Recently, the Bharatian and Egyptian Air Force conducted one of their several joint military training exercises. This comes in light of the increasing military cooperation between the two countries, rising over the years.
This drill between the Bharatian and Egyptian Air Forces was conducted at Egypt’s Berighat Air Base, and we saw stunning visuals of the Rafale planes of both countries flying past the Pyramid graves of the Great Pharoahs.
The delegation for this military exercise was led by Shri Ajit Gupte, who is Bharat’s Ambassador to Egypt as well.
Narendra Modi was the first Prime Minister since 1997, whereas I.K. Gujral was the previous one. Subsequent Prime Ministers never made State visit trips to Egypt, despite visiting the country.
Narendra Modi’s visit was twinned by the attendance of Abdel el-Sisi at the Bharat’s Republic Day parade. Both leaders share a deep fondness for each other which is seen in their deep ties and speeches made about one another.
The ties between the two countries, or rather civilizations, go back very far. Let us discuss this below:
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Bharat-Kemet ancient relations
Bharat, the old name for “India”, and Kemet, the old name for “Egypt”, were two ancient civilizations that knew about each other from times immemorial. Both countries had an ancient civilization, with numerous deities of nature Gods which they worshipped, such as a Sun God, a Tools Deity, a River Goddess, and so on.
The Kemeti people believed that animals were the Earthly manifestations of the Gods, with the Cow being the most sacred of all. The Nile back then was much wider and supported a lot more life forms. Many of those animals are extinct today. Almost every animal had a religious significance in the lives of the people.
The trade between Bharat and Kemet came from the textile trade. Many of the fancy ornaments that we imagine “Egyptian” kings and queens in today, were all manufactured in Bharat. Sea routes during the appropriate seasons would carry traders from Bharat’s shores to the Tiran Strait, and back again.
Land routes through Mesopotamia also existed, but they were disrupted by the repeated onslaught of Alexander on Kemet. Alexander’s empire expanded to the river bed of the Sindhu river (aka Indus) until King Purush defeated Alexander and sent him back.
We even see the advent of Buddhism in Kemet, with the discovery of several very intricate statues of Buddha, many made in the local Kemeti style as well. However this period of Egypt was a period of uncertainty.
Many kingdoms had started to move towards Monotheism to limit the range of opinion of their subjects; the Egyptians chose the Sun God. Conflicts between the priest class and king class increased, with one Pharaoh priest Osarseph overthrowing more debaucherous Amenophis to re-establish Pharoah Dharma.
Several Jews, newly monotheistic themselves, started committing acts of atrocities on the natives, like Moses who destroyed the Golden Calf to bring ishwarninda or blasphemy on the natives. In Hindi, this is called gohatya, or cow slaughter. Several Jewish historians of the day even appropriated the stories of priests like Osarseph to wrongly link them with Moses.
Through continuous blasphemy campaigns by the Jews, social chaos in Kemeti society, a move away from polytheism and towards monotheism pushed by the Kings, economic poverty caused by Alexander’s invasions, and desertification and drying up of the Nile, the Kemeti people eventually converted to Christianity in 90 AV and adopting the Greek name “Copts” for themselves.
This severed ties between the two ancient civilizations.
Hindustan-Misr relations
Many centuries later, another resistance movement against the Jews started in Arabia, among the Harran people. This was the movement of Prophet Muhammad. However, Muhammad and his descendant followers imbibed more Jewish ideas into their faith, instead of promoting their Beduioni religion. This new entrant in the Jewish pantheon called Islam spread to several parts of the world, colonizing them along the way.
In 698 AV, Kemeti-turned-Coptic was conquered by Islam. It was renamed to the Misr. The establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate meant that the land once belonging to the Kemeti people was now the land of the Arabo-Jewish people. A similar Islamic empire, called the Delhi Sultanate, was also established across Bharat.
As Jawaharlal Nehru mentions in his magnum opus “The Discovery Of India”, the Delhi Sultanate would pay Khums, a tax levied by the Caliph on the Sultan (who collects it from the Imam who collects it from the converts), to the Abbasid kingdom. This tax was the beginning of the loot of the sone ki chiddiya that was Bharat.
As Islam evolved across the Islamic world, these ties weakened, and independence was exerted by all Islamic empires across the world. Despite being debaucherous, degenerate, and not religious at all, the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids fought to appear as though they were the Caliphs.
This constant fighting was finally put to an end by the advent of the Maratha’s Liberation of Bharat and the Turkic rule over Kemet.
India-Egypt relations
In the modern period, it was Nehru and Nasser, who befriended each other and communicated in pre-colonial times. After the independence of both their countries, they formed the Non-Alignment Movement against the USA-USSR cold war.
However, after these two presidents passed away, their successors Anwar Sadat and Indira Gandhi onwards, tried to play a bigger role in the Islamic Ummah and the Communist World Order, respectively. This went on until the end of the Cold War.
After years of coldness, both countries are moving away from their older post-colonial stances after the end of the Cold War. The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune has criticized El-Sisi for “Pharaohizing Egypt again”. Turkiye, who wants to reconquer the Ummah against the “infidel” Saud’s Arabia and Egypt, has pitted militant opposition against El-Sisi.
As the world enters a new Decolonial Era globally, a multi-polar world order must emerge based on civilizational values. As Egypt rediscovers its civilizational identity as Kemet, joint military exercises are a step towards this multipolar world.
As these age-old ties find a new flourishing, it harks back to both the Bharat-Kemet era as well as the Nehru-Nasser era. Military drills like this will ensure the protection of the “New Spice Route” trade route that was finalized during the G20 but delayed due to the Israel-Palestine war.
As both Kemet and Bharat seek to reject the duo-polar China-USA poles in this multi-polar world, such a strategic tie between the two will only bring the people together, their cultures closer, make their civilizations richer and give the world a trustworthy “third option” in the duo-polar world order.
The future looks bright again for Kemet and Bharat.
