A few months after the BJP lost its majority in the Central Parliament, with the result that Modi now heads an ideologically and regionally diverse coalition, the always idiotic Mukul Kesavan wrote in the Guardian.
India is witnessing the slow-motion rise of fascism
Sonia Gandhi's father was a member of Mussolini's Fascist party. Is he slowly rising from the dead to take over India as its Il Duce?
Whenever mainstream politicians
like Nehru who presided over so extensive an ethnic cleansing of Muslims that their share of the population plummeted from one third to just five percent. Nehru also passed a law preventing Muslims who had fled across the border in panic from returning to claim their property.
It is a sad, but ineluctable truth, that the British Raj was good at protecting 'minorities'. Indeed, the Brits were the tiniest minority of all in India. Nationalism, in India and elsewhere, created 'majoritarianism' from which some minorities had to flee. This was true whether the new Nationalist regime was left-wing or right-wing or a Dictatorship or a Democracy.
begin to mutter about infiltrators,
Nehru was wrong to send troops to Kashmir Valley to defend it from Pakistani infiltrators. Lal Bahadur Shastri too was a Fascist of this description. On the other hand, Eisenhower, who presided over 'operation wetback' which expelled supposed Mexicans, wasn't a Fascist at all.
fifth columnistsIn a speech to the House of Commons , in June, 1940, Winston Churchill reassured MPs that "Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand." This proves he was a Fascist. Kesavan, is an Indian historian- i.e. as ignorant as shit. He doesn't get that 'fifth column' meant 'Nazi sympathizers' or potential collaborators within a country- e.g. Vichy France or Quisling in Norway.
and failed assimilation,
assimilation is bad. Muslims in Britain must have their own Sharia law.
that smell of sulphur is fascism in the air
Biden is a Fascist. 40,000 'illegal migrants' are currently detained in the US.
The problem with “fascism” as a description of any modern political tendency is that
only crazy people use the word.
the term is a weapon of mass destruction that flattens the landscapes that it wants to describe.
Words used by Kesavan and his ilk matter less than a fart. It is not the case that the Earth shakes every time Kesavan breaks wind.
Fascism is so freighted with historically specific meaning that using it for other times and places can seem sloppy and excessive.
Kesavan is as sloppy as shit.
And yet, juxtaposing the politics of contemporary south Asia with fascism, in its Nazi variant, serves a double purpose:
it shows you are stupid and that you have shit for brains.
it connects modern Indian majoritarianism with one of its ideological ancestors
Modern Indian majoritarianism dates back to the foundation of the Indian National Congress. Hindus opposed the partition of Bengal because they thought they could rule the roost over the entire province. Gandhi's consistent demand was that the Brits hand over all power, most particularly control of the Army, to the INC which he himself said was a Hindu party. Fascism only arose on the Continent because there was a clear and present Communist threat. Nothing of the sort existed in India- save in West Bengal where, ultimately, Mamta triumphed. Her goons beat the shit out of the Commies and chased them out of the political arena. But that doesn't make Mamta a Fascist. It just makes her a courageous Bengalis woman who won't let herself be intimidated by anyone. She only broke with the INC when the latter allied with the CPM.
and it helps us name and identify the ideological kernel of fascism
which is a one party State devoted to 'Corporatism' rather than representative democracy. No such thing can exist in India because the country is too diverse and the Army is too narrowly recruited. You can't have Fascism without the backing of the military. Sheikh Hasina had to flee Bangladesh when her Army Chief told her the soldiers would not shoot her opponents.
that survived to fight another day.
Fascist parties were welcome to change their names and fight elections in post-War Europe. Meloni could be said to lead a party descended from that of Mussolini.
India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is the political arm of a Hindu militia,
Militias have guns. The RSS may have sticks. It does not have guns.
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925,
by Dr. Hegdewar who had helped his old College Pal, Dr. Hardikar, set up the Congress Seva Dal in 1923/24. Nehru was its first president. The Raj banned this organization. The RSS was an 'overground' proxy- but a weak and provincial sister- for the Seva Dal. It was supposed to be non-political. But it soon came into conflict with the Hindu Mahasabha and thus chose to support Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee when he broke with the latter. This was after Independence. The new party was the 'Jan Sangh' which joined forces in the Sixties with popular Socialist leaders like Lohia and J.P. Narayan. Thanks to the excesses committed during Indira Gandhi's Emergency. The 'Janata Morcha' was able to come to power in 1977. Sadly, it was useless and fell apart on the 'dual membership' issue (i.e. RSS membership). But the Jan Sangh turned out to be the least useless of the components of the Janata coalition and, by the end of the Nineties, was able to lead a governing coalition which didn't do too badly. Still, the hope was that young Rahul's return to India would mean new blood and new ideas to enable India to rise rapidly. Sadly, Rahul was a gun-shy cretin and so, in 2014, there was a choice between Modi and Nobody. In 2019, the choice was between Modi and a moon-calf. However, once Congress appointed Kharge as its President, it could do a deal with other parties and prevent Modi getting a majority. It remains to be seen whether Modi completes his term. My guess is that the BJP will want elections by 2027- assuming the Census is delayed and seat redistribution is completed by then.
around the time Adolf Hitler began to find his political bearings in a routed, angry Germany.
Mussolini was firmly in the saddle by then. He took an interest in India and charmed the pants of people like Tagore, Gandhi and Iqbal. However, the RSS- though influenced by the Bengali Jugantar- was rooted in Maharashtrian history. It neither knew nor greatly cared about Italy or Germany. By contrast it was the Congress Premier of U.P, who described Gandhi as the 'Fuhrer and Il Duce of India'.
The RSS is a nationalist militia
Nope. It is a voluntary organization similar to the Boy Scouts. Militias have guns.
that defines India as a Hindu nation; only Hindus can be members.
Nope. It defines India as historically Hindu just as Britain is historically British. People who live in Britain need to respect its culture, traditions, and institutions. But this is to their own advantage. Rishi Sunak didn't get into Number 10 by singing Punjabi kirtans. Still, I have no doubt, that he kept some nice poppadoms in his pocket which he would feed to greedy BoJo.
While there are many similarities between the RSS and the fascist paramilitary organisations of the prewar decades,
There are none. The RSS was a weak and provincial sister of the Seva dal. It was the latter which conducted pogroms- e.g. the anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi in 1984. The problem with the Seva Dal is that its members were seen as corrupt sociopaths. RSS cadres were considered a bit provincial and lower middle class, but they were decent, trustworthy, folk. If you said 'my son is a member of the Youth Congress'- the assumption was that he was a rapist and a pimp. If you said 'my son goes to the RSS shaka'- the chap was a boring fellow who, however, managed a saree shop to which you could safely send your wife or daughter.
from uniformed drills
The Seva Dal had drills. At one time, under Sanjay Gandhi, it was a ticket to the top table. But it was corrupt and self-serving. Also the Sikhs might kill you if you were associated with people like Jagdish Tytler. Rahul did try to revive the Seva Dal. Perhaps, something came of it. The problem is the Dynasty is suspicious of alternative power centres.
and distinctive salutes to a persistent anxiety about masculinity,
Rahul keeps growing out his beard. What is he so anxious about?
at the core of both is a feral ethnic nationalism
Hindus are feral. Mukul's parents must be so proud!
that aims to mobilise a racial or religious majority against an allegedly encroaching minority.
Muslims were once a minority in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
We have become familiar with violence and discrimination directed at minority religious groups in India, particularly Muslims, through this last decade of majoritarian rule.
No. Our parents became familiar with it when Chacha Nehru ruled the roost. The Custodian of Evacuee (later 'Enemy') property harassed plenty of Muslims till they ran away across the border.
Lynchings connected to the cattle trade,
in States where Congress brought in draconian anti-beef laws
riots,
Nehru presided over the biggest riots though Rajiv did try to compete with his grandfather in that respect.
the bulldozing of Muslim homes,
The allegation is that they are disproportionately affected. But so are the houses of Hindu gangsters- e.g. Vikas Dubey. Nobody sheds a tear for those who prey upon their own.
the criminalisation of love between Hindu women and Muslim men via the bogey of “love jihad”,
As opposed to the complete ban, enforceable by law, on Muslim women marrying non-Muslims in Islamic states where Sharia law prevails.
Kesavan, being South Indian, must know it was Kerala's Catholic Bishops who first raised this issue in 2009.
have been features of Narendra Modi’s tenure as prime minister.
Modi runs the central government. State governments are responsible for such things as cow-protection, bulldozing illegal constructions or those that belong to notorious gangsters. The Home Ministry of each state decides whether or not cases should be registered against people who enter marriages of any type- inter-faith or otherwise- where the parents allege improper influence or abduction etc.
But the German inspiration for the BJP’s short way with minorities goes back to the 1930s.
But the Germans were inspired by Jim Crow America. Kesavan is a kretin. He doesn't get that it was Western Europe, not Central Europe, which did genocide against indigenous people in America, Australia etc. The French thought they could do something similar in Algeria.
In March 1939, the RSS’s principal ideologue, MS Golwalkar published We, Or Our Nationhood Defined, laying out his organisation’s blueprint for a Hindu nation. This is the relevant passage: “German national pride has now become the topic of the day.
Just the previous year, Govind Vallabh Pant had called Gandhi the 'Fuhrer and Il Duce' of India.
To keep up the purity of the nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races – the Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”
But it was under Nehru that this lesson was taught to Muslims in non-Muslim majority areas. As I said, the RSS was merely a weak, provincial, sister of the mighty Congress and its Seva Dal. When Nehru amended the constitution, against Shyama Prasad's protests, Frank Moraes gave tongue to the mood of the house. If India has to have a dictator, let it be Nehru. What no one then foresaw was that this would entail dynastic rule.
The BJP has taken this lesson to heart. Its local leaders and cadres refer to Muslims obliquely and directly as termites,
while Kesavan and his ilk rave about Nazis. Did you know Angela Merkel said to Modi 'boo to you! You are a big meanieQ' and he replied ' Frau Merkel, die Sittlichkeit der Gellassenheit des Neoliberalismus macht mich sehr gemein.' She said, 'OMG! You aren't a Hindu at all. Just you are putting some boot-polish on your face. You are actually Martin Heidegger! I will tell Obama. He will scold you like anything.'
the status of medieval mosques is called into question,
before courts of law. That is how property disputes are usually resolved.
and the BJP has made a concerted attempt to marginalize Muslims and make them politically irrelevant:
Nehru accomplished this long ago.
among the hundreds of elected BJP legislators in state assemblies and parliament, there are no Muslims.
More worryingly, none of them are cats. Chairman Miaow is very upset about this.
The assault on Muslim livelihood through restrictions on the cattle trade,
Cow protection is a directive principle in Nehru's constitution. Congress administrations imposed draconian laws in this respect in some States.
the official stigmatization of the hijab in public institutions,
Worse yet, GoI is not permitting Talibanis to come and put a bullet in the brains of Muslim girls who are so lost to shame that they attend Schools or Colleges.
and the attempt to smuggle in a religious test for citizenship through the back door of the Citizenship Amendment Act,
That religious test was brought in by Nehru. Muslim, who had fled, weren't allowed back. Non-Muslims who fled were given a route to citizenship though, in many cases, this remained a dead letter.
What Kesavan is not saying is that where India gave asylum to Muslims accused of apostacy, Indian Muslims responded by putting a price on their heads.
represent a systematic attempt to unsettle Muslims and destabilize their status as equal citizens.
They were deprived of this by Nehru and Ambedkar. Did you know Dalit Muslims got affirmative action under the 1935 Act but this was stripped from them. Indeed, even Sikh and Buddhist Dalits only got this at a later time. I may mention, it was the Brits who decided Dalit Christians should not get any affirmative action. The result is that they have risen up.
Nazism … is majoritarianism speeded up.
Nope. Nazis were happy to conquer land and expel or enslave the majority population.
Alternately, contemporary majoritarianism in south Asia, is fascism in slow motion
And it was Gandhi & Nehru & Jinnah who set the ball rolling. If only the Brits hadn't slyly fucked off! Did you know the founder of the INC was a Scotsman named A.O Hume? But for him, King Charles would still be Emperor of India. Whatever you might think of the Windsor dynasty- at least it isn't as stupid as the Nehru dynasty.
The lesson that modern majoritarians learned from nazism was
don't start wars you are bound to lose. But this is a lesson any type of regime should learn.
that the concerted demonisation of a minority was the quickest way of turning a nominal majority into a politically aggrieved behemoth.
African Americans were demonized. The decimated First Nations only got full citizenship in 1924. Plenty of Americans are 'politically aggrieved'. Indeed, they unleashed their fury on the Muslim world- killing 1.3 million and displacing tens of millions. That doesn't change the fact that everybody wants a Green Card.
The success of Hitler in turning the most assimilated minority in Europe into an expendable underclass in less than 20 years is the ultimate majoritarian precedent.
Vichy did the same more quickly. But plenty of Arab countries were quick enough to get rid of their Jews.
Still, what is remarkable here is that Kesavan doesn't get that Whites were once a minority in the US and in Australia. How does he think they became a majority? That was the precedent for Hitlerism. As he observed in 'Mein Kampf', there was nowhere in Africa or Asia to which Germany could send its people. It would have to conquer land from its Eastern neighbours. Keynes had said the same thing. Either Germany took land from Poland, Ukraine etc. or else it would starve. Keynes was so shitty an economist that he thought the US had turned into a net food importer!
As Golwalkar wrote just before the second world war, “non-Hindu” people could either totally assimilate themselves into Hindu culture or “… stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights”.
Nehru made this dream come true. That is why his Dynasty dominated India politics.
Nazism seems sui generis for two reasons. One, the speed of Germany’s transformation from vanquished nation to genocidal Reich
Russia too was vanquished. It did genocide better than the Reich.
and two, the industrial processes that powered the Holocaust.
Which Indians scoffed at. Genocide can be done more cheaply using just agricultural implements. Also, be sure to rape the girls before bashing in their skulls. Also why send 'cattle trucks' to extermination camps? Just stop the train and slaughter all the passengers.
But if we focus, not on the breakneck speed of this political project, but its consistent goal – majoritarian supremacy through the subordination of dehumanised minorities – naming its lineal descendants becomes easier.
America. Australia, Argentina. These are the lineal descendants of genocidal regimes which turned small minorities into majorities.
Nazism, in this view, is majoritarianism speeded up.
No. Nazism was about getting bar-room brawlers to beat the shit out of the Commies.
Alternately, contemporary majoritarianism in south Asia, is fascism in slow motion.
Why? Because the Brits slyly fucked off. Who does 'minority protection' best? The answer is Emperors. Nationalism is about linguistic, or religious, majorities taking power over territory. It may not be expansionary though there is likely to be some 'irredentism'. Still, no one thought that the Irish Republic would want to conquer Wales though Ireland did have a 'Fascist' blue-shirt' movement in the Thirties. But then, there was a British Union of Fascists. Oswald Moseley did try to relaunch this by seizing on the issue of coloured immigration. I think his mistake was to wail about how his 'black-shirts' had been mercilessly beaten up by little Jewish tailors from the East End.
To look for a Weimar-like collapse in modern India is silly;
To look for anything sensible in what Kesavan writes is silly.
India is a subcontinental republic with a flawed but embedded democratic system; reconstituting it into a supremacist Hindu nation will be a drawn-out affair.
Nope. It happened once and for all in 1947/48. Nehru also beat the shit out of the Commies till they played nice.
The last general election is a sign that it might never come to pass. This is not to say that contemporary majoritarianism is a necessarily gradual business. Buddhist majoritarianism in Myanmar climaxed in the genocidal ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine province.
It looks like the Arakan Army will prevail. Incidentally, the Muslim Rohingya first killed Hindu Rohingya before setting their sights on Buddhists. That didn't end well for them. Still, it appears the junta is losing ground there.
The Sri Lankan state decimated its Tamil minority in a savage war to consolidate Sinhala Buddhist supremacy.
To be fair, Sri Lankan Tamil politics took a disastrous turn. But there was also the crazy JVM coup. Let us see how the young Dissanayake does. Sri Lankans are plenty smart. Their economy should soon take off.
Whether it’s slow or quick, the AfD or the BJP, majoritarian parties share with nazism a steadfast, sinister, obsession with minorities.
Mukul is cool with countries where the current majority only became so through genocide of the indigenous people.
The BJP is a professional outfit which recruits technocrats for top jobs- e.g. Jaishankar as Foreign Minister or Nirmala as Finance Minister. The AfD was headed by professors like Bernd Lucke and Meuthen, Petry, but they have quit because the thing is too kray kray. Still, I suppose it represents a 'protest vote'. The problem is that the German economy looks weak. True, they have turned things around in the past, but the global climate appears to be changing for the worse. In India the fear is that the gap between the industrialized States, which have achieved demographic transition, and those which remain involuted agricultural shitholes will continue to widen. Moreover, since Modi does not have a majority, it is likely that seat redistribution (frozen for the last five decades) will go ahead. This means the poorer, more agricultural, Hindi belt will gain at the expense of the South (Gujarat breaks even). Coupled with gender reservation, India is headed into uncharted seas. There is a fear that no party will have a majority in January 2030 and this could mean that Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes won't be renewed. That, by itself, will set the cat amongst the pigeons. The other great danger is that the State will go off a fiscal cliff and there will be entitlement collapse just when Climate Change catastrophes- e.g. the recent rainfall based flooding in Pakistan- hit the sub-continent.
There is plenty of things for Indian people to worry about. But Hitler rising from the grave is not one of them.
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