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Climate and social justice activist Nikita Naidu has become the first known Indian participant in the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla, reviving conversations around India’s long and complex relationship with Palestine — from classical antiquity and Indian Ocean trade to anti-colonial solidarity and modern geopolitics.
As the Gaza War continues to reshape political discourse worldwide, an Indian activist has become part of one of the largest civilian-led solidarity missions in recent years. Earlier this month, Nikita Naidu, a climate and social justice activist from India, joined the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla’s overland convoy as it travelled across North Africa towards the Rafah crossing. Naidu is believed to be the first Indian participant in the Sumud Flotilla movement — named after the Arabic word for ‘steadfastness’ or ‘resilience’ — which aims to deliver humanitarian aid and highlight Palestinian resistance to Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. “We have no choice but to put shoes on our feet and do this ourselves,” Naidu told The Polis Project in a recent interview.
Naidu joined the convoy in Tripoli, Libya, as activists, medics, students, workers, and organisers from multiple countries attempted to reach Gaza via Egypt. Naidu’s participation is part of a longer history of anti-colonial solidarity between India and Palestine. That solidarity, often forgotten in contemporary geopolitical debates, stretches back centuries — even millennia.
Long before modern nation-states emerged, the Indian subcontinent and the eastern Mediterranean were linked by ancient commercial and cultural networks. At the height of the Achaemenid Empire (553-330 BCE), regions of northwestern India and the Levant were part of the same imperial sphere of influence, connected by trade routes, administrative systems, and maritime exchange. Later, in the Roman period, goods from India — pepper, indigo, ivory, cotton textiles, and gemstones — travelled through the Red Sea and Levantine ports toward Mediterranean markets.
Ancient Palestine and India were also connected through diasporic religious communities. Jewish migration and mercantile networks established some of the world’s oldest Jewish communities on the Malabar Coast, while Syrian Christian traditions linked Kerala to Jerusalem, Antioch, and the wider West Asian world. These connections reveal that India and Palestine were never isolated civilisations, but part of a larger Afro-Eurasian network shaped by trade, pilgrimage, empire, and migration. In the 13th century, the Hindh-i-Zawiya, or Zawiyat al-Hindiyya (the Indian Hospice) formed around the shrine of Hazrat Farid ud-Din Ganj Shakar, or Baba Farid — an Indian mystic of the Sufi Chisti brotherhood who spent a considerable time at the Al Aqsa mosque in the old city of Jerusalem.
In the 20th century, these older historical links acquired a new political meaning through anti-colonial struggle. Leaders of the Indian freedom movement increasingly saw the Palestinian question through the lens of resistance to imperialism and dispossession. Mahatma Gandhi famously argued in 1938 that Palestine belonged to the Arabs “in the same sense that England belongs to the English.” After independence, India emerged as one of the strongest supporters of Palestinian self-determination within the Global South.
India opposed the 1947 UN Partition Plan for Palestine, later became the first non-Arab country to recognise the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1974, and formally recognised the State of Palestine in 1988. During the Cold War, solidarity with Palestine became intertwined with India’s leadership position within the global Non-Aligned Movement and its broader postcolonial identity. It is said that when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian politician and statesman, broke down in tears. He supposedly said, “My sister is gone.”
That political landscape has shifted considerably in recent decades as India has deepened strategic and economic ties with Israel. Yet public expressions of solidarity with Palestine continue to persist across sections of Indian civil society, student movements, trade unions, artists, and activists.
In many ways, Nikita Naidu’s participation in the Global Sumud Flotilla represents the continuation of that much longer history — one that runs from ancient maritime routes and diasporic communities to anti-colonial movements and contemporary global struggle for peace and justice.
