2/12/26Why India enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza | The Caravan
A second-generation settler in the West Bank, Smotrich had briefly been jailed, in 2006, for violently protesting Israel’s decision to formally withdraw from Gaza while retaining control over the territory’s borders, airspace and supplies of food and water. When militants affiliated to Hamas and other groups broke through the Israeli siege and killed nearly twelve hundred people, on 7 October 2023, he told the Israeli cabinet, “We need to deal a blow that hasn’t been seen in fifty years and take down Gaza.” The Israeli response has killed over seventy thousand Palestinians, according to the health ministry of Gaza—although the actual death toll is much higher, once the associated famine and spread of diseases, as well as those buried under the rubble, are taken into account. Smotrich has described the starvation of 2 million Palestinians as “justified and moral,” and the destruction of Gaza as the “demolition phase” before a “real-estate bonanza.” He bitterly opposed the ceasefire agreement imposed by US President Donald Trump, in October 2025, even though it heavily favours Israel, but did not follow through on his threats to bring down the Netanyahu government for accepting it. Israel has violated the terms of the ceasefire more than a thousand times in the three months since it was signed, killing hundreds of people and destroying almost three thousand buildings.Smotrich’s statement to the cabinet finds mention as one of the many “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others” in the application filed by the South African government at the International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide. In January 2024, the ICJ ruled that the charge was “plausible.” The International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution, on 31 August 2025, declaring that Israel’s actions met the definition laid out in the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. An independent commission of inquiry appointed by the UN Human Rights Council came to the same conclusion on 16 September.
While much of the world was looking to isolate Israel, the Modi government was eager to enmesh itself further with a genocidal state.
A week earlier, Smotrich was in India for a three-day visit. On 8 September, he signed a bilateral investment agreement with his Indian counterpart, Nirmala Sitharaman, and spoke to the commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, about a prospective free-trade agreement between the two countries. “The volume of trade has doubled in recent years,” he told ANI. “We can multiply it by three or four times.” India is Israel’s second-largest trade partner in Asia, after China. In recent decades—especially during the tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—the relationship between the two countries, which the Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein described to me as a “marriage of convenience,” has been predicated on expanding bilateral trade, particularly in the defence sector. Israel, he explained, has serviced, and helped upgrade, India’s Soviet-era military arsenal in exchange for political support and diplomatic cover against international criticism of its atrocities in Palestine.
“I think it is important to understand that the Israel–India defence relationship is not just about weapons and ammunition,” Loewenstein, whose book The Palestine Laboratory explains how Israel has successfully exported its architecture of occupation, told me. “It’s obviously partly about that. Many Indian and Israeli defence companies are increasingly synchronised—as some of my sources say, it is often hard to tell when one company ends and the other one begins. It is also an ideological alignment.” He called Modi and Netanyahu “ideological soulmates” who had developed similar strategies and identified common enemies. “India and Israel are fighting a war of good against evil,” Smotrich said at Mumbai’s Chabad House, which had been one of the targets in the fidayeen attack of 26 November 2008, during his India visit. “Both India and Israel experience the hypocrisy of the international community—countries that judge us, and countries that attempt to prevent us from responding to these threats of terrorism.”
The Israeli response to the 7 October 2023 attack has killed over seventy thousand Palestinians—although the actual death toll is much higher, once the associated famine and spread of diseases, as well as those buried under the rubble, are taken into account. OMAR AL-QATTAA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) condemned Smotrich’s visit and demanded that the Modi government “rescind all military, security and economic collaboration with Israel,” but there were no major protests. Asaduddin Owaisi, the president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, was the only other national politician to issue a condemnation. A few hours after Smotrich visited Chabad House, Israel launched an airstrike on a residential neighbourhood in Doha, targeting Hamas leaders who had gathered to discuss Trump’s ceasefire proposal. This earned a rare condemnation from Modi, but his post on X came at the end of Smotrich’s visit and did not name Israel, merely stating that “India condemns the violation of the sovereignty of the brotherly State of Qatar.” It certainly did not jeopardise bilateral relations. In November, Goyal visited Tel Aviv and signed terms of reference for the FTA. At a time when much of the world was looking to isolate Israel, the Modi government was eager to enmesh itself further with a genocidal state that India has a history of opposing.
Modi was one of the first world leaders to reach out to Netanyahu after the 7 October attack, offering to provide any help that Israel needed. The two prime ministers spoke several times in the next few months, with Modi reiterating that the “people of India firmly stand with Israel.” Supporters of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were some of the staunchest backers of Israel on social media, drawing on a shared Islamophobia. When X briefly made public users’ country of origin, several prominent pro-Israel accounts were found to be run from India. Several state governments—including those ruled by the Congress and the CPI(M)—cracked down on pro-Palestine protests and social-media posts, while permitting pro-Israel demonstrations by Hindutva groups.
The Modi government kept its distance from various international efforts to apply pressure on Israel to end the genocide, often tying itself in knots while justifying its positions. On 27 October 2023, India abstained on a resolution in the UN General Assembly that called for a humanitarian truce, because the text had not contained an “explicit condemnation” of the Hamas attack. However, it supported a ceasefire resolution on 12 December, even though this neither mentioned Hamas nor condemned the 7 October attack. After seven international aid workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike, in April 2024, it abstained on a UNHRC resolution calling on states to enforce an arms embargo on Israel in the absence of a ceasefire. India also abstained on three resolutions pertaining to the UNGA seeking an advisory opinion from the ICJ on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In June 2025, its representative at the United Nations cited these abstentions as the reason it refused to support a call for an immediate ceasefire, since preambulatory clauses in the resolution mentioned the ICJ’s rulings—despite India previously having supported resolutions that made references to them. Each of these resolutions was passed by an overwhelming majority, putting India firmly on the wrong side of history.
WITH THE TIDE OF GLOBAL OPINION appearing to turn against it, even among its allies in the West, the Israeli government adopted a siege mentality. On 15 September, a day before the UNHRC-appointed committee issued its report and the European Commission began discussing an end to Israel’s trade privileges, Netanyahu addressed a conference organised by Smotrich’s ministry. “Israel is in a sort of isolation,” he said, blaming the “limitless migration” of Muslims to European countries, as well as online propaganda allegedly funded by states such as Qatar and China, for pressuring Western governments to adopt anti-Israel policies. “Can we get out of this isolation? Yes. I am a devotee of the free market, but we’ll have to have some signs of an autarky.” Israel would have to be self-sufficient—a “super Sparta,” as he called it, referring to the ancient Greek state with fabled military resolve.
Netanyahu’s speech precipitated crashes in the stock and currency markets, worsening Israeli anxieties about the impact of the conflict on the economy. It attracted widespread criticism, with the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, accusing him of having “turned Israel into a Third World country” by persisting with the conflict. “How romantic to fantasise about the heroic and ascetic Spartans,” the Israeli journalist Ben Caspit wrote. “The problem is that Sparta was annihilated.” Netanyahu scrambled to defuse the controversy. Sources close to him told the media that he had made a “slip of the tongue.” During a press conference the following day, he clarified that his comments had been restricted to the defence industry. “Our defence industries are soaring,” he said. “They have reached tremendous achievements in exports, both in quantity and quality, but there we have, indeed, encountered—and could again encounter—political restrictions during the war. And if there is one lesson we have drawn from this war, it’s that we want to be in a situation where we are not restricted, that Israel defends itself with its own forces and with its own weapons, and that is why we want to achieve security independence.”
India is central to this vision, having become the world’s biggest importer of Israeli weapons. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a leading think tank on defence issues, India has accounted for over a third of Israeli weapons sales during Modi’s tenure. Israel has become the fourth-largest source of Indian defence imports, behind Russia, France and the United States. Siemon Wezeman, a senior researcher compiling the SIPRI’s arms transfers database, told me that the defence industries in the two countries have a symbiotic relationship. “Israel is probably the country for which arms exports are the most important,” he said. Wezeman described India as “a quite safe market for Israel.” The genocide had made arms imports from the country a “hot potato in Europe,” he added, but “you don’t get too many questions in India about Israeli weapons.” Similarly, for India, “Israel is a very good supplier, because, unlike many of the other suppliers in the West, Israel doesn’t ask many questions. If you want to bomb Pakistan with Israeli weapons, that’s up to you—‘self-defence,’ no problem for the Israelis.”
After the ICJ’s interim ruling deemed the charge of genocide plausible, several governments suspended the sale of arms to Israel, while others claimed to not have made any since October 2023. Germany and the United States—which, according to the SIPRI, together accounted for ninety-nine percent of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023—did not join them but faced strong internal pressure to do so. In August 2025, when Israel began a ground offensive on Gaza City, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that his government would no longer authorise exports of weapons that could be used in the invasion. (Merz’s government lifted this partial embargo in November.) Despite these measures, the Israeli defence industry enjoyed a boom during the conflict. It has seen record exports, while the Israeli government’s military expenditure, much of which was spent on procurement from domestic companies, was equivalent to almost nine percent of the country’s GDP in 2024. Only Ukraine had a higher defence burden, with military expenses coming to about a third of its GDP.
Much of this boom was supported by India. In September 2024, after a group of academics, activists and retired government officials approached the Indian Supreme Court to seek an arms embargo on Israel based on the ICJ’s rulings, an anonymous source in the defence ministry told The Hindu that, although Israel had needed artillery shells in the early days of the Gaza conflict, “we took a policy decision not to supply them.” The source added that there were “very little defence exports to Israel from India.” This is not borne out by data from the UN Comtrade Database, which shows that India’s exports of arms and ammunition to Israel were worth $130 million in 2023—almost equal to its imports. The amount dropped to $56.5 million in 2024, but even this was by no means negligible and was more than any other year before 2020. Wezeman noted that this did not account for raw materials, such as steel or aluminium, that are used by Israeli arms manufacturers.
Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, visits India in 1980. India was the first non-Arab country to recognise the PLO. SONDEEP SHANKAR / GETTY IMAGES
The Caravan accessed shipping records, maintained by the trade data platform ImportGenius, to analyse the flow of arms, ammunition, explosives and weapons components from India to Israel between 2019 and 2024. There were over ten thousand shipments during this period, most of which consisted of relatively small machining companies, as well as a few state-owned entities and subsidiaries of the Adani Group, making regular supplies of parts to some of the largest Israeli defence contractors, including Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, Israel Weapons Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. This indicates that India occupies a fairly low rung in the supply chains for the Israeli defence industry. In fact, many of the companies making the shipments appear on the Indian defence ministry’s list of offset partners, which suggests that the Israeli manufacturers had entered into supply agreements with them in order to facilitate the sale of weapons to India, since defence procurement rules mandate that a portion of the payments they receive be invested into Indian manufacturers.
These shipments made up a small fraction of India’s total defence exports, which reached a record high of Rs 23,622 crore, or $2.66 billion, in 2024–25 and largely consisted of the union government selling missiles and advanced weapons systems to countries in Asia, Africa and South America. For instance, India became Armenia’s largest supplier of military equipment during the latter’s conflict with Azerbaijan, in 2023. However, the supply of components to major defence contractors in countries such as Israel and the United States is a key part of the Modi government’s push to further boost exports, particularly from the private sector, which currently accounts for around a fifth of defence production. Wezeman viewed this push as the reason for an asymmetry in India–Israel relations. “It’s not that Israel will fall flat if India stops, for whatever reason, the arms exports to Israel,” he said. “For India, it’s probably a little bit more sensitive. India, as you know, is very keen on increasing its exports and showing to all potential customers that they actually manage to export, so to lose a customer may make India look a little bit weak to other potential customers.”
The Indian companies supplying arms to Israel greatly benefited from the Gaza conflict, profiteering from the first ever live-streamed genocide. Premier Explosives, for instance, sent 37 shipments of rocket motors and warheads to Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries between August 2021 and May 2024. During a conference call with investors, on 31 March 2024, its executive director, T Chowdhary, reportedly credited a payment from Israel with causing “an exponential jump” in the company’s revenues for that quarter, which were its highest ever. While most of these companies are unlisted and are not bound to disclose their balance sheets, the few financial documents I was able to access suggested that contracts with Israeli firms helped provide crucial windfall gains. Some of the weapons they sent to Israel, Loewenstein said, “have undoubtedly been used over Gaza, which, I would say, exposes Indian officials from Modi down to potential legal ramifications [over] the assistance of war crimes in Gaza. I think many Indian officials are blind to that reality, and they shouldn’t be.”
India’s public advocacy for the Palestinian cause obscures a complex history of collaboration with Israel, in which weapons sales played a crucial part.
“States must ensure Israel implements ICJ provisional measures, prevent conduct that may constitute genocidal acts, including arms transfers, and cease the transfer of equipment or items like jet fuel if they could facilitate genocide,” Navanethem Pillay, the South African jurist who chaired the independent UNHRC committee, told The Hindu. “States must investigate and punish genocide domestically, ensure corporations or individuals within their jurisdiction are not complicit, impose sanctions, facilitate ICC investigations and support ICJ proceedings like South Africa vs Israel. India should be proud that they have a judge from India on that court. So, it is a matter of shame if India is found to be complicit with Israel by selling or giving them arms.”
INDIA WAS THE FIRST non-Arab nation to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization, in 1974. The following year, it voted for a UNGA resolution determining—by a margin of 72 to 35, with 34 abstentions—“that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” However, its public advocacy for the Palestinian cause obscures a complex history of collaboration with Israel, in which weapons sales played a crucial part.
The Indian National Congress passed resolutions during the 1930s condemning Zionism as an imperialist project. In a 1938 Harijan article, MK Gandhi wrote that the Israel of the Bible “is not a geographical tract” but something that existed in the hearts of Jewish people, whom he called the “untouchables of Christianity.” Even if Jews “must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home,” he added, “it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun.” At a 1947 conference organised in Delhi by the Indian Council of World Affairs, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been in charge of the Congress’s foreign policy since 1928 and would soon be sworn in as the first prime minister of independent India, declared that “Palestine is essentially an Arab country, and no decision can be made without the consent of the Arabs.”
Later that year, on Nehru’s instructions, the Indian delegation at the UN Special Committee on Palestine joined Iran and Yugoslavia in proposing a confederation in which Arabs and Jews would control 56 percent and 44 percent of the land, respectively, with a federal government responsible for defence, immigration and foreign policy, and two national governments that would handle their communities’ domestic affairs. It bore a striking resemblance to the “federal plan” that the Muslim League had formulated as an alternative to partitioning India, only to be rejected by the Congress. This plan was also rejected, both by the Arab states, who believed it made too many concessions, and by the Zionists, who wanted sole control of immigration policy. In November 1947, India was one of 13 countries to vote against the UNGA resolution partitioning Palestine. It recognised Israel only in September 1950, two years after the state was created.
Five months earlier, Nehru’s deputy in the ministry of external affairs, BV Keskar, wrote to him that “the main question is to decide whether we get any benefit in one form or the other from the Arab countries because of non-recognition.” In a press conference, Nehru said that the recognition, which his government had justified by calling the existence of Israel “an established fact,” was “not a matter of principle. It is not a matter on which two opinions cannot be held.”
Moshe Dayan, the foreign minister of Israel, visited India in secret, in 1977, and met Prime Minister Morarji Desai. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In his book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance between India and Israel, the journalist Azad Essa notes that India’s opposition to Israel was driven not just by an ideological opposition to partitions and colonialism but also by a dependence on Arab states for energy security, shipping channels through the Suez Canal and support against Pakistan at the United Nations. In 1962, however, Israel found a chance to be of use. During the war with China, Nehru wrote to his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, for military assistance. “Nehru requested the weapons be transported in ships that did not carry the Israeli flag,” Essa writes. “Ben Gurion refused. And Nehru had no choice but to accept.” India would purchase arms and ammunition from Israel during subsequent conflicts with Pakistan, in 1965, 1971 and 1999.
While the Congress struggled to maintain a balance between its cooperation with Israel and its public advocacy for the Palestinian cause, opposition parties were much more unambiguous in their support. The Praja Socialist Party was, like Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party, a member of the Socialist International, and many of its leaders visited Israel and criticised the Indian government for not establishing full diplomatic relations. Both the Swatantra Party and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the precursor to the BJP, promised to improve bilateral ties in their manifestos for the 1967 general election, held four months before the Six-Day War, through which Israel began its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Criticism from opposition parties, as well as internal dissent within the Congress, over the government’s public support for the Arab states during the conflict made Prime Minister Indira Gandhi consider calling another election in order to seek a public mandate for her West Asia policy.
“Growing up in India in the 1970s, I had a picture on my wall of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister during the Six Day War,” the essayist Pankaj Mishra writes in his recent book The World After Gaza. “This infatuation with Israeli heroes was irresistible partly because it was glamorously illicit in India.” He adds that “many Indians, especially upper-caste Hindu nationalists, were proud and eager to break the official consensus against Israel,” since they felt an “emotional and ideological affinity” with Zionism. “Both Jewish and Hindu nationalisms had emerged in the late nineteenth century out of an experience of marginality and humiliation,” Mishra writes. “Many of their radical ideologists”—like Essa, he draws parallels between Ze’ev Jabotinsky and VD Savarkar—“longed to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.”
The Israeli government was aware of this affinity and sought to take advantage of it, as revealed by documents recently declassified by the Israeli foreign ministry. In a 1965 telegram, Peretz Gordon, the consul in Bombay—the seniormost Israeli diplomat in the country at the time—wrote that “the Hindu fears and hates the Muslim the same” and that “this finds _expression_ in various forms and even openly” within the BJS and the right wing of the Congress. A summary of a foreign-ministry meeting, in 1966, shows one official suggesting “cautious contact with the Jan Sangh party (perhaps through the Mossad),” referring to Israel’s external intelligence agency, but other documents show that Israeli diplomats were already in touch with several BJS leaders, such as Manohar Lal Sondhi, who once complained that Israel was using the same intermediary as Taiwan to liaise with the party.
An Israeli official had worried “whether there is any room for tightening ties with an extreme nationalist party that has no chance of coming to power.” However, the ambassador to Nepal, Moshe Arel, reported about Sondhi reassuring him that, having won a majority in the 1967 election to the Delhi Metropolitan Council, the BJS was ready to cooperate and “to put the Indian government to various tests in the Israeli context, the result of which will be the undermining of the existing anti-Israel policy.” The documents reveal that, through its intermediary, the Israeli consulate got BJS legislators to ask questions in parliament that would criticise and embarrass the government. In 1973, the BJS president, LK Advani, met Israeli diplomats in Delhi and reiterated his party’s support for Israel.
The Israelis were under no illusions about whom they were dealing with. In various telegrams, diplomats referred to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena as fascists. On 31 December 1973, the consulate in Bombay received a surprise guest: Gopal Godse, the brother of MK Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. Gopal had been released, in 1964, after sixteen years in prison for his role in the assassination. “He spoke passionately about his hatred of Muslims and was interested in whether the consulate was willing to lend its help in printing the defense speech of his brother,” the Israeli diplomat Gideon Ben Ami reported, adding that he rejected the request but politely heard Gopal out. Earlier that year, another official, Yaacov Shimoni, reported that the Congress and the communists had complained about their ties with the Hindu Right, to which Israel had responded that it “very much wants the friendship of the National Congress and the left-wing parties as well, but it cannot rudely reject the friendship of right-wing circles—and if the Right remains the only force in India that offers its friendship, Israel is not the one who is to blame.”
Four years later, Israel got a more amenable partner, as the Janata Party, of which the BJS was a constituent, ended three decades of Congress rule. Israeli officials approvingly noted that the new foreign minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had previously led a demonstration against PLO leaders visiting Bombay, which had forced them to fly to Delhi instead. Vajpayee was now eager to defuse criticism that the Janata Party would be pro-Israel. At a victory rally in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, on 24 March 1977, he said that the new government would “consider every question based on its merits and demerits. However, regarding the Middle East, it is clear that Israel must vacate the land of Arabs it occupies. We cannot accept the invaders enjoying the fruits of their aggression.” When his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Dayan, visited India later that year and met Prime Minister Morarji Desai, he did so in secret.
Dayan’s visit was made public in May 1980, causing controversy in India. The newly founded BJP defended the visit in a statement, arguing that it was “in India’s interest to have full diplomatic relations between the two countries.” By then, Indira was back in power, and relations with Israel reached their lowest ebb in the next few years. In June 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, its consul in Bombay, Yosef Hassin, said in a media interview that India’s denunciations of Israel were meant to “impress the Arabs,” because its leaders were afraid of them. “They are afraid that Iraq will cancel their contracts, Saudi Arabia will stop accepting labourers.” The Indira government had Hassin declared persona non grata and reportedly even considered shutting down the consulate, before relenting due to US pressure.
Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to visit India, in 2003. He was greeted by thousands of protesters who marched from Delhi’s Jama Masjid to the Israeli embassy, chanting “Butcher Sharon, go back!” PAWEL KOPOCZYNSKI / REUTERS
ON 1 OCTOBER 1985, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the PLO headquarters in Tunis. At the UNGA, two weeks later, 18 Arab countries introduced a resolution to revoke Israel’s credentials, along the lines of South Africa’s 1974 suspension over apartheid. However, Rajiv Gandhi, who had succeeded his mother as prime minister after her assassination a year earlier, met his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, on the sidelines of the session. It was the first ever meeting between the two countries’ heads of government. Although Rajiv had condemned the Tunis airstrike, India abstained on a Swedish resolution that quashed the expulsion effort.
Rajiv increasingly ran Indian foreign policy through the prime minister’s office, eschewing the advice of the ministry of external affairs and relying instead on the intelligence community and his own advisors. One of these advisors was the opposition politician Subramanian Swamy, who told The Caravan, in 2012, that he and Rajiv would often meet late in the night and discuss “everything.” Swamy had visited Israel in 1982 and was a prominent advocate for improving ties. Several witnesses before the Jain commission, which investigated Rajiv’s 1991 assassination, alleged that Swamy had been instrumental in getting Mossad to train the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which was accused of carrying out the assassination. As a junior minister in the Chandra Sekhar government, Swamy lobbied for full diplomatic relations. Despite his efforts, the international-relations scholar Nicolas Blarel writes, neither of the coalition governments that ruled between 1989 and 1991 had “the political legitimacy nor the willingness to change India’s Israel policy. Priority went to the political survival of their fragile coalitions in Parliament.”
It was the Congress government of PV Narasimha Rao, elected in 1991, that finally established diplomatic relations, in January 1992. “Because he was heading a seemingly weak minority government of transition, Rao did not feel constrained by the INC’s long-established ideological positions and by traditional domestic voting constituencies such as the Muslim vote,” Blarel writes. “As a consequence of this greater flexibility, he gradually pushed for a reformist foreign policy agenda in West Asia.” By then, the Soviet Union, India’s biggest defence partner, had collapsed; the Gulf War had revealed the divisions within the Arab world; and even the PLO, whose support for Iraq during the war had alienated some of its traditional allies, was on the verge of recognising Israel as part of the negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords. India and Israel began negotiating a military partnership, with the future president APJ Abdul Kalam, who headed the Defence Research and Development Organisation at the time, visiting Israel in 1996 and 1997.
“Because he was heading a seemingly weak minority government of transition, Rao did not feel constrained by the INC’s long-established ideological positions,” Blarel writes.
These negotiations accelerated once the BJP came to power, in 1998. During the 1999 Kargil War, with India facing sanctions over its nuclear tests the previous year, Israel provided drones, ordnance, laser-guided bombs and satellite imagery. A year later, Advani led a cabinet delegation to Israel. At the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which was boycotted by Israel and the United States, Indian representatives led by Omar Abdullah—the current chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who was the minister of state for external affairs at the time—opposed an Arab League effort to equate Zionism with racism, while simultaneously blocking a similar designation for caste discrimination.
Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to visit India, in 2003. Unlike Smotrich two decades later, Sharon was greeted by thousands of protesters who marched from Delhi’s Jama Masjid to the Israeli embassy, chanting, “Butcher Sharon, go back!” The CPI(M) tried to disrupt Sharon’s visit to Rajghat, while similar protests were organised in Mumbai and Srinagar. Sharon, whose entourage had flown in four bulletproof vehicles for him to use, was forced to cancel a visit to Agra due to security concerns.
The Congress-led government that took charge in 2004, with outside support from the communists, did not halt this military cooperation. It completed the border fence in Kashmir that was being built in partnership with Israel and approved dozens of contracts for the purchase of equipment, despite several Israeli companies being accused of corruption in arms deals. After the 26 November 2008 attack, India turned to Israel for counterterrorism training as well as for collaboration on a system of mass surveillance. It began using Israeli drones and rifles in the fight against the Maoists. Between 2000 and 2010, India’s defence imports from Israel were worth $10 billion. At one point during the decade, the journalist Prabir Purkayastha writes, Israel was supplying more arms to India than to its own military.
Mumtaz Ahmad Shah, a professor of international relations at Bengaluru’s Presidency University, told me that, during this period, Israeli officials often described their country as “India’s mistress,” drawing a contrast between the private cooperation on defence with India’s advocacy for Palestine. After coming to power, in May 2014, Modi effectively made the affair public. While attending the UNGA session that September, he met Netanyahu, who invited him to Israel. “I know you’ve been there before,” Netanyahu told Modi, referring to his 2006 visit as chief minister of Gujarat. “It will be a pleasure to welcome you again. We’re very excited by the prospects of greater and greater ties with India. We think the sky is the limit.”
Mumtaz Ahmad Shah said that Modi laying a wreath at a Haifa cemetery for Indian soldiers was symptomatic of the “reinterpretation of history” in service of bilateral relations. The soldiers had been fighting for the British in a war to defend its colonial interests, he noted, but the 1918 battle was now being recast as an attempt to “liberate” Haifa from Ottoman rule. JACK GUEZ / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
As with Rajiv’s meeting with Peres three decades earlier, the two prime ministers met in the aftermath of Israeli excesses that caused international opprobrium. In July, the Netanyahu government had launched Operation Protective Edge, a seven-week bombardment of Gaza that killed over two thousand Palestinians, most of whom were civilians. “India is deeply concerned at the steep escalation of violence between Israel and Palestine, particularly, heavy air strikes in Gaza, resulting in tragic loss of civilian lives and heavy damage to property,” the official MEA spokesperson said in response to a media query. “At the same time, India is alarmed at the cross-border provocations resulting from rocket attacks against targets in parts of Israel.” This drew an equivalence between Israel’s actions, which India did not condemn, and strikes by Hamas, which killed six civilians during the entire conflict.
Although India voted for a UNHRC investigation into violations of humanitarian law during Operation Protective Edge, it abstained on the resolution accepting the probe report, in 2015—reportedly after Netanyahu called Modi—because it called for the matter to be brought before the International Criminal Court. The MEA claimed that it had done so because India is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC in 1998, but the Palestinian ambassador to India, Adnan Abu Al-Haija, found this explanation “unconvincing.” In an interview with The Hindu, he noted that other non-signatories, such as Russia and China, had voted for the resolution, as had several European nations, “who were once considered steadfast supporters of Israel.” India was one of just five abstentions, and only the United States voted against the resolution.
The BJP’s response to the conflict had clearly shown which way the winds were blowing. Modi’s foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, rejected calls for a discussion in parliament over the issue, leading to an opposition walkout. A pro-Modi group organised a demonstration in Delhi supporting Israel. On 16 August, Hindu Samhati, an organisation with ties to the RSS, held a rally in Kolkata—to mark the anniversary of the communal violence of 1946—where twenty thousand attendees chanted pro-Israel slogans. A group called Hindus United for Israel made #IndiaWithIsrael trend on social media. A Tel Aviv-based restaurateur who heads the local chapter of Overseas Friends of BJP set up a makeshift kitchen near the Gaza border to serve chicken biryani to Israeli soldiers.
Modi made his much anticipated visit to Israel in July 2017, the first ever by an Indian prime minister. Unlike the trips by Swaraj and President Pranab Mukherjee, in the two previous years, his itinerary did not include a stopover in the Palestinian territories—he would visit Palestine only in February 2018, a month after Netanyahu made a reciprocal trip to Delhi. After signing several memoranda of understanding on subjects including telecommunication, water management and space technology, Modi and Netanyahu laid wreaths at a cemetery in Haifa, where 44 Indian soldiers had died during the First World War.
This, Shah told me, was symptomatic of the “reinterpretation of history” in service of bilateral relations. The soldiers had been fighting for the British in a war to defend its colonial interests, he noted, but the 1918 battle was now being recast as an attempt to “liberate” Haifa from Ottoman rule. During Netanyahu’s visit to Delhi, in January 2018, the Modi government formally renamed the Teen Murti Memorial—built by the colonial authorities in 1922, opposite Nehru’s future residence, to commemorate three regiments from the principalities of Hyderabad, Jodhpur and Mysore that fought in the battle—as the Teen Murti Haifa Memorial.
MODI’S ENTOURAGE during the 2017 visit included the billionaire Gautam Adani, who would, in January 2023, acquire a controlling share in the Haifa port in partnership with Israel’s Gadot Group—after more than three decades of protests by Israeli trade unions against the port’s privatisation. Adani had often accompanied Modi on foreign trips, even during the latter’s tenure as Gujarat chief minister, and usually used the occasions to expand his business empire. At the time of the Israel visit, one of his companies, Adani Aero Defence Systems and Technologies, had already signed a statement of intent with Elbit Systems to work together to produce military drones. The joint venture, Adani Elbit Advanced Systems India, was finalised in 2018. It would manufacture Hermes 900 drones, developed by Elbit in 2009 and first used in combat during Operation Protective Edge, in which almost two-fifths of the Palestinian deaths were attributed to drone strikes.
On 14 December 2018, AEASI inaugurated a factory in Hyderabad to produce the carbon fibre exoskeletons for Hermes 900 and Hermes 450 drones. It was the first such facility located outside Israel. “Our foray into defence and aerospace has a deep personal significance for me,” Adani said at the event. “I want us to be able to look back and reflect that the Adani Group did its bit to help build a more self-reliant India—the nation that is second to none in its defence manufacturing capabilities, the nation that is stronger in its ability to defend itself.” Elbit’s decision to set up the joint venture, he added, was “a critical milestone for the trusted and strategic relationship between our nations” and “a testament to Elbit’s commitment to our nation and the ‘Make in India’ programme.”
While it hoped to find international orders, AEASI had a ready customer, since Elbit produced more than eighty percent of drones used by the Israeli Defense Forces. In February 2024, the journalist Neelam Mathews reported that the company had delivered more than twenty Hermes 900 drones to Israel, which had been manufactured “under a transfer of technology agreement ‘and strict supervision by Elbit Systems.’” Mathews added that “the Hermes 900 kits were sent to India by Elbit, along with tools including sensors and engines for assembly.” It is unclear whether these specific drones have been used in the current conflict, but the Hermes 900 was widely used in bombing Gaza, as well as Lebanon and Iran, over the past two years.
Unlike his predecessor Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to visit Agra without facing sizeable protests in India. STR / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
In 2023, the Indian army and navy each ordered two Drishti-10 drones, which Mathews described as a renamed version of the Hermes 900 that has “the same configuration.” AEASI claims that sixty percent of components in the Drishti-10 are indigenous, but the payload system—a drone’s mechanism to lift and transport any weight—is believed to be Israeli. During a pre-acceptance trial at Porbandar, in January 2025, one of the naval drones, reportedly worth at least Rs 120 crore, crashed into the Arabian Sea. Although there were no casualties and, since it had not yet paid for the drone, the navy did not lose any money, questions were raised about the operational reliability of the Drishti-10.
The Adani Group further enmeshed itself into the Israeli weapons industry by acquiring a factory in Malanpur, near Gwalior, that was producing components for a range of Israeli rifles and machine guns. The factory had been set up in 2017 by PLR Systems, a joint venture between the Indian conglomerate Punj Lloyd and Israel Weapon Industries, which had, before its privatisation in 2005, been the small-arms division of the state-owned Israel Military Industries. (Elbit Systems eventually acquired the rest of IMI.) PLR Systems described itself as India’s first private small-arms unit.
In a 2020 article, Ajay Soni, a retired army colonel who was a director at PLR Systems, described being inspired by Modi’s directive to “Make in India” when he entered private service. “Defence and aerospace industry in India was at a nascent stage and there was a sense of optimism and purpose,” he wrote. “A large number of big industry houses made a beeline for licenses and responded to multiple RFIs/RFPs”—requests for information or proposals, a preliminary step in the tendering process. “The industry soon realised that this was a different ball game and needed big investments and patience. The final orders were far and few and with the government being the only user there was no alternate buyer indeed.” Unlike other conglomerates, which waited for government contracts, Punj Lloyd “decided that we want to find and introduce a world class product to the Indian Armed and Police Forces. Tie up and establish the production in India and then go and sell it to India. It was a much more cavalier approach but if you don’t believe in your product, why will the world?”
Distress sales have been a key component of the Adani Group’s growth, with the conglomerate taking advantage of liquidation processes to rapidly expand.
After searching for international partners, Soni wrote, the company settled on IWI, “a known name in the small arms industry with its products such as Tavor Assault Rifle, Galil Sniper Rifle, Uzi SMG and X-95 Micro Tavor already in service in India with the Indian security forces such as the revered Special Forces, Para battalions, CRPF, BSF and multiple state police. We decided to bring the manufacturing of these weapons closer home in India. It was a giant leap of faith, wherein we were committing ourselves without any firm orders.” PLR Systems was set up in October 2015 and, once the Malanpur factory was functional, “multiple thousand components and sub-assemblies of Negev LMG, Galil Ace Rifles, Uzi Pro SMG, MASADA and JERICHO pistols and X-95 (Micro Tavor) carbines are now being exported to Israel every month.”
In a 2017 interview with CNBC–TV18, Atul Punj, the chairperson of the group, estimated a business opportunity of almost Rs 20,000 crore in the small-arms sector over the next five years. “We expect to have a price advantage, as we are manufacturing in India, and we are supplying best-in-class technology that is already being used as a preferred weapon in the special forces.” The company delivered its first domestic order in July 2019, selling a batch of X-95 rifles to a state police force. In his article, Soni recalled coming across “a CISF soldier at the Vaishno Devi shrine holding an X-95 Assault Rifle with ‘Made in India’ stamped on it. I can hardly compare the feeling to anything but to the likes of seeing your first newborn.”
The trouble was that Punj Lloyd was in dire financial straits. Even when the Malanpur factory was established, its stock was trading at just over a tenth of its 2008 price, with a number of its infrastructure projects in Libya—which accounted for a sixth of its total orders—suffering due to the turmoil in the region, a British company it had acquired going into administration, and auditors being unable to verify its accounts. Insolvency processes were initiated against the conglomerate in May 2019.
A person familiar with the liquidation of Punj Lloyd, which is still ongoing, told me, on condition of anonymity, that the Malanpur factory was already off the books at that point. In January that year, Soni and his fellow PLR Systems director Ashok Wadhawan had founded a consultancy firm called Fouraces Systems, with Wadhawan’s wife, Priya, as the CEO. At some point that year, Punj Lloyd had sold its 51 percent stake in PLR Systems to Fouraces, which, in turn, sold the stake to the Adani Group. (The full form of PLR was subsequently changed from Punj Lloyd Raksha to Precise, Lethal, Reliable.) It is unclear when either of these transactions took place—the Economic Times reported that the ownership of PLR Systems had been transferred to Adani in late 2019, but the Adani Group revealed its purchase in a filing at the Bombay Stock Exchange only in September 2020. Unlike most such acquisitions, Adani did not publicise the deal in a press release. Neither Fouraces Systems nor the Adani Group responded to my questions about the deal.
Gautam Adani shakes hands with Netanyahu, in January 2023, after acquiring a controlling share in the Haifa port in partnership with Israei’s Gadot Group. KOBI WOLF / BLOOMBERG / GETTY IMAGES
The journalist Ravi Nair told me that, even though PLR Systems had begun getting domestic orders, “the company was still struggling, because the numbers were not much.” According to the Adani Group’s annual report for 2020–21, it paid Rs 50.25 crore for the company. Fouraces Systems had paid around Rs 36 crore, Nair said, “so, for them, it was a profit-making deal.” Distress sales like this have been a key component of the Adani Group’s growth over the years, with the conglomerate taking advantage of liquidation processes to rapidly expand in sectors such as power, logistics, cement and real estate, with the bankrupt companies’ creditors often having to settle for a fraction of what they were owed.
There was tremendous potential in Adani’s acquisition of PLR Systems. The Malanpur factory had state-of-the-art facilities and a workforce that had been trained in Israel. IWI retained its 49 percent stake, providing crucial technology and a stable client in the form of the Israeli military. Between 2019 and 2024, according to the ImportGenius data, PLR Systems made 594 shipments to Israel with a total of 242,670 rifle and pistol components, including firing pins, bolt carriers, accessory mounting rails and slides. IWI was the consignee for all the shipments.
The data also included three shipments, in February 2022, of parts for IWI’s Arbel computerised firing system, which can be integrated with assault rifles and machine guns to make them more accurate by automatically adjusting for variables such as the shooter’s heart rate, breathing and muscle fatigue. IWI and Adani Defence unveiled the Arbel system at a trade fair organised by the Indian defence ministry at Gandhinagar, in October 2022. It was first used in combat by Israeli soldiers invading Gaza the following year. “The Israeli Defense Forces has demonstrated a disregard for civilian life in Gaza to the point of routinely targeting children with small arms, meaning that Arbel could easily be used to make the killing of civilians, of children, more efficient,” Noah Sylvia, a research analyst at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, told Middle East Eye.
The problem of domestic orders was also swiftly resolved. Senior officers in the Indian Army had long been calling for an alternative to the INSAS rifles—developed by the DRDO during the 1980s and produced by the state-owned Ordnance Factories Board—that were ubiquitous among security forces despite concerns over their reliability and dated technology. The army had made some limited efforts to procure foreign rifles, including from IWI. In the months leading up to Adani’s acquisition of PLR Systems being made public, the Modi government decided to end the OFB’s monopoly over 275 items, which could now be procured from private companies; announced that it would allow central armed police forces to procure arms and ammunition from domestic manufacturers; increased the limit of foreign direct investment without requiring government permission in the defence sector from 49 percent to 74 percent; and instituted a procurement policy that would ban imports of certain weapons, so that domestic companies could be protected from international competition.
Soni and Wadhawan welcomed these initiatives as gamechangers for the private sector, but the ultimate beneficiary was Adani. PLR Systems was well placed to take advantage of the reforms, which opened a floodgate of orders. The initial list of 101 weapons subject to an import embargo included specifications that could be met by Galil sniper and assault rifles, as well as the Negev light machine gun, provided they were manufactured in India. The Indian Army had already signed a contract to procure 16,479 Negev LMGs and would soon agree to purchase 40,949 more, with the first batch of these expected to be delivered early this year. While only the CRPF and the BSF had previously purchased the X-95 rifles, the CISF and several state police forces, including Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, added them to their arsenal. The Indian Navy ordered over five hundred Masada pistols for its elite commando unit, in November 2021. PLR Systems had total revenues of Rs 154 crore in the five years since Adani acquired the company—a figure that is set to skyrocket as it receives, and delivers, more orders in the near future. On 30 December 2025, it signed a deal with the defence ministry to sell a hundred and seventy thousand carbines, based on the Galil Ace, worth an estimated Rs 1,108 crore.
ALTHOUGH IT WAS the lowest bidder in the carbine deal, PLR Systems was only contracted to provide forty percent of the defence ministry’s total requirement. The rest were to be manufactured by Bharat Forge, which also has significant ties to the Israeli weapons industry. In 2015, its subsidiary Kalyani Strategic Systems had incorporated a joint venture with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, a company owned by the Israeli government. Kalyani Rafael Advanced Systems inaugurated a factory at Hyderabad, in August 2017, a month after the founder of Bharat Forge, Baba Kalyani, had accompanied Modi on his Israel trip.
The factory was initially meant to produce Rafael’s Spike anti-tank guided missiles for the Indian Army, but the Modi government cancelled the $500 million deal for 8,356 missiles, 321 launchers and full transfer of technology in November 2017, after an expert committee appointed by the defence ministry recommended that the DRDO be asked to develop an indigenous alternative. When Netanyahu visited India, two months later, he was accompanied by the CEO of Rafael and told the media that the deal was back on the table. After the missile performed poorly in field tests, later that year, India again delayed the agreement and instead made an emergency purchase of 210 Spike missiles and 12 launchers, in April 2019, for Rs 280 crore. These missiles were made in Israel, rather than in Hyderabad. With the DRDO missile system still in development, and proving inferior to the Spike, the Indian Army finally made a deal worth Rs 287 crore with KRAS, in August 2023, to produce an undisclosed number of missiles.
The Hermes 900 is displayed at the Bharat Drone Mahotsav, at Delhi’s Pragati Maidan in May 2022. T NARAYAN / BLOOMBERG / GETTY IMAGES
In the meantime, KRAS had repurposed the Hyderabad factory to work on other missile systems. It produced the SPICE-2000 bombs that were used in the Balakot air strikes of February 2019. Five months later, Rafael subcontracted KRAS to provide components for almost a thousand Barak-8 air defence missiles, a deal worth $100 million. This would be paid out of the $2.5 billion that India was paying for the missiles, which had been developed by the DRDO in partnership with Rafael and Israeli Aerospace Industries, another state-owned company with which Kalyani Strategic Systems had signed a memorandum of understanding, in February 2017. This contract appears to be reflected in the ImportGenius data, which shows that, between 2019 and 2024, KRAS, KSS and Bharat Forge made 150 shipments to Rafael, with a total of 1.06 million components. Ghazala Wahab, the editor of Force magazine, alleged to me that, during the current invasion of Gaza, IAI had diverted some of the missiles meant for India to Israel. Neither IAI nor KRAS responded to my request for comment.
Wahab told me that, although India calls the Barak-8 a joint venture, “essentially it’s an Israeli missile which they have given us,” with the DRDO playing very little role in developing it. The DRDO had been claiming for a long time that the medium-range surface-to-air missile was an indigenous project, she said, “but the cat was out of the bag” when it conducted the first tests, at Chandipur in July 2016, and IAI issued a press release titled “IAI Successfully Tested the MRSAM Air & Missile Defense System.” She noted that this “is the same thing that Adani has been doing,” by rebranding the Hermes 900 as Drishti-10. In both cases, the claim to indigeneity rested on most components being made in India, but the Indian contribution was usually restricted to manufacturing small components or importing parts from abroad and assembling them. There was very little value addition in India, Wahab added, and foreign partners rarely shared technical knowledge, detailed designs or the computer systems that controlled the weapons. “Because of this façade of ‘Make in India,’ we are running a huge fraud on our own people,” she said.
In an article published shortly before Modi’s 2017 visit to Israel, Amit Cowshish, a retired bureaucrat who had served in various capacities at the defence ministry, particularly around procurement, noted that there was “recognition in India—perhaps now more than ever before—that the domestic defence industrial base will have to be strengthened to achieve strategically critical self-reliance in defence production. Not that the domestic industry is not capable of meeting this challenge on its own, but India cannot afford the luxury of waiting for long periods for equipment to be designed and developed by the Indian industry from scratch. Even commercially, it does not make sense to reinvent the wheel, as it were.” It made more sense for Indian companies to tie up with foreign firms “willing to transfer already developed technologies.”
However, Cowshish wrote, the “fundamental problem seems to be the absence of a well-articulated defence procurement policy.” India had a procedure instead of a policy, he explained. “One of the consequences of this is the ambiguity that surrounds what could be described as ‘Make in India’ projects. It is never very clear to foreign companies as to [what] India wants them to do under this policy and how.” It was not clear to them whether Modi’s clarion call in his 2014 Independence Day speech “is a call to foreign companies to come to India to make defence equipment, or a call to Indian private sector companies to take the lead, or a mix of both,” he added.
In the eight years since that article, there has not been much clarity on this question. India now appears to be favouring partnerships such as the joint ventures Adani and Bharat Forge made with Israeli companies. These Indian conglomerates have an advantage, Cowshish told me, since “you need very deep pockets” to make it in the weapons industry, “because there are no immediate returns.” The Israeli firms appear pragmatic about the situation, often spouting platitudes to “Make in India” in press releases, though there is frustration in India about their reluctance to ensure full transfer of technology, as seen in the Spike saga. Cowshish said that this arrangement helps project self-reliance since, when Indian companies “became prime vendors, we can show that we are not doing any imports. Our imports have not decreased—the company is importing. It is giving them in dollars. I am giving them in rupees.”
Cowshish speculated that a major reason for the rise in private arms manufacturing in recent years was that many offset contracts that had been signed in previous arms deals were maturing. “They came to the stage where they have to deliver, and the ministry of defence also started increasing pressure,” he told me. “It was admitted by the minister of state in the last parliament that most of what we are exporting are spare parts, components, assemblies, sub-assemblies—not major platforms. Maybe things will change, but till now I don’t think that we have actually exported a major platform.” He noted that offset contracts are a dying breed, with the government increasing the minimum deal amount that requires them from Rs 300 crore to Rs 2,000 crore and exempting intergovernmental agreements from having them.
“Because of this façade of ‘Make in India,’ we are running a huge fraud on our own people,” Ghazala Wahab said.
Nevertheless, this system seems to be sustaining a growing ecosystem of small companies that rely on export orders from Israel. Ace Inotec Manufacturing is a Bengaluru-based machining firm, established in 2006, that made 3,641 shipments, totalling 4.68 million components of small arms, to IWI between 2019 and 2024. IWI appears to be its biggest customer and—according to the Fitch Group, an international credit ratings agency—accounted for 54 percent of its total revenues between April and December 2024. Increasing demand from Israel helped the company’s revenues register an annual growth rate of 23.7 percent between 2019–20 and 2022–23, and it had pending orders of Rs 112 crore as of February 2024. Another major supplier of IWI during those five years was Indo-MIM, which is also based in Bengaluru and focusses on precision machining. Between 2019 and 2024, the company sent 4,401 shipments of various weapons components to IWI. Over this period, it recorded a total revenue of Rs 9,949 crore.
The MRSAM is successfully tested at Chandipur, on 23 December 2020. PRESS INFORMATION BUREAU
In August 2025, Bengaluru for Justice and Peace, a coalition of civil-society organisations, named Ace Inotec and Indo-MIM in a list of nine companies based in the city that it urged members of parliament to take action against because of their complicity in the genocide in Gaza. “As our elected representatives, your views in Parliament must reflect those of the people—and the people of India stand in unflinching solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation, dignity, and equality,” the group wrote in its open letter, which called for an arms embargo on Israel and accountability for war profiteers. The list also included Alpha Design Technologies and Alpha-Elsec Defence & Aerospace Systems, which are vendors of Elbit Systems; DCX Systems, an IAI vendor; Defsys Solutions, which provided parts to Rafael; and three others that do not appear in the ImportGenius data.
Another major exporter in the database was Solar Industries India, a Nagpur-based company that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of explosives. Its founder, Satyanarayan Nuwal, is Nagpur’s richest man and registered the highest growth in wealth among Indian billionaires in the first half of 2025. He is reportedly close to local RSS and BJP leaders, and donated Rs 14 crore for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. During the tenure of the Modi government, his company expanded its defence operations, benefiting from government contracts while diversifying from explosives to ammunition, grenades, rocket systems and drones. Cowshish cited the use during Operation Sindoor of the Solar Group’s Nagastra loitering munition, which the Indian Army began procuring in 2023, as an example of how private weapons manufacturing is being boosted by the government reducing the scale of the equipment it bought from large ships to drone systems. Meanwhile, the Indian Air Force is in the process of integrating Solar’s “universal” air bomb, which, the company claims, is compatible with both Western and Russian aircraft. Between 2022 and 2024, Solar Industries India made 63 shipments to Rafael, sending 351.24 tonnes of various explosives, including RDX and Octogen.
It was not just private companies that were exporting weapons to Israel. One of Rafael’s most prominent vendors was BrahMos Aerospace Thiruvananthapuram, a subsidiary of the Indo-Russian joint venture that had developed the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile. BAT came into existence, in 2007, after BrahMos Aerospace took over the cash-strapped Kerala Hitech Industries, which was owned by the state government. It struggled to stay afloat in its initial years and was referred to the Board of Industrial and Financial Reconstruction in 2014. However, its missile integration complex began to show results, and BAT manufactured airborne launchers, metallic airframes and booster motor cases for the BrahMos missile. Between 2019 and 2024, it made 114 shipments to Rafael, most of which were components of something labelled as BA1CP, which was occasionally followed by MRSAM. It is unclear what BA1CP stands for—Israel does not have BrahMos missiles—but it is possible that these components were part of the Barak-8 missile deal, perhaps forming part of the system’s command posts.
The OFB, which was broken up into seven companies in 2021, also featured in the shipping data. In September 2020, it sent 10,000 M80 cartridges to IWI, while its Mumbai office sent a variety of goods, including rangefinders and cameras, to Elbit Systems over 12 shipments in 2021. Two of the seven OFB offshoots were also mentioned. One of them, Advanced Weapons and Equipment India, seems to have continued OFB Mumbai’s supply of equipment to Elbit Systems. The other, Munitions India, sent six shipments to Elbit in May 2024, with different components of the M92 propellant charge used in artillery shells. The following month, it sent Elbit a tonne of pyrotechnic nitrocellulose, a chemical used in explosives and propellants. Around that time, two air defence regiments of the Indian Army sent three gun interface units—electronic devices that send a secure signal to weapons systems mounted on an aircraft or vehicle—to IAI. I sent questionnaires to all the companies mentioned here but did not receive any response.
WHEN I ASKED COWSHISH whether he had any qualms about military cooperation with Israel despite India’s historical position on Palestine, he demurred. “I don’t see a problem with that,” he told me. The United States was happy to supply weapons to both India and Pakistan, he said. “They have given F-16 to Pakistan, and they want to sell it to us also. I mean, that is the problem. For a long time, Congress didn’t establish any contact with Israel because they thought the Muslims of India will not like it. Why would the Muslims of India not like it? Till date, there is no answer to that question.” A two-state solution, he added, “doesn’t mean that we will be happy to have contact only with one state and not with the other.”
The genocide in Gaza, however, makes the question of India–Israel relations about more than just the import and export of weapons. On 20 October 2025, Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, published a report titled “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime.” The genocide, she wrote, had been “sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation.”
While much of Albanese’s condemnation was directed at Western powers, she specified two specific ways in which India had enabled the genocide through its military ties with Israel. She listed India as one of the states that have most frequently “supplied parts, components and weapons to Israel through an opaque system that obscures transfers, including ‘dual use’ and indirect transfers.” She also cited the Indian Air Force’s participation, along with those of Israel and ten other countries, in the 2025 edition of the annual INIOCHOS exercise, held in Greece. Moreover, she added, “Third States also continue to purchase Israeli weapons and military technology. Besides being a core component of its economy—in 2024 weapons exports accounted for 23 percent of Israeli exports, the second-highest share globally—these exports also enhance Israeli arms manufacturing capacity.” Testing weapons on Palestinians, she noted, was a “unique selling point of Israeli military technology,” which means that the genocide had helped increase the value of its arms exports.
The genocide, Albanese wrote, had been “sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel.”
“Third States’ acts, omissions and discourse in support of a genocidal apartheid State are such that they could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts,” Albanese wrote. “At this critical juncture, it is imperative that Third States immediately suspend and review all military, diplomatic and economic relations with Israel, as any such engagement could represent means to aid/assist/directly participate in unlawful acts, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”
Albanese recommended a slew of measures that governments should take, such as insisting on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, breaking all ties with Israel, securing reparations, cooperating with the ICC and the ICJ, and suspending Israel from the United Nations. She urged trade unions, civil-society organisations and ordinary citizens to monitor their governments’ response to these recommendations “and to continue to press institutions, governments and corporations for boycotts, divestments and sanctions, until the end of the Israeli illegal occupation and related crimes.”
Donald Trump holds up the founding charter of the Board of Peace during the signing ceremony at Davos, on 22 January. India was invited to join but has neither accepted nor declined. MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
These recommendations were similar to the measures that were taken to ostracise South Africa during the apartheid era, a struggle in which India was a key leader. It was the first nation to place a trade embargo, in 1946, and worked to isolate South Africa at the United Nations, the Commonwealth and the Non-Aligned Movement. As with Israel, India’s position was not as unambiguous as portrayed on the global stage. The Indian and South African high commissions in London maintained a steady informal communication. India did not act to prevent violations of the sanctions by either South African or Indian businesses, such as the diamonds industry. Indian defence contractors reached out to South Africa for assistance and received it.
However, India’s unflinching position on the world stage until the end of apartheid burnished its credentials as a leader of the Global South, a position it has seemed to abdicate in recent years. “I don’t think that India is anymore the voice of the Global South,” Albanese told The Wire, in November. “The Global South itself is changing, but India is no longer the country that it was, politically. It doesn’t play the role that it used to play thirty, forty years ago in the international community. Today, India and the relationship with Israel demonstrates that it is aligned with right-wing forces.”
On 22 January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump, whose government had sanctioned Albanese in July, held a signing ceremony for the Board of Peace, a new international organisation that arrogated to itself the task of reconstructing Gaza. His son-in-law Jared Kushner—who, like Trump, comes from a family of New York realtors—announced the board’s “master plan,” prepared without any consultation with the Palestinians. It was the “real-estate bonanza” Smotrich had talked about, featuring the creation of waterfront properties, new cities, industrial parks and a new airport. “I’m a real-estate person at heart, and it’s all about location,” Trump said. “And I said, ‘Look at this location on the sea. Look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people.”
As usual, there was no condemnation from the Modi government. India had been invited to join but had not accepted, reportedly due to the presence of Pakistan and fears that the board would turn its peace-making eye towards Kashmir. It had not rejected the invitation either, for fear of antagonising the world’s most powerful man, who already held a grudge for not being given credit for ending the India–Pakistan military conflict last year. Instead, there was only silence, and it was damning.