Israel–Palestine conflict: Calling freedom fighters ‘terrorists’ is a game India should know well, given its history

India's freedom struggle was no stranger to revolutionaries who used violent methods in their fight against the British, so the country's sympathies should lie with the colonised, not the coloniser, writes Shreya Bansal. 

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INDIA is amongst the handful of countries that have been former colonies that paradoxically continue to support the colonial–apartheid regime of Israel in Palestine even as the genocide enters its second year.

For a country that harbours such strong nationalist sentiments and even to date annually recalls the 200 years of an oppressive regime that Indians were subjected to under various colonial powers, it is profoundly perplexing that segments of our society would extend support to a system of which we ourselves have been a victim.

This raises critical questions: What motivates this support, and does it hold any substantive merit?

From the 1857 Mutiny to the Bhadralok Dacoits in West Bengal, Indian revolutionaries shed their own blood and that of the colonisers in the relentless pursuit of freedom. How, then, can a nation founded on violent resistance fail to recognise the struggles of Gaza in its quest for liberation from the settler-colonialist regime of Israel? This disconnection can only be attributed to a lack of engagement with our own history.