Temporal Fabrication in Israeli-Indian Relations

Abstract This paper considers the imagination of time that is inherent in the political alliance between India and Israel; specifically, as it is made apparent in the context of a shared agricultural program between the two countries, the Indo-Israeli Agricultural Project ( IIAP ). Recent work in this area of foreign relations has focused on shared strategies for internal and external repression, especially as regards surveillance technologies on undesirable populations, but larger and smaller interactions between political positioning, policies, and policy outcomes are only now making themselves visible. The ideas of “development” (and of those considered “undeveloped”) that drive policy in these two ostensibly democratic countries are structured by the aforementioned imagination of time. By considering the particulars of the IIAP ’s “Centres of Excellence” across India, and speeches by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at these Centres, these ideas of “development” can be seen to be, in reality, the realization of a mythical past where the status of a cultural and religious elite was assured. Situating the supposedly benevolent economic argument for this “development” in the context of the two countries’ religious mythologies permits us to see how political agency in a democracy is withdrawn from people invented as being of “the past”.