Film stars and other activists in India challenge Israel ties

A ray of hope. That's how many in India are seeing the recent cancellation of an Israeli film festival here at home. The event was to be held at Mumbai's National Museum of Indian Cinema earlier this month, but was scrapped by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) due to pushback from the public.

A collective statement was issued by over 1,000 film stars, directors, activists and citizens who objected to the programming of the Israel Film Festival, as the genocide in Gaza has continued now for 11 months, with 40,000 killed - including over 15,000 children.

The distinct signatories include Indian actors Nasiruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, and human rights lawyer Mihir Desai.

In the statement, they said the event "is shamefully taking place at a time when the entire world is witnessing Israeli war crimes (in Gaza)… the genocide is happening in real time, and the entire world is witnessing this inhuman criminal monstrosity, as we watch in horror on our mobile devices and TV screens."

Why did the NFDC even organise such an event showcasing Israel, at an hour when the world is divided over the Palestine cause, with Palestinians suffering the worst war crimes?

The simplest answer would be because it is a state-backed agency. And with the current strengthening of relations between India and Israel, an event like this would be in tandem with the tone of our government.

In recent years, India and Israel have become stronger economic partners. They have been trading in arms and since October, India has even agreed to send tens of thousands of workers to Israel to plug their labour shortage.

But the NFDC's decision to host an Israel film festival go beyond India's economic ties with Israel. To understand in depth, we need to learn more about the complexity of India's state-run film entity.

Looking back

The NFDC and its predecessor the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) were created to support alternative cinema that critiques society, norms, and acting as a carrier for depicting change. But the entity is also tasked with keeping up with the politics of the times, by highlighting government achievements or sometimes helping the image-building of political leaders like former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

An example of this would be the 1976 film, Manthan or The Churning, about the dairy industrial revolution in India. It showed development politics from a socialist perspective, largely reflecting on the success of government schemes.

For Gandhi, the film was an opportunity for a facelift, an improved public image as she called off the Emergency in 1977. The image-building exercise continued when Gandhi returned as premier in 1980 and authorised the government, through the NFDC, to give $6.5 million to help fund a $22 million Gandhi biopic, said historian Rochona Majumdar.

"Never had the Indian state paid such a gigantic sum for a single film," Majumdar added in her book Art Cinema and India's Forgotten Futures – Film and History in the Postcolony. "Financing Gandhi, a global film with an international cast and an epic feel, was an effort to undo some of that damage" caused by the Emergency.

Majumdar added that the film's "resounding success in the Academy Awards validated the Indian government's stance toward film funding, especially since the NFDC received a third of the film's global profits."

Needless to say, political facelifts were connected to such decisions and NFDC played along.

In this light, hosting a weekend festival of Israeli films doesn't seem out of place – after all, the NFDC had always toed the political line, often subtly. What is remarkable is the pushback it faced from civil society in these broken times, enough so that it felt compelled to call off the festival.

But India wasn't always pro-Israel.

India - early Palestine supporter

Until Prime Minister Narendra Modi's historic visit to Israel in 2017, India had been a supporter of the Palestinian cause, originally and historically.

Jawaharlal Nehru, long before he became the first Prime Minister of India, once stated in 1936, "The problem of Palestine is thus essentially a nationalist one — a people struggling for independence against imperialist control and exploitation… It is not a racial or religious one."

Mahatma Gandhi, the civil rights leader, held his views on Palestine, "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France to the French."

These thoughts paved the way for India's relationship with Palestine.

As India's freedom struggle against British imperialism mounted in the late 1940s, its political stand towards Palestine only cemented.

During Israel’s entry to the United Nations in 1949, Nehru voted against the partition of Palestine and Israel. Jump cut to Indira Gandhi's era (1966-1977).

She continued the country's solidarity position and was the first head of the state to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), in 1974. She also converted the PLO office into an embassy in New Delhi and bestowed all the diplomatic facilities that any embassy would have.

The PLO chief Yaser Arafat visited India more than once during Indira Gandhi's tenure. An ever-smiling Arafat with black and white keffiyeh around his collar and the prime minister in her elegant sarees featured in national media whenever the leaders met.

In 1981, India released a one-rupee commemorative postal stamp with tiny impressions of flags of India and Palestine. In 1983, a year before Gandhi was assassinated, India hosted a Non-Aligned Movement summit where she professed her support for Palestine yet again.

Gandhi's stance towards Palestine was well thought of by way of foreign policy, but it also reflected a continuity of Nehru's secular, socialist thoughts.

This continuum of Palestinian support can be seen today amongst a handful of Indian parliamentarians. Last week, a delegation from Istanbul visited them in hopes of encouraging the Modi government to change its stance on Israeli occupation.

A friend to Israel

India's legacy of pro-Arab policies changed after it established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992, by opening an embassy in Tel Aviv.

At the time, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao's government fostered this bilateral relationship due to shared concerns about security threats, terrorism and common agendas like education and tourism.

The same year the growing far-right nationalist ideology at home would see its first victory, when in December, a mob demolished the historic Babri Masjid.

In the next decade, the India-Israel relationship firmed up with the latter supplying ammunition to India in the Kargil War - a brief conflict between India and Pakistan that took place from May to July 1999 in the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir and along the Line of Control (LoC).

After the demolition of Babri Masjid, popular cinema in India took a sharp turn towards jingoistic, historically incorrect storylines like Bombay (1995), Sarfarosh (1999), and Refugee (2000). The NFDC however continued its pursuit of purposeful cinema which historian Majumdar refers to as "good" cinema "whose foremost commitment was to uplift the Indian people."

Profit over social conscience Yet the productions increasingly became less incisive, distant from its original purpose with the changing political milieu. To that India was opening to globalisation.

The films backed by the organisation, like 27 Down (1974) a tale of dysfunctional middle class families, Garam Hawa (1977) a story set at the backdrop of Partition, and Anatarjali Yatra (1997) a look at the Brahminical practice of polygamy, caste and prohibition of remarriage of widows - were limited to a niche audience.

The common moviegoer however had no interest in these films nor cared much about retaining this cinematic culture as a source of deeper engagement with "real" India and its complex layers.

Also, the NFDC realised the importance of profit and launched "Cinemas of India" in an attempt to make money by creating a wider outreach of its older films produced in the 1980s. By then its original mandate of producing socially-conscious cinema was deprioritised.

And once the ultra-nationalist BJP government came to power for a second term in 2019, it restructured all the major public service film agencies / institutions of the country, including the NFDC which now functions as an umbrella organisation.

In the post-emergency era, Indira Gandhi's liberal policies and the free hand given to making independent cinema that criticises the establishment worked well.

Certainly, the cancellation of the Israeli film festival is a small win, when Bollywood, the second largest film industry in the world, has persistently been in denial about the Palestinian cause and the ongoing genocide.