In 2019, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul-general to the United States at that time, said India could follow the Israeli model of building settlements in Kashmir. He was speaking in the aftermath of the Indian government’s abrogation of Article 370, stripping away the special autonomy granted to Jammu and Kashmir under the Constitution.
“I believe the security situation will improve, it will allow the refugees to go back because we already have a model in the world. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it,” he had said, at an event organised by filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri to discuss his upcoming controversial film The Kashmir Files (2022) about the displacement of Kashmiri Hindus from the valley in the 1990s.
When a video capturing Chakravorty’s comments circulated widely online, Azad Essa, a journalist based between Johannesburg and New York, had been thinking about India’s growing closeness with Israel.
Essa grew up in South Africa and travelled to India every year to visit his family in parts of Mumbai and Gujarat where his grandparents came from. He is a journalist at Middle East Eye – and has previously covered Africa for Al Jazeera English. He has also reported from Kashmir.
When he visited the…
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