LAST SATURDAY IN NEW DELHI’S NEHRU PLACE MARKET, a peaceful demonstration of Indian citizens' solidarity with Palestine in the ongoing genocide by Israel turned violent as a mob of nearly two hundred people surrounded the group and began attacking them, eventually requiring the police to extract them to avoid a riot or stampede.
The demonstration began at around 12:00 PM, with a hundred or so participants gathered there, holding placards and pamphlets protesting India's supply of arms and labour to the Israel government. But before the public—which had quickly gathered around the demonstration—could even understand what was being protested, an altercation with the police personnel who, according to officers, had arrived there for security, caused the day to take a turn for the worse.
Role of Delhi Police
"We hadn't been informed earlier," an officer from the Kalkaji police station told The Leaflet, citing the lack of prior permission or 'bandobast' as the primary cause for the situation getting out of hand, though the previous year, detentions were carried out at a similar protest despite these permissions.
"If [the protesting activists] had taken official permission, we would have made arrangements for security. We only arrived after we received a call from a local shopkeeper reporting suspicious activity. We can't protect you from a crowd like this without a significant force being deployed," he added.
Members of the assaulted group, however, disagreed.
"It was the police's arrival that instigated the mob in the first place," said Paran Amitava, a researcher of public health and an organiser of the event. "It is possible that if the police hadn't begun interrogating us ,people wouldn't have got so angry and so agitated in the first place," she said, adding that they hadn't even begun to explain why they were there to the public in any way before the police arrived.
"Before they showed up and started questioning [our right to be there], the crowd was peaceful, viewing pamphlets and observing quietly,” Amitava explained, “No one said anything to us. It is the police who first began screaming at us and asking us to leave… What message will the crowd take if not that they too can and should do the same?"
Whatever the trigger was, within minutes of the police's questioning, a crowd of nearly a thousand people had assembled all across the Nehru Place market, lining the balconies and floor complex as a mob of right-wing, Hindu nationalist protestors began chanting communal slogans and cornering the protesting group. The mob, consisting of mostly young to middle-aged Hindu men, yelled things like, 'Jai Shri Ram!' and 'Bharat Mata ki Jai!' alongside vapid slurs such as 'Gaza ka ban gaya bhaja', 'Go back to Bangladesh!', 'Go back to Pakistan!' and 'Philistine Murdabad!'
"It was the police's arrival that instigated the mob in the first place," said Paran Amitava, a researcher of public health and an organiser of the event.
Criminalisation of the protest
Initially having a hundred registered attendants present, the group quickly shrunk down to a core team of 15–30 individuals—mostly consisting of women and the elderly—as the rest abandoned their flags and placards for fear of police detention.
Economist Jean Dreze, retired DU professor Nandita Narain, and former IAS officer Harsh Mander were all part of the small team along with the artists, students, activists and civil society members who had organised the silent demonstration, and were quickly engulfed by the growing mob.
"A few young men were laughing and trying to snatch the Palestinian flags from us, specifically targeting women," said a young participant who wished to remain anonymous. "I managed to hold on to mine, but there was an older woman with us, whose hand was already injured, and they were attacking her with such ferocity we eventually had to convince her to let go of the flag, and she lost her wrist brace with it." When asked if she had been hurt, she reflected on the sorrow of not having been able to protect the flag.
"There were nearly a thousand people there. This was a mob that physically pushed what were hardly 20-25 of us, most of us women—some quite old—out of the market complex," Amitava told Bebaak Bhasha. "What exactly did we do to necessitate this?"
Forced nationalisation
In Modi's India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot noted, based on interviews across the country, that the Modi government has "moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation."
Due to the short time frame in which things escalated, few people in the crowd at Nehru Place on Saturday had a concrete idea of what or who was being fought and why. The increased sensitivity of nationalist matters in the present social milieu meant that critique of the Indian government, added to the idea of defending a Muslim majority people, immediately translated to an attack on India itself.
"We are Indians!," I could see a man screaming at a woman protester who was holding the Palestinian flag in one hand, and a banner in another that read simply, 'ceasefire now.'
"Not one person who came to me knew what we were protesting. Someone came to me and said, 'look they are waving Pakistan's flag'," said Anjali S, a researcher and organiser of the event, part of the collective called Indians for Palestine.
"There are images circulating of men holding the Indian flag against our team holding Palestine's flag," she said, condemning the portrayal of the assailants as 'counterprotesters' fighting for India in the mainstream and right-wing media. "That was our flag," she clarified.
"We brought those flags, not them. We were holding the Indian and Palestinian flags together to show solidarity, but they snatched it and waved it against the Palestinian flag. What was 'India with Palestine' became 'India vs Palestine'."
Violence and the common man
The situation escalated so quickly that the police, who were initially threatening the solidarity group with detention, had to physically separate them from the mob. Mud and water were hurled at the activists from the surrounding balconies, a group of men yelled slurs at a Muslim protester, and a local shop set up a sound system to broadcast, "Bharat Mata ki Jai!" & "Jai Shri Ram" over loudspeakers. Some men brought out rods.
"Arey aap isko dharmic mudda mat banaiye. Please don't make this a communal issue. Get away from here, what business do you have here?", Anjali recalled a constable shout at the sloganeering mob, which in the mainstream media is being described as a 'counter-protest'. It is noteworthy that no action was taken, detentions made, or FIR registered against any members of the mob.
"The police in fact said that they would detain us, that they would file an FIR against us,” Anjali told The Leaflet, “All I said at the time was 'okay', because I was genuinely more scared then of the public than of the police. Even [the police] seemed desperate, after a point. I think they hadn't realised that things were so bad.”
In a press note later released by the solidarity group, which consisted of various civil society members, student organisations, and Palestine fundraising collectives, the choice of Nehru Place as the demonstration site was explained as a symbolic one—"an open, public market square frequented by working-class people, students, and office-goers alike."
"It was meant to reclaim democratic space in a city where protest is now virtually criminalised," the note said. But it is this very crowd of ordinary people that turned against them. The 'organic' nature of this violence, said a protester, is what was noteworthy.
Changing landscapes
On August 9, 2024, a similar demonstration was organised by the same collective (and many of the same people) outside the Embassy of Israel in New Delhi. Like the current one, it too was met with state repression; police detained the activists, including Dreze and CPI leader Annie Raja, despite prior intimation. But even then, as Anjali recalls, the public sentiment had not been nearly as volatile, and certainly not as strongly in favour of Israel, as it is now.
"It's much, much worse," she said when asked if the antipathy towards the Palestinian cause had grown stronger. "We have never faced this level of violence in a public place before. Certainly not at the hands of ordinary people like you and me. That's what's really scary."
Over the last year, India's historic foreign policy with Palestine and Israel has shifted drastically away from the anti-colonialist roots of its longstanding view on the conflict. What was once one of the first countries to recognise the Palestinian state upon its declaration of independence in November 1988 has now become a staunch ally of its occupier, politically and ideologically alike.
"India’s support for the Palestinian cause is an integral part of the nation’s foreign policy," says India's Representative Office in the Palestinian state, located in Ramallah since 2003, and which was in fact first opened in Gaza in 1996.
It states:
"India has always played a proactive role in garnering support for the Palestinian cause in multilateral fora. India has consistently supported, co-sponsored, and voted in favour of UN General Assembly Resolutions on issues regarding securing the right to self-determination of Palestinians, peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine and Palestinian refugees’ properties and their revenue."
In 1974, India became the first Non-Arab State to recognise Palestine Liberation Organization (‘PLO’) as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In 1977, late Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee delivered a speech that even today is unmatched in its singular clarity regarding the region's eight decade long conflict: "[It] is clear that the Arab land which Israel is occupying will have to be vacated," he said. "We do not accept that the aggressor should enjoy the fruits of the invasion. So, the rules that apply to us will also apply to others. The land of Arabs should be vacated."
In April 2024, after Israel intensified its occupation in the West Bank and Gaza to genocidal warfare, India voted in favour of the Human Rights Council Resolution on the Right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
Come 2025, this four decade long legacy of solidarity has been lost to the general populace. The enraged public at Nehru Place had no recognition of the Palestinian identity, struggle, or resilience in their fight for existence. But perhaps more worryingly, they had no recognition of India's stake in the matter; of a colonised nation standing with another, who lost their freedom when we found ours.
"Where were you when there was a dispute with Pakistan?" asked a senior constable to a journalist present at the scene. When the journalist responded with India's historical stance on the issue of Palestinian soil, the officer said: "I don't care about Mr. Vajpayee. I only care about my country."
"What they're doing is very wrong," said a few bystanders who chose to stay out of the mob, but still disapproved of the solidarity event. "Israel is our friend. They shouldn't do this."
Trickle down politics
"There was once a time when India stood with Palestine against Israel's brutal occupation," Amitava explained, "The reason [for the changed stance] is really quite simple. The Indian government stands now with [industrialists like] Adani. It is engaged in a massive weapons trade with Israel. The matter is of money."
Over the last decade since the Modi government came to power, India's trade in arms and ammunition with Israel has increased a staggering 33 times from a meagre 5.6 million USD in 2015 to 185 million USD in 2025. Between 2022 and 2023 this figure jumped 120 million USD from 135 to 265 in a single financial year—the same year Israel began its mass killings in occupied Palestine in retaliation for Hamas' October 7 attack.
The change in India's diplomatic relations with the Middle East over the last few years has occurred parallel to a corresponding shift in trade policy. In 1992 under the Narasimha Rao Ministry, during which India opened its Representative Office in Gaza, India's trade with Israel measured at a modest 200 million USD, about a twentieth of the trade with the US. Now, this gap has shrunk by over ten times, with Israel-India trade having expanded to an enormous 6.53 billion USD.
After being detained in the August protest last year, Dreze and Raja pointed out that the complicity of the Indian government with some public and private companies in the Gaza genocide was no hidden secret, “We have heard of Adani Defence and Aerospace Ltd., but there are other culprits as well – Munitions India and Premier Explosive, in addition to the government itself which has approved not just the provision of militarised cargo to Israel but also the shipment of Indian workers to Israel, a move that puts their lives at risk.”
Over the last year, India's historic foreign policy with Palestine and Israel has shifted drastically away from the anti-colonialist roots of its longstanding view on the conflict.
The shipment of workers mentioned refers to yet another trade deal: this time, dealing in human beings. Signed in November 2023, the deal was to ship over 42,000 Indian workers to Israel to work in construction and care, replacing Palestinian labour. 6,000 daily wage labourers from debt-ridden states like Bihar and East UP were flown to Israel during April-May 2024 under the deal, with 10,000 more flown in over the remaining year, which was a subject of controversy at the time for various reasons:
The ongoing Gazan genocide and conflict with Hamas meant that the region was already in a period of militarised conflict at the time, putting the workers' life in risk.
They would be replacing Palestinian workers on Israeli soil, who have historically had low and apartheid status in the country and are exploited due to the extreme poverty in occupied Palestine. As per The Times of Israel, these workers were paid less than half the price paid to imported Indian labourers.
Additionally, Israel was also at the brink of war with Iran at the time, with sufficient threat to life for the Indian government to issue an advisory to citizens not to visit either country at the time this 'shipment' was quietly made.
The upcoming Indian Lok Sabha elections made the matter even more controversial, as the timing of the deal meant that without exceptional circumstances, these migrant workers would lose their vote in the upcoming polls.
The tumultuous history of Indian labour exports, which have been compared to indentured labour migrations and described as a "new system of slavery" also caused ethical and humanitarian concerns to be raised.
Despite strong criticism of the move from trade unions, the deal went through in 2024. Of course, perhaps the most significant way in which ordinary Indians have begun to identify with Israel today, is on the matter of religion.
The sentiment within the general Indian public regarding Israel—rationalising the massacre of 59,000 people in less than two years, silence on 77 years of colonial occupation, settlement, apartheid, and a reluctance to condemn war crimes that have caused the European Union to severely restrict trade with Israel—is not unlike that which it possesses to other Western economies. Specifically, those with which India shares similar trade relations, such as the US, UK or the Netherlands: one of subservience and apologetics.
The difference is that the 6.53 billion dollar relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi hides behind the thin but gargantuan shield of a shared ideology: the planned extermination of Muslims for the creation of a religious ethno–state.
"The language that they were using, their words and phrases… they were parroting the very things we're bombarded with in the mainstream media like 'send them to Pakistan', 'send them to Bangladesh', 'jis thaali mei khaate hai usi thaali mei chhed karte hai', etc.," said Anjali, commenting on how geopolitical perspectives like Zionism and Hindutva alike trickle down into public consciousness from mainstream news outlets, with the corporate funded news becoming part of the state machinery.
The higher judiciary, too, has to some extent participated in enabling a narrative of discouragement around pro-Palestine protests in India. Nearly a week after the Nehru place protests, when Communist Party of India (Marxist) challenged Mumbai police’s denial of permission for a protest against the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a Bombay HC division bench rapped the organisation: “You are looking at Gaza and Palestine while neglecting what’s happening here. Why don’t you do something for your own country? Look at your own country. Be patriots.”
“Wherever we damn please”
After the dust had settled on July 19 in Nehru Place,police officers made a phone call to the Kalkaji police station to bring in a detention van and women police officers: not for any of the assailants who had snatched and destroyed flags and banners belonging to the solidarity group; not for the mob that broke an elderly woman's wrist brace trying to wrangle a flag from her hand; not for those who hurled abuses at young Muslim women and physically shoved 20 odd people to the edge of the road, but for the protestors themselves.
"Let's do one thing," a senior constable said to another surrounded by the young women who led the group. "Let's just leave them to the mob inside. Let's see what happens. Go back inside, why don't you?"
"The demonstration is over. You told us to put the banners and flags inside, and we have,” said Priyadarshini, a coordinator of the event, after an officer asked her and the others to "get out" of there immediately, unless they wanted to be detained, “Now we are just public standing here." The police were clear that the instructions were only for the protestors; bystanders who had watched and egged on the mob had, unlike them, “the right to be there.”
India's foreign policy on Israel, like all matters and characteristics of state, have trickled down not only into to its citizens but also to the executive machinery of the country, creating a chilling effect where rights like that to peaceful assembly, speech and dissent become ceremonial fictions devoid of meaning.
"Let's do one thing," a senior constable said to another surrounded by the young women who led the group. "Let's just leave them to the mob inside.”
"This will not fly in our country," an officer in civil clothes said to an older activist to an officer as she along with all the others were marched into the metro gates and forcibly dispersed.
"We can gather and protest wherever we damn well please," she replied.
"No, you cannot do this anywhere!" the policeman snapped back.
The activist was resolute, indeed aware that in resisting executive abuse in her own country, there was a deeper solidarity with the survivors of an ethnic cleansing thousands of miles away. She made sure her next words were heard, “Yes, we can.”