Israel, a key poll issue in Kerala

Wednesday, Apr 08, 2009

R. Krishnakumar


Thiruvananthapuram: Israel is the spice of this election season and a subject close to the heart of politicians in Kerala. Nearly 27 per cent of the State’s population is Muslim and the people, especially in the Muslim-dominated northern districts, have a long history of association with the Arab world and sympathy to the Palestinian cause.
India’s growing ties with Israel, especially the Indo-Israel missile deal signed a few days before the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections, have become an embarrassment for the Congress and the Muslim League in Kerala, partners in the UPA Government at the Centre as well as the Opposition United Democratic Front (UDF) in the State.
Therefore, no sooner was the former UN Under Secretary-General and author Shashi Tharoor declared the Congress candidate in Thiruvananthapuram, than an article he wrote in January in the context of the Mumbai terror attacks for Project Syndicate (which distributed it to over a hundred newspapers around the world) came in handy for the ruling CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the anti-League Muslim fringe parties in Kerala to beat the Congress and the Muslim League with.
As it appeared several days later in an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the article was titled “India’s Israel Envy”, and very soon was being read in India in the context of Israel’s action in Gaza. Mr Tharoor has since been trying to explain that “it was not his title,” that the article was “not about Israel,” and that he had only been trying to tell those in India who were arguing for such an Indian strike in Pakistan that “we are not Israel and we should not do what Israel has done.”
In an interview to Business Line (excerpts of which were published on March 31), Mr Tharoor said: “Within a week of the article appearing in Israel and so on, a number of my Arab and Muslim friends said, look, ‘you have opened yourself up to a misunderstanding.’ Therefore, in my monthly printed column, I issued a statement saying that it was a misunderstanding and it was not on purpose. It has taught me a lesson as a writer not to write on something that was an ongoing situation when the situation itself was likely to evolve beyond the ordinary. So that is the one mistake for which I am willing to apologise.”
But the damage was done and the issue snowballed into a major controversy, threatening the fortunes of not just Mr Tharoor in Thiruvananthapuram but of many UDF candidates. Some fringe Muslim groups, with pockets of influence in many districts, have since declared support to UDF candidates in many constituencies, but not to Mr Tharoor.
Many anti-League parties such as Abdul Nasir Maudany’s PDP have, along with the CPI(M) and the LDF, launched a campaign in Kerala to expose what they term the Congress and the Muslim League’s fondness for Israel.
On March 28, the CPI(M) also sought to bring the air defence missile deal that India has signed with the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) into the centre-stage of the Kerala election scene while demanding a CBI inquiry into the alleged kickbacks involved in the form of “business charges totalling Rs 600 crore.”
Missile deal
The targets of these allegations were obvious and the Defence Minister, Mr A. K. Antony, flew down on April 3 to launch his election campaign and reply to these allegations. Mr Antony said the deal was transparent and a result of talks going on since 2002; that it had been approved at several levels including finally by the Cabinet Security Committee and that it contained an integrity clause that allowed any future government to take stringent action, including legal, to recover the cost and debar the company from any future transactions for a period.
But Mr Antony has left too many questions unanswered, including why India signed the deal with the same company involved earlier in the Barak missile deal corruption scandal (during the NDA rule), as the CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Mr Sitaram Yechury, pointed out here on Monday.
With ten days to go for the April 16 polling in Kerala, Israel has become a key campaign issue in all the 20 constituencies of the State, with the LDF leaders explaining the implications of India’s huge Defence purchases from Israel on the Palestinian people, how Israel had been benefiting economically from India and how, therefore, India was also becoming responsible for the killings of Palestinians by Israel.
But the Opposition UDF is countering these charges, saying the missile deal has been brought up by the CPI(M) merely to divert attention from the SNC-Lavalin corruption case, which is now before the Kerala High Court, with the CPI(M) State secretary, Mr Pinarayi Vijayan, as one of the accused. (The case relates to the award of contract for the rehabilitation and modernisation of three hydro-electric projects in Kerala in the mid-1990s.)
“The CPI(M) is raising the allegation against the missile deal because the UDF had already made the Lavalin case a major election issue in Kerala,” the Opposition Leader, Mr Oommen Chandy, said a few days earlier in Kozhikode.
             Tough election for LDF
The prospects do not appear as rosy for the LDF in Kerala this time as they were in 2004 and the CPI(M)-led coalition is engaged in a tough contest in almost all the 20 constituencies in Kerala, where a significant factor that would decide the fortunes of the two Fronts is the mind of the minorities.
      Even though the Indian Union Muslim League often claims to be the representative of all Muslims in India, it has so far remained only as a party of the Muslims of Kerala. Yet, ever since the Muslim majority Malappuram district was established by a Communist government in 1969, the Muslim League had managed to have two representatives in Parliament, from the two constituencies in the district, Ponnani and Manjeri (now renamed Malappuram after the delimitation exercise).
   But that tradition was broken in 2004, with Manjeri voting for a Muslim candidate fielded by the CPI(M) instead.
It was an election in which all the 17 Congress candidates who contested from Kerala lost and the UDF had, therefore, only one representative in the last Lok Sabha — the IUML’s Mr E. Ahmed. Winning from the only other remaining League stronghold, Ponnani, he went on to become the Minister of State for External Affairs in the Manmohan Singh Government.
In this election, the CPI(M) is bent on breaking the monopoly of the Muslim League in Ponnani as well, the last remaining League bastion, and defeating Mr Ahmed in Malappuram too, with the support of the PDP and other anti-League forces.
There is also a sizeable section among the population in the 20 constituencies which considers Saddam Hussein a hero, George Bush a villain and Israel the arch enemy of the people of the Muslim world. Hence, the unlikely focus on Israel as a mobilisation strategy in Kerala.
IMPORTANT LINK

Envoy: Israel 100% with India on terror

June 30: Israel’s ambassador to India Mark Sofer on Wednesday said his country is “100 per cent behind India in its fight against terrorism on the Kashmir issue, regardless of India’s stand on the Palestine conflict.”

He said India was an enormously respected international player whose goals for peace in West Asia both Israel and Palestine shared, even as he denounced Iran’s Ahmedinejad as a “Hitlerite who wants to eradicate Israel” and Pakistan as the “last country that should lecture to us on human rights”.

Mr Sofer was in Bengaluru to meet Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa to discuss opportunities for growing Israeli investment in Bengaluru’s high tech industry as well as in other sectors, such as agriculture, across Karnataka.
India-Israel trade has grown from $180 million in 2001 to $4.1 billion, excluding the burgeoning defence trade, and the two countries have now started talks on a Free Trade Agreement


important link

'There is harmony of interests between India and Israel'

    Though India formally recognised Israel in 1950, New Delhi’s stand on Palestine and its traditional ties with Arab world stopped it from having full diplomatic ties with the Zionist state till early 1990s. However, over a period of time, pragmatism prevailed over moral dilemma and the two countries established official diplomatic relations on Jan 29, 1992. In an interview, ambassador Mark Sofer, Israel’s envoy to India, tells Anirban Bhaumik of Deccan Herald how the relation between the two countries grew in a relatively short period of time and resulted in cooperation in almost all sectors. Excerpts:

    How do you view the India-Israel relation? What are the next milestones the two countries are expected to reach in their efforts to boost bilateral ties?
     Well, in just 18 years, Israel-India relations has seen a huge upturn and become truly multi-faceted. We have made significant progress both in political level interactions, as well as in every sphere of cooperation like trade, investment, defence, science and technology and agriculture. There is now much harmony of interests between India and Israel as the two governments strive for development and welfare of their people. We have a number of projects in the pipeline. We have just launched negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement. Israel has lots of respect for India, not only because we appreciate this great country’s efforts for development with its billion plus population and its success stories in an extremely difficult situation, but also because there has not been any anti-Semitic incident in the long history of Jewish presence in this country.
Could you give us a brief overview of the economic relations between Israel and India?
    Indications are that the Israel-India bilateral trade would triple in the next 3 to 4 years after we sign the FTA. I hope the quantum of bilateral trade would reach somewhere in the region of $12 billion, which was un-dreamt of till recently. Israeli private investment in India is estimated at around $3 to 4 billion and spread over sectors like dairy firms, medical equipment, real estate, and also in IT and high-tech industry in Bangalore. Israel’s high tech industry association recently signed a collaboration agreement with three leading high tech associations of India. It looks very promising.
  How does Israel view India’s response to the Nov 26, 2008, terrorist attacks in Mumbai and other such incidents?
     We stand 100 per cent by the Indian government in its fight against terrorism emanating from outside. The 26/11 is just one example of the atrocities that India and Israel are subjected to. India is a highly responsible country and it knows very well how to deal with the situation and I should not comment on that. There are no two international situations which are identical, certainly not the situations in South Asia and West Asia. But both India and Israel are struggling to achieve peace in their respective neighbourhoods and both believe that peace — in South Asia or West Asia — cannot be achieved through military means and there must be political solutions based on compromise. We completely stand behind India on its position on the issue of Kashmir and on its position vis-à-vis Pakistan. We are completely supportive of India.
    Could you tell us about India-Israel counter-terrorism cooperation as well as ties in sectors like defence, agriculture and science and technology?
   Well, I believe that issues of counter-terrorism and defence cooperation should remain out of the public domain. Agriculture, however, is an area where I can see significant prospects of bilateral cooperation. We are setting up centres of excellence together with our Indian counterparts in Haryana, with focus on horticulture and floriculture. In Rajasthan, we are also cooperating in the field of crop management and proper utilisation of water for agriculture in semi-arid zones. I strongly believe that together we could make the desert bloom. We are cooperating in post-harvest production of mango in Maharashtra, particularly to increase the shelf-life of the fruit and thus augment the income of the farmers. We are now also in Tamil Nadu. We have brought over an agriculture attaché to India and we are planning to augment this office. We are planning to set up a joint mathematics institute somewhere in India. We are also focusing on interactions and collaboration among Israeli and Indian universities, other academic institutes and research centres.
   How does Israel view the situation in the region, particularly the move to reintegrate and reconcile with the so-called good Taliban in Afghanistan?
   Like India, Israel too believes that there cannot be a good Taliban and a bad Taliban, or a good Lashkar-e-Toiba and a bad Lashkar-e-Toiba, or, for that matter, a good Hamas and a bad Hamas. Some of the terrorist organisations try to identify themselves as charities, but we all have seen how charitable they have been, be it in Mumbai or Bangalore or Pune. We, in Israel, believe that the way to move forward is to find the pragmatists to work with to resolve the conflict in West Asia.
   Do you think New Delhi’s stand on Palestine issue continues to be an irritant in the bilateral relations between India and Israel?
    Our relation has matured to such an extent that words like irritant are probably out of place. We talk to each other, we explain to each other. Sometimes we agree and sometimes we don’t agree. India has been supportive of the peace process in West Asia. As far as the process to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict is concerned, I think we all agree on what should be the outcome of it — a state of Israel at peace with a state of Palestine free of terror.
important link