On Tuesday, we took off for the city of Agra in India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh, home to some 220 million residents. We made our way to the Taj Mahal, one of the architectural wonders of the world, and on the way encountered hundreds of signs showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the governor of Uttar Pradesh, who welcomed us. The Indians are going out of their way to demonstrate that this is a visit of unparalleled importance, for them as well as for us, despite the incomprehensible difference in the size of the two countries. Stores along the main road were closed, and police were deployed over a few kilometers. On the way, we saw masses of people who arrived to watch the convoy pass.
The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum built by Shah Jahan in 1632 in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died young. Even today, visitors experience a sense of tranquility as they wonder at the precise construction, seen in the tiniest of details. It's a memorial to love, the local guide told us. The walls of the building are adorned with entire verses from the Quran, and as a whole it reflects the long Muslim conquest of India.
This is the nondiplomatic part of the visit, and I still wondered why the Indians were so proud of a building that hearkens back to a time when Hindu believers were persecuted, and the Muslim conquerors destroyed their temples and forced many to convert to Islam. Indeed, the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is not completely happy with this monument.
Nevertheless, the Taj Mahal is still one of India's biggest tourist symbols, and this is a major lesson in understanding this enormous state and its population. During its thousands of years of existence, it has been penetrated by many forces and populations. Some wanted to break down the Indian culture and impose another culture on it. It didn't help; India swallowed up all the cultures and religions it came into contact with and turned them into part of its national lifeblood.
Thrillingly, the fact that it is a polytheistic culture in which people can choose from many divine entities allows India to accept different religions, creation myths, and even enemy cultures. In contrast, monotheistic cultures compete with everyone else to be crowned the "right" faith. If a monotheistic religion is accompanied by a strong military force, it results in conquest and "purifications" like the ones India paid heavily for in blood and damage to temples and other religions. Unlike Islam (and Christianity), the Jewish people does not have an ethos of forcing its religion on others, which is why the current encounter between two ancient cultures – one that believes in a single God and another that believes in many – raises curiosity about what the results will be.
In the evening, we arrived in New Delhi and went straight to the Raisina Dialogue, which brought together world leaders to discuss problems and propose solutions. Netanyahu gave the keynote address, in which he told the large audience the keys to moving their countries ahead. He suggested that they learn from our experience – how 75 years after a third of our people were annihilated, Israel became an economic and military powerhouse. His basic message was that in our region, the weak do not survive, and to be strong, military force must be backed by a strong economy and that the two together created international political power that led to alliances with many other nations. Just like at Monday's business conference, Netanyahu showed himself to be the best marketer for the Israeli economy, in all its aspects.
