Fabricating Homeland Security: How India was sold the dream to become 'more like Israel'
Rhys Machold's new book details how Israeli and Indian police began working together under the pretext of ‘homeland security’
For three days in November 2008, Mumbai - India's commercial capital and the heart of its Bollywood film industry - was in lockdown.
Beginning on 26 November, ten heavily armed men, allegedly from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, launched a string of attacks on sites across the city, seizing high-profile buildings and holding civilians hostages.
Thick plumes of smoke hung over the capital's precious symbols, the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and the 121-year-old Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, along with a cinema, a Jewish cultural centre and a cafe in the southern business district.
By the end of the offensive, at least 166 people, including nationals from more than two dozen countries were killed.
Amongst the dead were eight Israelis.
The events of 26/11 were not the first act of violence to befall the city.
Over the course of the early 1990s and the turn of the century, Mumbai had been a site of tremendous violence, including anti-Muslim riots and several bomb blasts that were even deadlier than 26/11. But given the attacks had targeted prominent financial and cultural centres in Mumbai affecting the city's affluent, and involving numerous foreign nationals, it wasn't long before the incident took on the moniker of "India's 9/11".
The severity of the shock precipitated a backlash against the Indian political class for what was seen as an under-preparedness for a new global terror threat. Within days, the fault lines deepened and, amid the recriminations, western lobbyists and security consultants with a toolbox of "solutions" to India’s inadequate and antiquated security profile stepped in.
And at the heart of these lobbying efforts was an assemblage of snake-oil salesmen with a weapons toolbox from Israel.
In his new book, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press), Rhys Machold details how the 26/11 attacks - seen as an exceptional moment in India's post-independence history - was used to bring western models of "homeland security" - a far-reaching security architecture ostensibly meant to "protect" the country - to India, or more specifically to the city of Mumbai.
Machold, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, finds that even as the embers in Leopold Cafe and Nariman House in Colaba simmered, these pro-Israel lobbyists managed to convince much of the Mumbai police that signing on to a raft of police exchanges, training and commercial relationships was the only way to reclaim public order.
The Maharashtra state government went on a spending spree, procuring armoured cars, speedboats (the Pakistani assailants allegedly came over by sea), night vision goggles, and communication devices, in a desperate attempt to abate concerns and build public confidence.
That India and Israel have enjoyed burgeoning ties over the past decade and have, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu's stewardship, culminating in the formation of a strategic partnership is no secret.
Over the past 15 months, too, as Israel embarked on an extermination campaign in Gaza, it has become well established that Delhi has been a pillar of strength for the Israelis.
India has abstained from key resolutions at the UN, sent Indian workers to replace Palestinian workers, dispatched combat drones and ammunition, and has refused to support an arms embargo on Israel. India has categorically framed its support for Israel as concomitant with its national interest.
The construction of the India-Israel compact however has drawn little critical scholarship. Scholars routinely choose instead to frame the alliance as a natural result of a forward-looking, pragmatic, neoliberal foreign policy that would ultimately benefit India's rise as a global power.
Most narrations of hastening Israel-India military relations are based on various memorandums of understanding between companies, PR statements issued by government spokespersons, or via endless troll armies on the internet.
Machold's work doesn't just fill this void, it provides a sophisticated examination of how some of the relationships were facilitated and came to be at a time even prior to Modi.
He provides a rare window into the world of Israeli weapons consultants and how they connive to not merely take their battle-tested arms and methods to the world, but also the fabrications and myths they use about Israel in order to so.
'Become more like Israel'
The siege on Mumbai delivered a sucker punch to the city elite.
The media spectacle that followed the 72-hour siege - with grainy CCTV footage of the assailants, and repetitive allusions to the attack being part of the global scourge of terrorism - recast India as a victim of an "old" hate: "Islamic terrorism".
Meanwhile, with several Israelis killed in "India's 9/11", the incident would entangle the two countries in a shared narrative of trauma and fear.
"The terror attacks in India are a clear warning sign to all countries in the world that terror poses a danger to all our children's welfare," Israel's president Shimon Peres said at the time.
Israeli arms dealers post-26/11 found a way to peddle their wares to an embarrassed Indian government desperate for solutions
"We must take the war on global terror seriously and act decisively and firmly against terror centres spread across the globe, headed by the centre of terror in Iran," he added.
Machold writes that just as they had done after 9/11 in the US, Israeli arms dealers post-26/11 found a way to peddle their wares to an embarrassed Indian government desperate for solutions.
The marketing of Israeli tactics as conflict-proved, battled-tested, and successful against the Palestinians would help spearhead enthusiastic Hindu nationalist politicians and commentators looking to connect the attacks on Mumbai and India's historic “softness” to Muslims.
If only India had what Israel did it would be a more functional, secure and modern state, the lobbyists appeared to say.
"Israel was enacted as tough, hyper-masculine, modern, and efficient, in contrast to India as weak, effeminate, backward, and incompetent," Machold writes.
The media, too, upped the ante, and helped to manufacture consent for the partnership. India Today published a piece in which it compared the attack on The Taj Palace Hotel with an attack by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) on the Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv in 1975.
The article described terrorism experts around the world as being "shocked by the sorry state of India's counter-assault teams".
Machold writes that as time went by, Israeli media commentators began to suggest that "India had something to learn [from Israel]."
"In other words, according to these accounts, Indian authorities should welcome 26/11 as an opportunity to become more like Israel," he writes.
Of course, the marketing of Israeli "authority" on matters of arms and security is a strategy that has long piqued the interest of the Indian military and political establishment.
Neither Israeli nor Indian commentators appear to reflect on the systemic violence of each respective state as the source of its collective insecurity
These date back to Israel's thundering victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. At the time, sections of the Indian military had looked on at Israel with intrigue.
The allusions to Israel's so-called self-reliant military-industrial complex expanded in the 1970s and 1980s when normalisation of ties with Israel was touted as India’s route to joining the global economy and eventual modernisation.
When India finally normalised ties in 1992, military ties with Israel would soon emerge as the bedrock of the relationship.
Indian officials were especially enticed by Israel's willingness to share military technology with Indian companies.
It made sense. India was home to a large market and labour force.
'The fantasy of becoming a militarised state'
The electoral victory of a coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1998 further consolidated the shift to the right and closer public ties with Israel.
Indian affinity and trust for the Israelis also soared following Israel’s refusal to condemn Delhi's decision to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998 and subsequent willingness to assist Delhi during the Indo-Pakistan war a year later, despite US sanctions.
Following the events of 9/11 and the assault on the Indian parliament in December 2001, India joined the US-led so-called "War on Terror", a project that paved the way for the securitisation and racialisation of Muslims globally.
Machold's book draws on the existing scholarship on how the global pacification industry has expanded and is constructed beyond borders.
Beyond Machold's narrative of how these relationships were built, his book is a riveting study on the colossal sham of the homeland security industry itself
"Indeed, rather than taking the geography of homeland security as a given, Fabricating Homeland Security is concerned with state-and corporate-led efforts to stage and organise the world in the image of homeland security alongside the violence of the empire," Machold writes.
His writing is lucid and captivating. His work is backed up by meticulous research, as well as rare testimony from former Indian officials and Israeli security consultants.
Machold meets a throng of hucksters who market security as a means to upgrade, or "educate" India, take it out of its "backwardness", and bring it into the fold of the West.
But beyond Machold's narrative of how these relationships were built, sold, projected and at times objected to, his book is a riveting study on the colossal sham of the homeland security industry itself.
As Machold notes, the homeland security industry only really came into being after the 9/11 attacks. The US subsequently became the natural leader in the field but Israel quickly decorated itself as a "pioneer".
The consultant discourse at the time, Machold writes, "sought to seize on the post-26/11 sense of collective insecurity as a moment of opportunity for a new shared vision of capitalist growth under the banner of 'Indian homeland security'."
It was, by industry accounts, "the Israeli experience" that would keep regimes ahead of local and foreign adversaries.
That Israel is an apartheid state that was founded on violent exclusion, ethnic cleansing and colonialism was concealed. That it was also in large part subsidised militarily and protected diplomatically by the United States was unimportant.
In the Indian context, buying into Israel's security was the only way to secure and protect its growing economy as it powered towards a bullish future.
In other words, this was not a project about providing security to the public.
It was instead about protecting the wealthy and the state's ability, like Israel's, to oppress, surveil and pacify dissent or opposition.
Naturally, then, the Israeli methods, implemented in shambolic ways, provided the Mumbai police with both the opportunity to reinforce existing prejudices against Muslims in the city, as well as the tools to expand on its long history of violence and impunity for which it had quite the reputation.
Following the so-called communal riots in Mumbai in 1993, for instance, the New York Times reported that "Hindu gangs" attacked Muslims with the cooperation of the police. "The extent of police cooperation with the Hindu mobs appears to have spread through the entire police force, excluding only the most senior officers," the Times reported.
"Transcripts of conversations between the police control room and officers on the streets, taken from the regular police radio band and made available to The New York Times by an Indian reporter, show that the officers at police headquarters repeatedly told constables in the field to allow Muslim homes to burn and to prevent aid from reaching victims," the report added.
In July 2009, an Indian delegation made up of high-ranking Mumbai police officials made a trip to Israel to learn more about "fighting terror".
Writing about the motivation to attend, Machold writes that "part of the appeal of travelling to Palestine/Israel for Indian officials in 2009 was to fulfil the fantasy of becoming a 'hard' militarised state and, in doing so, consolidating the Muslim Other."
A Mumbai-based newspaper wrote at the time: "Israel seems to have become the answer to most of Mumbai’s police problems."
'Decorative in nature'
Whereas the 26/11 attacks saw Indian elites call for an implementation of a homeland security model analogous to western approaches to internal security, these efforts were implemented haphazardly and were often largely decorative in nature.
Whereas Mumbai officials were happy to accept the weapon upgrades from the Israelis, they refused to give up on so-called home-grown tactics.
In response, several Israeli security consultants looked to pathologise the erratic nature of Indian compliance and implementation of its methods as a matter of “backwardness” and “ignorance” which Machold concludes, were often drenched in racial and colonial stereotypes.
Machold manages to claw out fascinating insights from the reports of consultant firms, as well as bytes from Israeli insiders who speak of the perils of entering, thriving and surviving the Indian market.
In a fascinating passage, he narrates the experiences of Israeli dealers, who speak to the impossibility of doing business with the Maharashtra state government.
Several give up, or move into private ventures, or move to other sectors.
Despite the challenges, India has still emerged as the largest market for Israeli weapons.
In fact, by the time of 26/11, India was already purchasing close to $1bn worth of arms per year from Israel, and Indian war hawks seemed to be pushing Delhi further into the Israel-America orbit.
Between 2015-2019, under the premiership of Modi, arms sales increased by 175 percent, with Indian and Israeli companies beginning to co-produce a cluster of weapons, from Israeli semi-automatics, to combat drones in Indian factories.
Nonetheless, to Machold, Israeli security consultants decried Indians as more committed to amassing technology and gadgetry rather than to developing their wider systems of security.
On the other hand, Mumbai officials appeared to delight in fashioning their stubbornness as an indicator that India would chart its own unique path on the world stage.
In this way, the book expertly weaves together different and sometimes contradictory threads that comprise the Israeli colonial enterprise as well as India’s self-image that sees itself as the keeper of its own exceptional identity on the world stage.
As a "great civilisation" with a "glorious past" or as a Vishwaguru (or global teacher), it would pick and choose its level of commitment to western methods.
Neither Israeli nor Indian commentators appeared to reflect on the systemic violence of each respective state as the source of its collective insecurity.
Instead, both Israeli and Indian officials appear to reinforce Zionist and Hindutva mythology that cast both nations as remarkable, ingenious homelands, uniquely besieged by everyone other than themselves.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/fabricating-homeland-security-israel-india-book-review
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:44
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