Uncommon Session in London

This time I write first about a House of Commons session that I hadn’t quite expected and then, in a round-up, touch briefly on three things: bids in India to restrict voting, a new US policy against opining on the fairness of elections elsewhere, and continuing risks in the India-Pakistan relationship. 

Watching on BBC the Q & A session in the House of Commons about Gaza and Palestine did my spirits a lot of good. I didn’t count the number of MPs who asked Foreign Secretary David Lammy questions about the UK government’s response to the escalating inhumanity the world has been witnessing, but the genuineness of their inquiries was not the only thing that struck me. 

The fact that the UK and 27 other nations, including France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, and Australia, had finally come together and condemned Israel for killing starving children lining up in Gaza for packets of food was the context for this July 21 discussion in the House of Commons. In their joint statement, the foreign ministers of these countries said that “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.” They spoke of “the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” 

“THIS IS TOO MUCH” 

The UK MPs participating in the session seemed to come from almost every party and spoke in a variety of regional accents. In skin-color and apparent age, too, they formed a broad spectrum. Each MP’s utterance was brief. Almost everyone said they were speaking on behalf of their constituents, with some MPs reading from what constituents had written. 

“This is too much.”  “The British government must do more to get the killings to stop.” “When will Britain recognize Palestine as a state?” “Military aid to Israel should end.” Such were the dominant remarks. Lammy either agreed with what the MPs said in their questions, or he expressed “total understanding” of the MPs’ feelings. Interestingly, however, he suggested that the ball was not with him or his government. Netanyahu and/or Trump possessed it, he implied. 

Lammy hinted that maybe towards the end of this month, when, he said, the current session of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, was due to end, Netanyahu would agree to a ceasefire. That would be ten whole days after his answers to MPs. When dozens of hungry children get killed within an hour, “ten whole days” feels like eternity. Still, we should not underestimate what the horrors of Gaza seem to have done to the minds of people everywhere. 

The world was no doubt impressed by Israel’s prowess, by its refusal to be daunted by an unfriendly neighborhood, by its “iron dome,” by its intelligence network, by its ability to kill individual “enemies” in countries opposed to it. And so on. 

However, messages entering the world’s eyes and ears reach more than the brain. They reach the conscience too. What I saw during the House of Commons discussion looked like humanity’s hurt conscience manifesting itself. Thank you, House of Commons! 

Lammy, I should point out, was in a tough spot. His personal conscience, too, was almost visibly alive. Much of him appeared to be in complete agreement with MPs deeply disappointed with his government’s unwillingness to be firmer with Israel and franker with Trump. Moreover, Lammy seemed lonely. Usually, a minister fenced in by questioning MPs has several ministerial colleagues sitting next to him and offering support. Lammy only had one at his side, and that one’s body language didn’t offer wholehearted backing. 

MASS EXPULSION 

Going beyond Gaza, some MPs pointed to actions by well-armed Israeli settlers in illegal occupation of Palestinian land on the West Bank against unarmed Palestinians owning that land. Perhaps I am seeing what I want to see rather than what’s actually happening. I sense some awakening (at last!) in the western world to the repeatedly declared plan of influential Israelis (a plan from which Netanyahu has not dissented) under which Palestinians must vacate all of Gaza and all of the West Bank (where they should go is never stated) and allow Greater Israel to occupy all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. 

The unrelenting growth of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank has been accompanied by forcible diversion of water into the settlements. Two years ago, the courageous Israeli NGO, B’Tselem, reported sharp disparities in water access within the West Bank between Palestinians and Israelis. Whereas nearly all residents of Israel and Israeli settlements had running water every day, only 36% of West Bank Palestinians did, the report said. 

Today that percentage would be a good deal lower than 36. 

If my reading is correct, a reading strengthened by the House of Commons discussion of July 21, a majority of the people of Europe and also of the U.S. are now strongly opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from lands where their ancestors have lived for centuries. As several UK MPs suggested, a practical step towards preventing that inhuman exercise would be for Britain and countries in Europe to formally recognize the state of Palestine, something that 147 countries, comprising the great bulk of our planet, have already done. 

INDIA’S SILENCE 

India was one of the first to do so, but the anti-Muslim thrust of the government that has been running India from 2014 has turned New Delhi into one of the few capitals unwilling to deplore the happenings in Gaza and the West Bank. South Africa and most of the rest of Africa, Brazil and the rest of Latin America, China, Japan, and the rest of Asia are all willing to speak out, but India, once a champion of human rights regardless of race or creed, is silent.

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Opposition parties in India are charging that the state governments of Bihar and Assam, aided by the inaction or partisanship of the supposedly independent Election Commission of India, are disenfranchising millions of voters under the pretense of ensuring that “illegal migrants” do not vote. Unless they provide various “proofs” of citizenship, large numbers of men and women, mostly either Muslim or Dalit, will not be allowed to vote even if they possess Voter IDs from earlier elections. Some of the new “proofs” being demanded are impossible for people at the lowest rungs of India’s economic and social ladder to produce. 

Elections are only a few months away in Bihar and Assam. In Assam, the question of voting lists has an additional dimension, a linguistic one. Many of the state’s voters, Hindu and Muslim, speak Bengali or “Bangla,” as the language is called by its speakers, rather than Assam’s chief language, which is Assamese (or Asamiya or Axomiya, as locals might prefer). 

Millions of Indian citizens living in West Bengal and other states in eastern India also speak Bangla. Moreover, Bangla is the language spoken by almost everyone living in Bangladesh, which has a population today of 176 million. A form of Bangla is also spoken by the Rohingyas who after expulsion from Myanmar found refuge in India. Their numbers are not large. The vast majority of Rohingya refugees are elsewhere, mostly in Bangladesh. 

Those determined to shrink the rights of India’s Muslim minority, including the right to vote, seem to insist that any Muslim anywhere in India who speaks a form of Bangla must prove with impossible-to-produce documents that her or his ancestors were Indian citizens. 

On July 21 the Indian Express wrote an editorial critical of the drive in Assam: 

“With assembly elections less than a year away, the Assam government’s campaign against purported outsiders in the state has gained political urgency. But electoral arithmetic must not override constitutional responsibility and due process. If the aim is environmental or administrative correction, it must be carried out without inflammatory rhetoric or partisan action, and with a commitment to transparency. It means building trust, offering rehabilitation, and recognising that the rights to shelter, belonging and dignity are fundamental. When the state trades empathy for political expediency, it is the notion of justice that gets bulldozed.” 

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RUBIO’S DIRECTIVE 

Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has asked American diplomats and consuls to be cautious while commenting on the fairness of elections elsewhere. A New York Times story by Michael Crowley and Julian E. Barnes reports: 

“In an official cable to diplomatic and consular posts on Thursday, Mr. Rubio said that public comments on foreign elections ‘should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.’ 

“Such messages,” the agency memo added, “should avoid opining on the fairness or integrity of an electoral process, its legitimacy, or the democratic values of the country in question.” 

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I am not jumping with relief at news that India is building a new ICBM that can carry a heavy conventional warhead. According to the influential weekly India Today, the projected new missile variant will be “capable of carrying a massive 7500-kilogram bunker-buster warhead.” 

The idea apparently is to develop a missile that can do what American bombers did to underground facilities in Iran. Commenting in Dawn, Rabia Akhtar, evidently a Pakistani defense expert, writes: “If Pakistan believes India can snatch away its nuclear sword in a sudden strike, Pakistan’s incentive to use that sword early, before it is lost, increases dramatically.”