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<b>Devangshu Datta:</b> Imagine Gaza in Delhi

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Devangshu Datta New Delhi
Last Updated : Jul 25 2014 | 11:26 PM IST
The city of Delhi has a population of about 11 million. Imagine a situation where two million Dilliwallahs are herded into a small pocket -say, the Yamuna Pushta (the flood plains on the riverbank). Barbed fences and checkpoints are put up to isolate that pocket. Colour-coded vehicle number plates are issued to keep the people placed there out of the rest of the city.

Even though many of that "concentrated" population are well educated, they are then excluded from white-collar jobs. Anything agricultural from that enclave, such as fruit or edible oils, is passed with deliberate glacial slowness through Customs and excise to ensure spoilage.

In this fictional country, the discrimination is for historical reasons. The "concentrated" belong to an ethnic group, which used to own much of the land. The others (we might call them "the Chosen") have been smarter. So they have taken over most of the land, using a combination of muscle and money power.

There are clear differences between the two populations. They adhere to different religions and speak different languages. They hold ancient grudges. They have been fighting for millennia, if you believe their folk tales. Both sides pay heed to ideologues who calmly advocate genocide.

The murderous intentions may be similar. But there is a massive asymmetry in military capacity. One lot have everything in the way of state-of-the-art modern equipment, including highly capable air force and navy, armoured brigades, mechanised infantry, drones, artillery units and defensive anti-missile shields. On top of that, they control the electricity supply, the water and the telephone communications system of the enclave. They have accurate three-dimensional real-time maps of the enclave. The other lot - the concentrated one - just have small arms, home-made rockets and improvised explosive devices.

When the lot with more military muscle have a go, they cause much more damage. Their assaults regularly take out schools, hospitals and homes in the enclave. The retaliation from the enclave is blocked by efficient anti-missile systems.

The efficiency differential causes a strange public relations problem. As children and civilians die in the enclave, each strike is followed by pictures of "telegenic" corpses doing the rounds of social media. This is awkward. It influences world opinion.

The lot doing most of the damage are, in many respects, good folks. Some of them object to the killing of kids. They hold regular elections; they have a modern constitution and a secular civil rights code; they don't discriminate by gender. They have an outstanding education system and technological-scientific partnerships in all sorts of cutting-edge areas. They would get on perfectly well with the rest of the world, if it only ignored their experiments in attacking civilian populations.

I speak of Israel, of course. It is one of India's largest trading partners. There are Indo-Israeli partnerships (government and private sector) in everything from multiple classified defence research projects to many agricultural science programmes, high-end consumer electronics and biotechnology. Large numbers of Israeli tourists (often rambunctious youngsters just out of the army) wander happily across Goa and Himachal Pradesh - there are Hebrew signs in tourist hotspots.

India kills its own citizens in the Northeast and Kashmir. Israel kills Palestinians in Gaza. Both nations claim to be modern, secular democracies. Both have, over decades, painted themselves into positions where they cannot easily negotiate an end to the violence. It is perfectly possible that these conflicts will continue through the next century.

Geopolitical relationships are built on pragmatism. Few nations have spotless human rights records. Geopolitical friendships don't break up when a friendly nation does something unacceptable to someone else. In extreme circumstances, friends may even publicly censure each other. Remember the European-American difference of opinion on the Iraq invasion?

The attack on Gaza will probably not make the slightest material difference to the strength of the Indo-Israeli relationship. Both sides have invested too much in this. In the circumstances, India's vote at the United Nations Human Rights Council was presumably entirely about domestic compulsions.
Twitter: @devangshudatta

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Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

First Published: Jul 25 2014 | 10:42 PM IST

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