India’s government supports Macron – but at home neither opposes violence nor defends free speech
In 1942, India’s Jews felt betrayed when Gandhi launched his Quit India Movement. The Jewish community felt that asking the British to quit India at a time when they, along with the Americans, had come to the rescue of Jews who had been persecuted by the Nazis in Germany, Poland and elsewhere in Europe, was insensitive on Gandhi’s part. They regretted the fact that anti-Semitism, which had wreaked havoc in the lives of Jews, meant little to the people of India.
As the Bene Israel poet Nissim Ezekiel said to me while I was writing his biography, Gandhi’s call alienated India’s Jews, comprising the Bene Israel, Cochin and Baghdadi Jews. They ceased to feel that they were a part of the nationalist movement and the freedom struggle, although the Bene Israel community had earlier supported the Congress’s call for swadeshi and the boycott of foreign goods. But they now began to see Indian nationalism as predominantly Hindu nationalism that did not address their concerns.
Poets like Nissim Ezekiel and political thinkers like MN Roy never recovered from the sense of disillusionment that they suffered in the years between 1942 and 1947, when the British finally left India.
Cut to October 2020. A French...
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