PM Modi steers through the Gaza war

Ever since he led the BJP towards winning a second term in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been confronting crisis upon crisis, none of which is his or India’s responsibility. In the initial weeks of 2020, the Covid-19 virus that had been developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with the active involvement of not just Chinese doctors but US physicians and funding as well, had spread across the world. Should a Republican take up residence in the White House in 2025, there is a possibility that those in the US who are culpable of assisting the WIV in such life-threatening research will be held to account, but thus far, such accountability has yet to take place. Despite an attitude of not just indifference but hostility by the WHO, especially in the clearing of some of the vaccines made in India, production was boosted to a level that enabled the Vaccine Maitri program to grow wings, thereby ensuring that India played a crucial role in mitigating the impact of the virus in populations located in the Global South. As a consequence of the record-breaking vaccination drive and the start of herd immunity in India, 2021 went by without the need for a national lockdown, nor a vaccine mandate. Just when matters appeared to be settling down in a favourable direction, the Russian Federation ordered what the Kremlin believed to be a pre-emptive strike on Ukraine, given that intelligence inputs indicated that the Ukrainian military was planning to re-occupy the eastern parts of Ukraine and Crimea that had been removed from the control of Kiev in 2014 as a consequence of kinetic measures taken by the Russian Federation. As a consequence of NATO sensing an opportunity to rapidly humiliate Russia by defeating its armies and ancillaries in eastern Ukraine, not just an unending stream of weapons from NATO member states but a sanctions regime targeting Russia was put in place that caused global dislocation in both financial as well as logistical terms. Inflation soared as grain and fertiliser supplies were significantly cut off from Ukraine and Russia. Through measures such as ensuring an increased supply of lower cost Russian oil and gas, Prime Minister Modi weathered the storm and held his ground when efforts were made to persuade India to join with countries that had cut themselves off from Russian resources.
The year of India’s Presidency of the G20, is also when the simmering tensions between Israel and Hamas, the extremist organisation that seized control of the Gaza strip in 2005, have again burst into combat. The spark was a terror attack launched by Hamas on the border of Gaza and Israel on 7 October, in which civilians were brutalised, killed and kidnapped on a scale not seen by the Jewish people since the 1940s. Just as there was a party in Europe in the 20th century that made no secret of its desire to extinguish the Jewish population, Hamas in its charter has made clear that its objective is to wipe Israel off the map, together with a goodly chunk of the Jewish population living in the country that was once and has since 1948 again become the homeland of the Jewish people.
Were Israel not to succeed in eliminating Hamas, terror groups across the world would get emboldened, with Europe being the primary target. There are pools of Hamas sympathisers across Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic as well, and they would spring into action were the Israel Defense Forces to fail in eliminating the Hamas leadership and destroying the military capability of the organisation. Prime Minister Modi, cognizant of the stakes involved in the conflict, has backed Israel’s right to defend its people against a terror machine. Hamas is seeking to cloak itself in the garb of the Palestinian people, but it does not represent them at all, a fact understood clearly by PM Modi, ably assisted by EAM Jaishankar. The people of Gaza need to be liberated from the control of Hamas, which has committed atrocities on them for several years in the manner that it is now doing on Israeli citizens. Once rid of the terror machine sheltering in their midst, the Palestinian people have the capability to build a country that would be among the most peaceful and prosperous in the world, such is the exceptional quality of the Palestinian community. India will be there to help them, as our country has since 1948.
MDN