The recent signing of a major defense cooperation treaty between India and Israel has sent shockwaves through the international political scene and has profound implications for South Asia and the Muslim world. Coming at a time when global public opinion has hardened dramatically against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, which many have accused of using disproportionate force and even amounting to genocide, this rapprochement marks a bold step by India into a complicated political minefield.
Diplomacy is a language, and India, throughout its diplomatic history and policy choices, has seen itself as a nation of moral crusaders and spokesperson for the developing world. A central strand of this self-image, and perhaps the most prominent feature of its diplomatic history in South Asia, has been a lengthy and consistent alignment with anti-colonialism, followed by sympathies with freedom struggles and self-determination. India’s Palestine policy for many decades fit neatly within this overarching Indian diplomatic stance, and dovetailed closely with the Indian popular mood and larger South Asian identity.
But in recent years, and more so under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, New Delhi has disavowed this historical orientation to build instead a more strategic, open, and even ideological partnership with Israel.
The roots of the new defense treaty do not lie in a vacuum, of course. This is a formalization of years of deeper military, intelligence, and technology cooperation, carefully crafted in line with shared priorities, including internal security, counterterrorism, national identity, and global power projection. But the more profound political implications of this new, formalized alignment exceed the sum of its specific clauses. They not only impact India’s relations with its neighbors and with the Muslim world, but also with the nearly 200 million Muslims who call India home. This pact also raises a broader question about India’s national identity: what kind of country does India want to be now? Whose side does India want to be on in the great geopolitical struggles of the 21st century? And what does this realignment do to the internal balance of power in South Asia?
A partnership that is much more than meets the eye
On the surface, the India-Israel partnership is one of self-evident synergies. Israel is one of the most advanced arms-producing countries in the world. This nation develops cyber-intelligence suites, drones, missile-defense platforms, and battlefield surveillance technology, all specifically tuned for the conditions and requirements of fighting asymmetrical warfare. India, a rising military power with longstanding territorial disputes and serious internal security challenges of its own, has sought out Israeli high-end military technology and know-how, both for external defense and internal policing, in particular in Kashmir and other flashpoints between the Indian state and Muslim communities.
But this goes deeper than just utility and practicality. The commonality runs deeper and has an important ideological contour. Both states have constructed their national identity through civilizational narratives, Zionism for Israel and Hindutva for the current ruling establishment in India. Both view themselves as majoritarian democracies born of long-standing historical grievances. Both cast their territorial conflicts in existential terms. And both deploy narratives of internal security and external threat to crystallize national unity and majoritarian identity.
This treaty, therefore, is not just an agreement on greater formalized cooperation. It is also an affirmation of a worldview.
Geopolitical Messaging to the Muslim World
The reason this defense pact is especially significant is its timing. In a moment when much of the world is issuing condemnations against Israeli operations in Gaza and the West Bank, India has taken the opposite step, one of publicly signaling strategic intimacy. And when one considers that it is happening right in the middle of a crisis that is very emotional for Muslims across the world, the larger diplomatic messaging becomes clear.
This defense pact signals three things to Muslim-majority countries and the Muslim political sentiment in the world:
India is prioritizing strategic alliances over a posture of moral leadership.
Sentiment in the Muslim world is no longer a restraining factor for Indian foreign policy.
India believes it has sufficient economic, labor, and energy interdependence with the Gulf to insulate itself from serious backlash. It thinks that Gulf states need Indian trade and its vast expatriate workforce too much to risk confrontation with New Delhi.
So far, this gamble has worked. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have all deepened economic and infrastructural ties with India, even as public anger and sentiment over Gaza rise in those countries. But history shows us that public opinion in the Muslim world can quickly be converted into political capital, mainly when it is channeled towards common-identity causes like Palestine. The longer this war drags on, the more shakier that Indian presumption of immunity looks.
Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Iran, all of whom have consistently positioned themselves as upholders of global Muslim solidarity, will see India’s repositioning as a tilt away from the Global South’s moral sensibility. The treaty repositions India away from the Non-Aligned Movement towards the orbit of a U.S.-Israel-Security Axis vision of world order.
Meaning for Pakistan: Reinforcement of Rivalry
The obvious, and most immediate and ideological, implication is for Pakistan. Pakistanis have a traditional self-image of a country that champions Muslim geopolitical grievances. Palestine has long been one of the causes around which it has tried to establish a nexus between national identity and global Muslim solidarity. The India-Israel defense pact gives structural reinforcement to a few dangerous narratives in Pakistan’s national security discourse.
That India is increasingly cosying up to Pakistan’s perceived enemies in a bid to encircle and contain it.
That Israel and India are sharing intelligence related to Pakistan, especially in matters of nuclear stability and militant networks.
That India is shedding its Cold War neutrality in security posturing in South Asia to adopt an explicitly hostile and belligerent posture.
In a competitive security environment, this development may feed Pakistan’s paranoia and justify an even greater reliance on the military-security establishment and a greater dependency on China as a counterweight to India. A security spiral will not be easy to break out of, and South Asia will drift even further away from any realistic possibility of a diplomatic détente.
Bangladesh: The Delicate Balancer
The case of Bangladesh is more nuanced. Dhaka has been engaging in modest economic exchanges with Israel in recent years, with a view to realizing a number of development and security objectives through trade, technology, and the modernization of its defense forces. But it is no secret that the Bangladeshi public has a deep emotional investment in the Palestinian cause. Visible association with Israel could come with political costs domestically.
India’s defense treaty with Israel places Bangladesh in a difficult diplomatic corner:
Need to protect its vital economic and geographic relationship with India.
Need to not come off as being callously indifferent to the Palestinian cause.
Need to signal its moral consistency to its overwhelmingly Muslim citizenry.
Bangladesh will likely mumble its way through quiet neutrality, walking a tightrope between its citizens’ emotional identification with Palestine on the one hand and its existential need to maintain close ties with New Delhi. But the room for that tightrope walk is narrowing fast.
Impact on Other South Asian States
As a region, South Asia has had a shared collective memory of an anti-colonial struggle. Palestine, in that way, was somewhat similar to Bangladesh’s independence movement or the ethnic reconciliation struggle in Sri Lanka: an unfinished narrative of liberation and self-determination. The India-Israel axis, however, threatens to break that shared political memory.
Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, which maintain relations with the Muslim world solely on the basis of trade surpluses and manpower exports, will be forced to reexamine their regional diplomacy policies and practices. No longer can South Asia be characterised as a region bound by decolonial camaraderie, post-conflict rehabilitation, and reconciliation. The solidarity, but of a distinctly different character: a solidarity of strategic competition and ideological segmentation.
India’s Domestic Muslim Population: A Silent But Central Layer
A far more sensitive implication of this treaty lies within India’s own borders. India has the third-largest Muslim population in the world. For India’s own Muslims, the Indian state’s stated support for the Palestinian cause served as a symbolic assurance of pluralistic inclusion within a state that had always presented itself as officially secular and pluralist. Even in the face of increasing domestic tensions and marginalization, there was at least a subliminal assurance that India acknowledged the dignity of Muslims the world over.
This new defense treaty, especially with the backdrop of Israel’s actions in Gaza, signals a reversal of that unspoken assurance. In the context of debates on citizenship, restrictions on religious expression, mosques, and rising majoritarian political discourse, the treaty sends two dangerous signals to Indian Muslims.
First, that Indian state’s national identity is no longer going to be anchored in pluralism and inclusion, and instead represents a Hindu majoritarian political rhetoric that subsumes other identities within a hierarchy of legitimacy and entitlement.
Second, Muslim political sentiment and political space are no longer going to be a factor in Indian domestic politics and policymaking.
The subtextual implications of the treaty on India’s Muslims are subtle but deeply profound. It is likely to calcify their alienation even further, entrench the narrative of their exclusion, and harden social fault lines even more.
Resituating India in the World Order
This treaty does two things. It not only says that India is a rising power, but also that it is willing to throw its lot in with a powerful military and intelligence complex. It also shows that India is no longer bound by its ideological past and is not worried about how the Muslim world or the Non-Aligned Movement might judge it. By signing this pact, India does three significant things to its identity:
Closer to the U.S.-Israel security complex, especially in terms of Asia-Pacific military coordination and potential integration into a common security framework.
Distanced from the Global South, whose popular legitimacy used to be the most excellent amplifier of India’s diplomatic voice.
It locates itself within a worldview defined by identity-driven nationalism and majoritarian sentiment rather than a pluralist, liberal-democratic one.
In taking this step, India is no longer a state that thinks it has to wait for validation or acceptance from the Muslim world or the Global South to be able to speak its mind. It is no longer going to see its strength or agency through the prism of anti-imperialism or the cause of freedom, dignity, and justice. But in doing so, India is also trading away its moral voice for strategic gain.
Conclusion: Power Without Moral Authority Carries Long-Term Costs
The India-Israel defense treaty is not just a piece of paper. It is an affirmation of a worldview, a bold proclamation of strategic identity. This is a definitive shift in India’s worldview, coming as it does when the global public conscience has never been so focused on human rights and suffering in Gaza and the Palestinian territories.
Empires do not rise by military might alone or by cultivating strategic alliances. They also rise on the credibility of the values they project, on their public legitimacy, and the moral force of their voice. India is now betting that power matters more than principle.
Power, however, is a fickle currency. Allies fall out, dependencies erode, and security alliances get broken. That leaves legitimacy, the world’s faith in a nation’s purpose. That, however, is the hardest thing to lose, and the longest it takes to rebuild.