The Wire, 27/Jun/2025
The genocidaires of the past gave no food packets; they only killed. Trump and Netanyahu do both at once.
Palestinians inspect the damage at a school used as a shelter by displaced residents that was hit by Israeli military strike and killed at least 36 people, in Gaza City, on Monday, May 26, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI
You just may have noticed that a new ingenious modality of mass murder has been in operation in Gaza.
Call it game-hunting, safari style.
Recall how when some royals used to be taken on a tiger shoot, a bait would be tied to a tree so a big cat could be drawn to it for the dignitaryโs convenient aim.
So now, dangerously famished Palestinian children, women, old folk on spindly legs are got the better of by being drawn to the bait where ostensibly benevolent patrons are ready to hand out food packets.
As soon as they rush to the bait, the guns blaze. As most are eliminated, some manage to grab a packet or two, proving to the world how the scheme remains such a success at both ends โ some get to eat, salving the qualms of those upset at being accused of allowing genocide, others swell the ranks of the dead, facilitating the grand project of ethnic cleansing.
When did the world see so clever a two-timing enterprise?
The genocidaires of the past gave no food packets; they only killed. Trump and Netanyahu do both at once. What could be smarter? And how could anyone object, not that anyone is objecting.
You see, the killings in Gaza are game-hunting; in Ukraine it is people who get killed.
Which brings home another sad reality: Curse me if you will, but as a true follower of the Sanatan Dharma, I have been having trouble reconciling Dharma with ethical indifference to the mass murder of a whole innocent population.
Nothing is closer in exclusionary genius to Hindutva than Zionism
I am unable to swallow the trick that my noble nationโs so-noble government played in the United Nations General Assembly.
Where 149 countries voted in favour of demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and the resumption of humanitarian aid operated by the United Nations, Naya Bharat abstained from voting.
Perhaps we were setting up an example of how to eat the cake and have it too: after all, nothing is closer in exclusionary genius to Hindutva than Zionism, and nobody more consequential for ensuring Viksit Bharat than Trump, Musk, the Pentagon, Silicon Valley etc.
So, at one canny stroke of turning our face away from genocide, we accomplished the feat of not annoying either of our pals, not knowing how badly this Trump fellow would behave subsequently.
But these are risks great governments have to take in the larger national interest. After all, as Vishwa Guru, the worst we can do is to take sides.
Then, did we not also abandon our so-close friends in the SCO by abstaining there as well when the organisation to which India belongs issued a statement condemning Israel for attacking Iran?
Nobody may thus accuse us of inconsistency in our extraordinary foreign policy towards the comity of nations.
Now that I am arguing the case, I say mea culpa for not being able to square these cunning decisions with my Sanatana Dharma.
So, give me time and I will follow the leader whose finesse in these matters I have thus far been too incapable of absorbing.
In the meanwhile, the Mecca/Medina Islamic world more than matches us in their brand of sagacious cynicism towards the game-hunt in Gaza.
Also Read: If Trump Turns Tyrant, Can Others Be Far Behind?
As to the fussy International Criminal Court, their warrant of arrest against the conqueror of Palestine and the elimination of innocents remains a residual pinprick from a queasy but defeated world that no longer exists.
Why these judges and prosecutors in the Hague should be receiving either the worldโs attention or their salaries from honest tax-payers is a conundrum that may also be up for resolution should Trump and Netanyahu go from strength to strength, should the grand nations of Europe continue to behave with customary sophistication, and should rising stars like Narendra Modi show the way to moral fusspots whose understanding of great events and great ideas remains atavistic.
So help us god, and so may the Palestinian lambs-to-the-slaughter know that they serve a noble and mighty purpose in their canonical sacrifice.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
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