By Rajiv Shah
I have been forwarded a report titled “Profit and Genocide: Indian Investments in Israel”. It has been prepared by the advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) and authored by Hajira Puthige. The report was released following the Government of India’s signing of a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) with Israel.
While the report focuses on top Indian business giants as well as public sector undertakings and their defence ties with Israeli defence firms—stating that India accounts for nearly 45% of Israel’s total arms exports—it took me back to the days when Narendra Modi came to power in October 2001 as Gujarat chief minister, doing everything in his capacity to develop ties with what is often termed the Zionist state.
In fact, circles around Modi then considered Israel a development model that Gujarat should follow. As the Times of India correspondent covering Gujarat Sachivalaya in Gandhinagar, I was briefed by officials on how Israel—despite being an extremely water-scarce country—had developed technology to increase farm production, particularly through drip irrigation. They also noted that sweet water was being supplied from desalination plants set up along the country’s sea coast.
Post-2002 Gujarat riots, there were efforts—ironically from Left-wing and Left-of-Centre circles—to put hurdles in Modi's initial moves to get closer to Israel. Excerpts from RSS founders’ statements were cited to point out how they had praised Hitler and Nazism, and wished to follow his path. Also cited were Gujarat school textbooks where “internal achievements” of Nazism were praised while ignoring the pogroms against Jews.
I do not recall if the Israelis ever took notice of such references. Yet the fact remains that Modi made strong efforts to establish ties with the Israeli leadership—something in which he succeeded to a considerable degree. In May 2006, Modi, along with Gujarat farm experts, visited Israel to “study” water resource management and desert cultivation that could benefit the dry regions of Gujarat, particularly Kutch, Banaskantha, and Sabarkantha. This happened at a time when the US had revoked his visa, and he was a de facto persona non grata in England for his alleged involvement in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots.
Briefing me on the plan of the Modi team, which was to include a few bureaucrats from the chief minister's office (CMO), M.C. Varshney, vice-chancellor of Anand Agriculture University, told me they would be visiting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the Red Sea area, and the Negev desert, where dry-land farming is particularly prevalent.
While plans were also being worked out for Gujarat MLAs and ministers to visit Israel, there was a constant suspicion that Modi wished to establish closer ties with Israel also because he appeared to believe he was ideologically aligned with the Zionists’ right-wing exclusionary worldview. From whatever I could gather from officials around him, they seemed to have a very high opinion of Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and even sought advice from security agencies to develop an anti-terror mechanism in Gujarat.
This became evident following the ghastly Mumbai terror strike of 2008, when the CMO was flooded with proposals from global security agencies, including from Israel, offering expertise. A senior official in the CMO confirmed having received several such proposals. “We are evaluating all options within the given framework,” I was told.
Meanwhile, the Israelis decided to set up their first major venture in the country by starting a dairy farm in Gujarat. An Israeli firm, Elbit Imaging, agreed to import 10,000 high-breed milch cows to set up a $100-million dairy unit at two locations in north Gujarat.
The project, it was made known, was a fallout of Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel in May 2006. The Gujarat government even leased out 143 hectares of land in two areas to the firm for 30 years to set up the dairy. Elbit executives claimed that Israeli cows produced around 25–30 litres of milk per day, compared to 3–9 litres from local breeds. Stating that the frozen semen of Israeli bulls would help, it was pointed out that Gujarat’s cattle breeders could gain considerably in terms of technique and yield from the project. It’s another matter that the project never took off.
The move was significant because, while the US government was still keeping Modi’s Gujarat at bay by denying him a visa, the Jewish nation had extended a hand of friendship to an Indian state where the leadership claimed to have taken a firm stance against terror.
A few weeks before I retired in January 2013, I had an animated interaction with a key Gujarat bureaucrat handling home affairs. We were discussing whether there was any unofficial phone tapping of top officials. He confirmed that he had personally seen the demonstration of an Israeli phone-tapping device, shown to him in the presence of former state home minister Amit Shah and several police officials. He added, however, “I don’t know if the device was installed.”
“You just enter certain mobile numbers, and you could hear, at random, whichever phones you wanted,” this bureaucrat told me, adding, “I don’t know whether, after seeing the demonstration from the Israeli firm, Shah decided to buy it or where it was installed, but it has left a lurking suspicion among us all—that our phones are being tapped.”
In 2014, on becoming Prime Minister, it became clear that Modi favoured changing India’s foreign policy, which had traditionally leaned toward Palestine. A major reason for the unceremonious sacking of foreign secretary Sujatha Singh in January 2015 was reported to be Modi’s unhappiness with her for agreeing to insert a paragraph in a BRICS resolution critical of Israel, a country Modi had declared as a priority partner.
This was followed by India voting against Israel at the UNHRC—along the lines of India’s traditional stance, but at odds with the position of the new government. In fact, an abstention was not even considered, which the PMO objected to. “It was, therefore, no surprise that Modi chose to meet Benjamin Netanyahu in New York,” the Times of India reported on January 30, 2015.
A decade of Modi rule shows how ties between India and Israel have not only fructified but become a cornerstone of Modi’s foreign policy. Not only has Modi met Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu thrice, apart from having four conversations with him, but the CFA report also claims that today India is one of Israel’s biggest defence clients. It offers examples of several top Indian companies having defence ties with their Israeli counterparts.
One of them is Adani Defence Systems and Technologies Ltd., which has acquired stakes in two major Israeli weapon manufacturing companies, Elbit Systems Ltd. and Israel Weapon Industries (IWI), through its joint venture PLR Systems.
Pointing out that Elbit Systems provides 80% of the weapons and equipment for Israel’s land forces and 85% of the combat drones used by the air force, the CFA report notes that the company played a major role in remodeling Caterpillar’s D9 bulldozer into an automated, remotely operated weapon system, deployed in almost every military activity since 2000, clearing incursion lines and causing destruction to life and property.
Further, the report says that in 2025, Adani Defence Systems and Technologies Ltd. partnered with Sparton, a US-based subsidiary of Elbit Systems Ltd., to produce and develop anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems. In 2022, almost a year before the October 7 attacks, Adani Ports and SEZ Ltd (APSEZ) acquired stakes in Israel’s Haifa Port under the Gadot group for US$1.18 billion.
Further, the CFA report notes, in 2016, Reliance Defence and Engineering Ltd. partnered with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defence Systems to manufacture air-to-air missiles, air defence systems, and large aerostats. “The Israeli military has used the same company’s Spike Guided Missiles extensively to target, from the air and ground, people inside buildings in the Gaza Strip,” it claims.
Apart from defence, ties between the two countries extend to energy, pharmaceuticals, water, healthcare, education, finance, and technology sectors. Through such “economic entanglements,” the report comments, the effort is to “portray an image of business as usual,” unmindful of the fact that they indirectly “legitimize violence against civilians, while reflecting a troubling complicity that undermines global calls for accountability and peace.”
Among the firms identified as having ties with Israel are Indian Oil Corporation (energy), Dr. Reddy’s (pharmaceuticals), Samvardhana Motherson (automotive), and Reliance Industries (technology). State-owned enterprises Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) have also invested heavily in Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). In 2017, to develop the Medium-Range Surface-to-Air Missile (MRSAM) system for the Indian Army, BEL signed a US$2 billion contract with IAI.
“The two entities later partnered on a US$630 million deal for the supply of Barak-8 missile systems, designed to defend against airborne threats, to the Indian Navy. This missile system was used by Israel to intercept Iranian drones during the recent conflict,” says the report.
It adds, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with HAL to convert the Multi Mission Tanker Transport (MMTT), an aerial refuelling tanker, in India. "Heron drones manufactured by IAI have played a pivotal role in Israel’s attacks on Gaza, including in strike operations,” its CEO Boaz Levy is quoted as saying.
Further, says the report, Tata Motors has supplied “Land Rover Defender vehicles to the Israeli military. Israeli company MDT Armor then converts the Land Rover frame into the MDT David, an armoured vehicle that has become a standard patrol and intelligence-gathering vehicle for Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.”
How India obliged Israel became clear in May 2023, when both countries signed an agreement to send 42,000 Indian construction and nursing workers to Israel. “By the end of that year, as Israel’s military campaigns in Palestine intensified and Israel revoked permits for tens of thousands of Palestinian labourers, Israel turned to India to fill this gap, replacing a workforce long central to the Palestinian economy and further entrenching the dynamics of displacement,” says the report.
Other Indian firms that have developed ties with their Israeli counterparts include Larsen & Toubro (L&T) for producing a combat-proven technology designed to protect military vehicles from incoming missiles and rockets; Wipro, to provide cyber threat intelligence services; and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), in key digital transformation initiatives in Israel, including Project Nimbus, which has faced “significant criticism for its potential implications on human rights and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict by using the technology for surveillance and targeting of Palestinians.”
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