founder of revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who in 1923 had promised Palestinians “equality” only if they submitted to Jewish colonisation (Golwalkar, cited in Essa, 2023, p. 144). Whatever the direct line of influence, Golwalkar was building the ideological architecture Hindutva still runs on today, in language strikingly close to the ethnonationalism Zionism had already articulated.

This ideological alignment extends beyond the rhetoric of foundational thinkers, finding active reproduction within the everyday discourse of grassroots adherents. In an ethnographic comparative study examining Hindu nationalist women in India alongside Zionist settler women in Palestine, Akanksha Mehta (2017, p. 219) demonstrates that both the Hindu right-wing movement and the Zionist settler project rely upon, and are sustained by, systematic “practices of erasure.” A settler near a West Bank outpost-settlement asserted that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian, dear… There are no Palestinians in the world and that is why we keep asking – if they don’t exist then how are we killing them? You must not say Palestine; you must only call them Arabs” (p. 217); a Hindu nationalist activist in Delhi, in a separate and unconnected interview, made an identical move against Indian Muslims: “there are no Indian Muslims. All these people who are calling themselves Muslim were Hindus anyway” (p. 219).20 This stark similarity lays bare a logic shared by both Zionism and Hindutva, in which denying the other’s existence lets both movements recast their own violence as self-defence against a threat that, by definition, cannot have a victim.

This shared logic of erasure is not the last connection worth tracing. Even the nationalist movement that opposed Hindutva failed to build an anti-caste politics alongside its anti-colonialism. As the Dalit writer Kancha Ilaiah has argued, “while conducting the anti-colonial struggle, Brahminical leaders and ideologues did not attempt to build an anti-caste egalitarian ideology. On the contrary, they glorified brutal Hindu institutions,” reconsolidating the very authority that colonial rule had briefly unsettled (Ilaiah, cited in Essa, 2023, p. 137). India’s freedom struggle, in other words, never resolved the question of who counts as fully free. That unfinished reckoning is why solidarity with Palestine belongs inside the same struggle as Dalit and Muslim liberation within India. All three struggles demand the same thing that anti-colonial politics once promised and then failed to deliver: that no community stays subordinate so another can rule.

Scholars disagree on how much weight to give this ideological history against the material one. Achin Vanaik has suggested that Modi’s Israel policy goes beyond strategic logic, however flawed that logic might be, toward something closer to admiration for how Israel achieved Jewish statehood at Palestinian expense (Vanaik, cited in Essa, 2023, p. 143). Mustafa Shalash reads the same relationship differently: for him, it is India’s 1980s turn toward economic liberalisation, and the resulting hunger for foreign investment and technology, that best explains why Israeli capital found such easy entry into Indian agriculture, tech, and security (Shalash, cited in Alsaafin, 2023, p. x). Both readings are likely true at once. The ideological kinship explains why Israel, rather than any other state, became the preferred partner; the material relationship, arms, surveillance technology, and corporate investment, explains how that kinship became infrastructure. The Adani Group manufactured deals under Make in India, and purchased Haifa Port21 in 2023, giving India its first Indian-owned port on the Mediterranean. These constitute the clearest recent evidence of that kin-like infrastructure. Ultimately, Israeli equipment sits inside India; the Indian capital sits inside Israel.

Kashmir is where this alignment is most visible, and most openly acknowledged by Indian officials themselves. Sandeep Chakravorty, while serving as India’s consul general in New York, called explicitly for the emulation of an “Israeli model” in Kashmir (Moaswes, 2023). Since the 2019 revocation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, that model has become concrete. Indian authorities have added home demolitions to their arsenal in Kashmir and beyond, bulldozing Muslim homes, often without formal charges being filed. It is an import from Israel’s own long practice of demolishing Palestinian homes as collective punishment (Essa, 2023, p. 148). Similarities exist within the legal impunity with which soldiers act in these two states. India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) grants its own troops immunity from prosecution in Kashmir, a protection Israel achieves through a different but equally durable legal and cultural apparatus that has shielded its own soldiers from facing accountability for “unjustified use of lethal force” (p. 151).

Kashmiris understood what connected them to Palestinians before any Indian official said so. In the back alleys of Srinagar, “Free Palestine” is spray-painted on shuttered storefronts, alongside a history of real cost for saying so: Indian police shot and killed a Kashmiri teenager, Suhail Ahmad, in 2014, during a protest against the bombing of Gaza. When Palestinians rose up again in the 2021 “unity intifada,” Kashmiri police answered with twenty-one arrests, and a public statement telling residents not to treat Palestine’s crisis as their own cause (Moaswes, 2023).22

Naming the Structure: Beyond Moral Claim to Political Solidarity

A commitment to anti-colonial politics has to mean more than sympathy for Palestinian suffering. Jasbir Puar’s account of the war on terror explains why this matters structurally, beyond moral argument alone. Puar argues that homonationalism is “defined by its racialization,” a process through which certain subjects are “liberated” by law and nation, and others simultaneously “imprisoned” by that same legal and national architecture (Puar, 2007, cited in Cowen, 2009, p. 584). Beyond its origins in the United States and queer politics specifically, this theory, taken together with securitisation theory (Wæver, 1995), describes what this essay has traced from its opening page: upper-caste Hindus and those not read as Muslim are the law’s liberated subjects, protected by the very state apparatus that marks Dalits, Muslims, and Kashmiris as its threats, justified by whatever means are deemed necessary to neutralise the threat. Furthermore, Palestinians occupy Puar’s second category twice over: imprisoned by Israeli law as a non-citizen population under occupation, and imprisoned again, at one remove, by the Indian state’s own securitising logic, which treats solidarity with Palestine itself as suspect, as shown in the 2021 Kashmir arrests during the “unity intifada.” Fragmentation, then, the strategy this essay named at the outset, only works if these three refuse to see themselves in each other.

What connects Shaheen Bagh to Gaza, the Bhima Koregaon defendants to the prisoners of Jenin, the Pasmanda weaver in Varanasi to the displaced family in Ramallah, is a shared recognition that imperial power works by isolating each struggle from the others, so that no single fight for justice ever grows large enough, or connected enough, to threaten the whole architecture of domination. Solidarity with Palestine is therefore an ideological imperative. The fires burning in Gaza, Delhi, Varanasi, and Jenin are lit by the same hand, in the service of the same order, against the same people: those who have always been told their place is at the bottom, and who have always, despite everything, refused to stay there.

• 1. The Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) amended India’s Citizenship Act of 1955, explicitly excluding Muslims. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) announced, alongside the CAA, it would require all Indian residents to prove citizenship through documentary evidence. Together, the CAA-NRC created a framework through which Muslims could be rendered stateless while other communities were protected.
• 2. The term Dalit, meaning “broken” or “oppressed” in Sanskrit, refers to communities that have historically been placed outside and below the four-fold Hindu caste hierarchy, subjected to the practice of untouchability – the belief that their touch, presence, or shadow pollutes those of higher caste. Dalit is best understood as an umbrella term: it spans hundreds of distinct sub-castes across India, each historically tied to different occupations and regional contexts, making Dalit communities highly diverse rather than a single homogeneous group. Dalits constitute approximately 16-17 per cent of India’s population and continue to face systemic discrimination, violence, and exclusion despite constitutional protections. This condition is sustained by their continued underrepresentation in India’s major civil and political institutions, and by generations of capital accumulation concentrated among upper-caste populations at their expense. The term is a political self-designation reclaimed by anti-caste movements, most powerfully shaped by the thought and organising of B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956).
• 3. The ideology behind this project is much older than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule, tracing back to the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925 and its early ideologues. Since 2014, the capacity of Hindutva ideology has changed as Hindu nationalism gained control of the state, and could act on this ideology through law, appointments, and policy, rather than through argument alone.
• 4. Caste within Indian Muslim communities is structured as a graded hierarchy, in three broad tiers. At the top sit Ashraf groups, Sayyids, Sheikhs, Mughals, and Pathans, whose claim to status rests on descent from Arab, Persian, Turkic, or Afghan Muslims, as well as from upper-caste Hindu converts who already held high caste standing before conversion. The middle tier, termed “Backward Muslims,” comprises Ajlaf groups such as the Julaha, Dhuniya, Teli, and Badhai, tracing their origins to Shudra (labourer) occupational castes. At the bottom, termed Dalit Muslims, sit Arzal groups such as the Halalkhors, descended from formerly untouchable communities (Ansari, 2023, pp. 124-125).
• 5. These occupational communities are classified within the Ajlaf, or “Backward Muslim,” status group, distinct from the formerly untouchable Arzal converts. Julahas organised politically under the “Momin” identity from 1926, later led by Abdul Qaiyum Ansari, in explicit opposition to Ashraf dominance (Ansari, 2023, pp. 125-126).
• 6. Ashraf and Pasmanda name the two poles of a caste hierarchy within Indian Islam. Pasmanda, from the Persian meaning “those left behind,” is an umbrella term for the lower-caste and marginalised Muslim majority, encompassing further internal caste distinctions of its own. Ashraf, meaning “noble” in Arabic, refers to upper-caste Muslims in South Asia who claim descent from Arab, Persian, Afghan, or Central Asian ancestry, including Syeds, Sheikhs, Mughals, and Pathans. The Pasmanda movement, emerging most visibly in the 1990s in Bihar, challenged Ashraf dominance of Muslim political and religious leadership.
• 7. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) was a Dalit jurist, economist, and political thinker who remains the most significant intellectual figure of the anti-caste movement in India. Born into the Mahar caste, one of the communities subjected to untouchability, he experienced caste discrimination throughout his life and dedicated his intellectual and political work to its annihilation. He studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics and drafted the Indian Constitution as the country’s first Law Minister. His thought, known as Ambedkarite thought, has given rise to a living political and intellectual tradition that continues to animate anti-caste movements across South Asia and the diaspora, informing struggles for Dalit and Other Backward Classes (OBC) rights, dignity, and liberation.
• 8. This essay uses “upper-caste” for clarity and accessibility to readers unfamiliar with caste terminology. Within anti-caste discourse, the term is itself contested: some scholars and activists argue it reproduces the caste system’s own logic of hierarchy, that some are literally “above” others, and prefer the term Savarna, which names inclusion within the four-fold varna order without endorsing the value judgment embedded in “upper” and “lower.” This author shares that preference, and uses “upper-caste” here only for ease of communication.
• 9. Bhim-Meem refers to the political coalition between Dalit and Muslim communities, named after the colours associated with Ambedkarite movement (blue) and Islam (green). The coalition was contested and uneven: Dalit communities carry legitimate grievances about Ashraf Muslim attitudes toward caste, while Muslim communities have sometimes found Dalit political movements indifferent to anti-Muslim violence (Kumar and Ansari, 2022). The coalition’s significance lies in refusing to let these tensions prevent political organisation against a common structure of domination.
• 10. Bajrang Dal is a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation affiliated with the RSS, the ideological parent of the BJP. Ghar wapsi, meaning “homecoming,” is a practice of forcible or coerced reconversion of non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians, back to Hinduism, frequently carried out by Bajrang Dal and affiliated groups. This case is documented in Jaffrelot (2021, p. 204).
• 11. Amit Shah repeatedly invoked Shaheen Bagh during the Delhi election campaign of February 2020, asking voters whether they stood “with the nation or with Shaheen Bagh.” See: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/no-let-up-amit-shah-again-with-nation-or-with-shaheen-bagh-6243450/
• 12. The Delhi violence of February 2020 broke out in the context of sustained anti-Muslim incitement by BJP leaders during the Delhi assembly election campaign. Hate speeches by senior BJP figures included Union Minister Anurag Thakur’s, who encouraged crowds to chant “shoot the traitors of the nation” in reference to anti-CAA protesters, and Kapil Mishra’s, who issued a live-streamed ultimatum to the Delhi police to clear protesters on 23 February, the same evening violence erupted. The violence continued until 29 February in the North-East district of Delhi. According to government data, Muslims constituted the overwhelming majority of casualties. No BJP leader who made hate speeches in the build-up to the violence has been prosecuted. See: https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Investigative-Briefing.pdf
• 13. Caste-based labour division means different Dalit sub-castes historically performed different assigned tasks (Halalkhors in sanitation, for instance, distinct from Chamars in leatherwork), illustrating how caste functions not as a single undifferentiated status but as a graded hierarchy of occupation and stigma. The Chamar community, one of India’s largest Scheduled Caste groups, concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Bihar, is traditionally associated specifically with skinning, tanning, and animal carcass disposal. The term “Chamar” itself, derived from the Sanskrit for tanner, has become a caste slur, reflecting the stigma long attached to the work. This occupational association, while pre-colonial in origin, was hardened under British rule, which organised a diverse set of marginalised groups into a specialised leatherworking labour force to supply export markets, a reminder that caste hierarchy has been actively reshaped by colonial economic demands, not merely inherited unchanged from the past. For more on the community and the colonial roots of the trade, see: https://foundationchamar.org/the-leather-archive-of-india
• 14. The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2025, published by the NGO Common Cause and the Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), is based on a survey across 17 states, covering 8,276 police personnel in urban and rural areas. The report finds that caste, religion, and political affiliation play a decisive role in shaping police perceptions and influencing their actions: https://frontline.thehindu.com/news/bias-in-indian-policing-report-2025/article69415354.ece
• 15. The Public Safety Act (PSA) was employed here; though legally distinct instruments, the UAPA and PSA converge on the same function. The PSA is an executive detention order: a District Magistrate or Divisional Commissioner can detain a person for up to two years without trial, without formally charging them with any offence, on the grounds that their release would threaten public order. The UAPA, by contrast, operates through prosecution, requiring the state to bring a formal case, but it achieves a similar practical effect through its bail provisions, which impose an unusually high threshold on the accused to secure release, meaning long pre-trial detention functions as the punishment even before any conviction. See: https://www.amnestyusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/asa200012011en_11.pdf
• 16. “Love jihad” is a conspiracy theory promoted by Hindu nationalist groups alleging that Muslim men systematically seduce Hindu women to convert them to Islam. It has no evidentiary basis but has been used to justify anti-conversion legislation in several BJP-governed states.
• 17. Interfaith marriages in India are understood to be rare, though no national-level census or survey directly records their prevalence, and inter-religious marriage data must be estimated indirectly from the recorded religions of both spouses in household surveys. Sahgal et al.’s “Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation,” based on face-to-face interviews with 29,999 Indian adults, offers a useful indication of both attitudes and self-reported behaviour: less than 1 per cent of all Indian marriages involve spouses raised in different religions. Additionally, 99 per cent of married Hindu respondents and 98 per cent of married Muslim respondents reported that their spouse shares their religion. Opposition to interfaith marriage is also high: 67 per cent of Hindus say it is very important to stop Hindu women from marrying outside their religion, while 80 per cent of Muslims say the same about Muslim women. While survey data has its limitations, these figures suggest that interfaith marriages remain sociologically rare and socially discouraged across communities. The anti-conversion ordinance criminalises a practice that is already exceptionally rare, functioning primarily as a mechanism for policing communal and caste boundaries. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
• 18. An unnamed BJP leader, speaking to journalist Prashant Jha during the 2017 Uttar Pradesh campaign, said: “Everyone was wooing the Muslims. We told the Hindus – they will unite, will we always remain divided? Trump in the US showed that it is not blacks and Hispanics and Muslims who will decide who becomes US president. It is whites. Here too, it is not Muslims who will decide who rules UP. It is all other Hindus” (Jha, cited in Jaffrelot, 2021, p. 415). The comment makes explicit that the BJP models itself on Trump-era majoritarian arithmetic, a telling instance of how Hindu nationalist strategy borrows its logic of exclusion from a wider transnational playbook of ethnic majoritarianism.
• 19. India’s relationship with Palestine has shifted dramatically since independence. India was the first non-Arab state to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974, and granted the PLO full diplomatic status in New Delhi in 1980. By 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit the Zionist entity in Palestine without also visiting the West Bank, a deliberate break from diplomatic convention that signalled the depth of the ideological shift. In February 2026, Modi addressed the Israeli Knesset during an ongoing genocide in Gaza, expressing India’s “strong support” for Israel. Netanyahu described him as “more than a friend, a brother.”
• 20. This activist’s claim, that Indian Muslims are simply Hindus who forgot themselves, is the logic behind Hindutva’s reconversion movement, ghar wapsi (“returning home”). Ghar wapsi treats conversion out of Hinduism as a temporary lapse rather than a real identity, framing reconversion as merely restoring what was Hindu all along, and using it to shore up Hindu numerical and political dominance (Katju, 2015, pp. 21-22). The same logic explains why, previously in the essay, we discussed how the Bajrang Dal forcibly “returned” a Dalit Muslim convert to Hinduism: in this worldview, there is no such thing as leaving.
• 21. Adani Ports, in partnership with Israel’s Gadot Group, completed its purchase of Haifa Port for 4 billion shekels (approximately $1.15 billion) on 10 January 2023, taking a 70 per cent stake. The deal gave India its first Indian-owned port on the Mediterranean, and gave Gautam Adani, one of Narendra Modi’s most prominent business allies, a direct commercial stake in Israel’s economy. It marks the shift from a relationship built primarily on arms and security cooperation to one now anchored in Indian capital and infrastructure ownership inside the settler entity itself.
• 22. This recognition has travelled beyond Kashmir itself. In Britain, the activist network Palestine Action has targeted the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems in part because its drones, purchased by India in large volumes, are used in military campaigns against Kashmiri populations. See: https://www.newarab.com/analysis/palestine-action-how-shut-down-israeli-weapon-company