There is a word that keeps surfacing in the corridors of New Delhi and Jerusalem model. Not a model of democracy, nor of peace, but of control. Of how to hold a people down quietly, legally, and efficiently with bulldozers, spyware, and the steady hum of military boots on occupied ground, according to Al Jazeera News.
In November 2019, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s then consul general in New York, was filmed at a private gathering musing openly about Israel’s settlement strategy in the occupied Palestinian territories. He was speaking in the context of Kashmir, the Himalayan region India had just stripped of its semi-autonomous status, throwing its political leaders in jail and cutting off communications for millions of people. “If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it,” he said, with unmistakable confidence.
He was not speaking loosely. He was mapping a future.
Six years on, that future has largely arrived.
A Brotherhood of Ideology
At its core, the India-Israel relationship under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not merely a trade partnership or a defence arrangement, though it is both of those things in full measure. It is, say analysts, something deeper: an ideological kinship between two states that each cast themselves as civilisational homelands one Hindu, one Jewish and that each view Muslim populations within and beyond their borders as security threats to be managed rather than citizens to be protected.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party draws from Hindutva, a nationalist philosophy that envisions India as a natural and eternal homeland for Hindus worldwide. Israel, since its founding, has defined itself as the Jewish homeland. The parallels are not lost on the people who study them.
“The India-Israel relationship under Modi is a bond between two ideologies that see themselves as civilisational projects and Muslims as demographic and security threats,” said Azad Essa, author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel. “The friendship works because they have similar supremacist ends.”
Bulldozers as Policy
Nothing illustrates the borrowing more visibly than what Indians have come to call “bulldozer justice.” Across BJP-ruled states over the past decade, the homes and shops of Muslim families have been demolished, often without legal notice, often in the immediate aftermath of communal tensions or protests. The message is not subtle: dissent has a price, and that price is your home.
India’s Supreme Court ruled in November 2024 that such demolitions violate due process. On the ground, they continue.
The tactic has a familiar echo. Israel has spent decades demolishing Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, clearing space for illegal settlements. In Gaza, since October 2023, entire neighbourhoods, hospitals, universities, mosques have been reduced to rubble. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, is celebrated by his followers as “Bulldozer Baba.” In Israel, the Caterpillar excavator is a symbol of state power. In both countries, the bulldozer has become political theatre.
Spies in Your Pocket
Beyond the physical, both governments have reached into the digital lives of their citizens. Among Israel’s most controversial exports to India is Pegasus, the military grade spyware developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group that can silently transform any smartphone into a surveillance device, capturing messages, photographs and live audio without the user ever knowing.
Siddharth Varadarajan, co-founder of the independent news outlet The Wire, discovered his phone had been targeted. “This Israeli model of using spyware to keep an eye on any possible arena of opposition or criticism is something that the Modi government has adopted and embraced wholeheartedly,” he told Al Jazeera. India’s Supreme Court-appointed committee found malware on several phones but could not conclusively confirm the source, citing the government’s limited cooperation with the investigation.
Kashmir as the Laboratory
Nowhere does the Israel model press harder on human lives than in Kashmir. Since August 2019, the region has been stripped of its special constitutional status, its elected government replaced by direct rule from New Delhi, its people living under pervasive surveillance, military checkpoints, and laws that grant security forces extraordinary and largely unchecked powers.
Political scientist Sumantra Bose draws the line plainly: “It echoes Netanyahu’s approach of rejection and non-engagement with the Palestinians and the exclusive reliance on military power.” Kashmir, like the West Bank, exists in a state of engineered permanent emergency where daily governance is handed to local administrators with little real authority, while the occupying power holds every meaningful lever.
India is the largest buyer of Israeli weapons. In return, it has received drones, radar systems, air defence technology, and joint military training. It has also, critics argue, received something less tangible but equally powerful, a governing philosophy that treats its own people as an enemy to be subdued.
As Modi heads to Israel, the two nations stand not merely as allies, but as mirrors, each reflecting in the other a vision of the future they are already building, stone by stone, byte by byte, and bulldozer by bulldozer.
