Five years on and the massacres in Gujarat seem to have faded into the background against the escalating noise of the War on Terror. Public consciousness is filled with a sense of danger, of the threat of religious extremism, of violence rippling across the world and back again, threatening even affluent westerners in our own streets and homes. However everyone agrees, it seems, that the battle is between Islam and the West – this is the fault line that leads to violence. Rising India could not be part of this assault on so-called western values. India is the world of movies and consumerism, of big business and secular democracy. Less scary than China, India is the kind of ascendant Asia that the West can do business with. Whatever internal problems India may face, these could not be linked to the politicisation of religion and backlash against (so-called) western liberal values that are seen to animate the clashing civilisations of the War on Terror.

Some sections of Indian political life have been mobilising the diaspora in support of this view. Not content with buying arms from Israel, the Hindu Right have been learning tactics of information control from Israel as well. India is presented as essentially and timelessly ‘Hindu’. Hindu identity is presented as a matter of national pride – and this pride is seen to be under attack from the corrosive and colonial forces of westernisation.

For all of us non-residents this manifests itself in various cultural campaigns to preserve the good name of Hindu India. Look at the websites of self-appointed Hindu organisations to see the world through their eyes. An India that is under constant attack – from within by the minorities who fail to understand their place under the umbrella of Hinduised Indianness, from without from the forces of westernisation, modernisation and commercialisation that undermine the muscularity of an ancient culture with the seductive frippery of Valentine’s cards and Christmas cake. And most of all from the self-hating so-called Hindus who resist the call to arms.

As a tactic, this echoes the Israeli slurs against supposedly self-hating Jews. In the face of criticism of killing, violence and abuse, defenders of the state claim victim status for themselves. ‘Look – can’t you see that it is we who are under attack. You who criticise our actions have forgotten yourselves and give succour to our enemies’. To speak of the atrocities carried out in (Hindu) India’s name is to bring shame upon India. In another echo of Israeli rhetoric, apologists respond that India is a multi-faith state unlike Pakistan, that human rights abuses are widespread in ‘Arab’ nations, that India has created a democracy of a billion people and such pogroms are an aberration, and that such a focus on communal massacres is part of a conspiracy to undermine the status of India. Indians across the diaspora who voice their dissent – to this account of Hindu identity or Indian exceptionalism – are portrayed as dupes of the West who do not appreciate the life or death struggle that faces Indian civilisation.

Increasingly, British Jews have been voicing their refusal to be constrained by the demand of solidarity with Israel. The group Independent Jewish Voices, formed to enable an open debate about the Middle East without the community policing that demands absolute support for Israel as a criteria of Jewish identity, explains their motivating ethic:

‘We hereby reclaim the tradition of Jewish support for universal freedoms, human rights and social justice. The lessons we have learned from our own history compel us to speak out’.

As part of India continues to rise, with increasingly explicit co-operation from the non-resident diaspora, maybe it is time for us to say we too refuse to accept silently anything at any price in the name of Indian identity.