Arms, silence, and alignment: The moral and geopolitical cost of India-Israel military ties
India’s emergence as one of Israel’s most reliable arms partners is not merely a story of defence procurement or strategic pragmatism. It marks a deeper moral and geopolitical shift—one that signals how India’s foreign policy has moved away from ethical positioning and non-alignment toward transactional power alignment, even when that alignment implicates it in grave violations of international law.
For decades, India cultivated a carefully balanced foreign policy identity. Strategic realism coexisted with a rhetorical—and often principled—commitment to anti-colonialism, international law, and Palestinian self-determination. That equilibrium is now visibly fractured. As European governments confront legal challenges, parliamentary resistance, and mass public pressure over arms exports to Israel amid the devastation in Gaza, India has quietly filled part of the vacuum—not only as a buyer of Israeli weapons, but increasingly as a co-producer and supply-chain partner.
This distinction matters. Arms trade is one thing; arms integration is another.
Joint ventures, technology transfers, and domestic manufacturing under the “Make in India” framework collapse ethical distance. When Israeli drones, surveillance systems, or missile components are partially manufactured in India—or when Indian firms supply components to Israeli defence companies – responsibility is no longer abstract. India ceases to be a passive recipient of military technology and becomes embedded in the infrastructure of Israel’s war economy.
Geopolitically, the alignment is justified as realism. Israel offers high-end military technology, battlefield-tested systems, and privileged political access to Washington. India offers scale, manufacturing capacity, diplomatic cover, and a vast, dependable market. The partnership is efficient, mutually beneficial—and profoundly political.
But realism without restraint carries costs.
India’s growing defence intimacy with Israel has coincided with a striking diplomatic silence on Gaza. Abstentions at the United Nations, carefully calibrated statements, and the avoidance of legal language around occupation, collective punishment, and war crimes reflect not neutrality but risk management. Arms relationships constrain speech. They narrow moral space. They recalibrate what can and cannot be said.
This silence has consequences for India’s standing in the Global South. India has long claimed leadership among post-colonial nations, many of which view Palestine not as a peripheral issue but as a living symbol of unfinished decolonisation. By materially supporting Israel’s defence sector at a moment of unprecedented civilian suffering, India risks being seen not as a balancing power but as an enabler of impunity.
The comparison with Europe is instructive. European governments are hardly innocent actors, but they are constrained – by courts, civil society, investigative journalism, and international legal scrutiny. Arms export licences are challenged. Parliamentary debates erupt. Transfers are delayed, suspended, or reviewed. India faces no comparable domestic pressure. Its arms relationship with Israel operates in an opaque political space, largely insulated from parliamentary scrutiny and sustained media interrogation. This very absence of constraint makes India uniquely valuable to Israel at a time of growing global isolation.
Equally significant is the ideological convergence beneath the hardware.
Israel is admired within sections of India’s ruling establishment not only for its military prowess but for its model of securitised nationalism—one that fuses religion, territory, surveillance, and permanent emergency. Defence cooperation thus operates on two levels: material capacity abroad, ideological reinforcement at home. Technologies perfected in occupied territories circulate globally, normalising practices of population control, digital surveillance, predictive policing, and militarised governance.
From Kashmir to urban policing, from drone surveillance to data-driven security systems, Israeli technologies and doctrines are increasingly embedded within India’s internal security architecture. What is imported as “counter-terror expertise” often returns as counter-citizen governance.
This is where the ethical rupture becomes unavoidable.
Supporters of the India–Israel defence relationship often argue that India does not directly supply “lethal” weapons for use in Gaza. This is a narrow and misleading defence. Modern warfare does not distinguish cleanly between lethal and enabling systems. Surveillance platforms, targeting software, drones, radar, electronic warfare, and data integration are integral to killing. Participation in these supply chains carries responsibility, even if indirect.
The irony is sharp. India, once wary of military blocs and foreign entanglements, now finds itself entangled through production lines rather than treaties. This is alignment by stealth. It avoids formal alliances but produces similar outcomes: shared interests, muted criticism, strategic dependency, and moral accommodation.
The costs to India are not merely reputational; they are structural and long-term.
First, India’s credibility as a voice of the Global South is being quietly hollowed out. You cannot credibly invoke anti-colonial solidarity while partnering militarily with one of the world’s most entrenched settler-colonial regimes. You cannot champion international law selectively without eroding its meaning altogether.
Second, India’s Middle East policy risks becoming dangerously unbalanced. While economic ties with Arab states remain strong, strategic intimacy with Israel alienates popular opinion across West Asia—particularly among younger generations and civil society actors. Governments may remain pragmatic; publics remember.
Third, there is domestic blowback. The normalisation of Israeli security practices – profiling, surveillance saturation, militarised responses to dissent – feeds directly into India’s democratic erosion. Technologies developed under occupation do not remain neutral when imported; they reshape political culture.
Finally, there is the question of historical judgment. Arms relationships forged during moments of mass atrocity do not age well. They leave archives, trails, and responsibilities. Today’s commercial rationalisations become tomorrow’s moral reckonings.
None of this requires hostility toward Israel’s existence, nor denial of India’s legitimate security needs. It requires something far simpler and far more demanding: moral coherence.
India has not replaced Europe as Israel’s arms partner because it is stronger or wiser. It has replaced Europe because it is less constrained—ethically, politically, and institutionally. That is not a compliment. It is a warning.
The question is not whether India has the right to pursue its interests. It does. The question is what kind of power India seeks to become: one that merely substitutes for Europe in Israel’s war economy, or one that understands restraint as a form of strength.
History is unforgiving to those who confuse strategic gain with moral silence. Arms deals fade from balance sheets; complicity lingers in memory. For a country that once spoke the language of justice fluently, the cost of forgetting that language may prove far higher than any defence contract can justify.
December 29, 2025 -
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, India, Israel, Palestine, Zionism
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