The problem with “fascism” as a description of any modern political tendency is that the term is a weapon of mass destruction that flattens the landscapes that it wants to describe. Fascism is so freighted with historically specific meaning that using it for other times and places can seem sloppy and excessive. And yet, juxtaposing the politics of contemporary south Asia with fascism, in its Nazi variant, serves a double purpose: it connects modern Indian majoritarianism with one of its ideological ancestors and it helps us name and identify the ideological kernel of fascism that survived to fight another day.
India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is the political arm of a Hindu militia, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, around the time Adolf Hitler began to find his political bearings in a routed, angry Germany. The RSS is a nationalist militia that defines India as a Hindu nation; only Hindus can be members. While there are many similarities between the RSS and the fascist paramilitary organisations of the prewar decades, from uniformed drills and distinctive salutes to a persistent anxiety about masculinity, at the core of both is a feral ethnic nationalism that aims to mobilise a racial or religious majority against an allegedly encroaching minority.
We have become familiar with violence and discrimination directed at minority religious groups in India, particularly Muslims, through this last decade of majoritarian rule. Lynchings connected to the cattle trade, riots, the bulldozing of Muslim homes, the criminalisation of love between Hindu women and Muslim men via the bogey of “love jihad”, have been features of Narendra Modi’s tenure as prime minister. But the German inspiration for the BJP’s short way with minorities goes back to the 1930s.
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. 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.”
The BJP has taken this lesson to heart. Its local leaders and cadres refer to Muslims obliquely and directly as termites, the status of medieval mosques is called into question, and the BJP has made a concerted attempt to marginalize Muslims and make them politically irrelevant: among the hundreds of elected BJP legislators in state assemblies and parliament, there are no Muslims.
The assault on Muslim livelihood through restrictions on the cattle trade, the official stigmatization of the hijab in public institutions, and the attempt to smuggle in a religious test for citizenship through the back door of the Citizenship Amendment Act, represent a systematic attempt to unsettle Muslims and destabilize their status as equal citizens.
The lesson that modern majoritarians learned from nazism was that the concerted demonisation of a minority was the quickest way of turning a nominal majority into a politically aggrieved behemoth. 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. 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”.
Nazism seems sui generis for two reasons. One, the speed of Germany’s transformation from vanquished nation to genocidal Reich and two, the industrial processes that powered the Holocaust. 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. Nazism, in this view, is majoritarianism speeded up. Alternately, contemporary majoritarianism in south Asia, is fascism in slow motion.
To look for a Weimar-like collapse in modern India 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. 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. The Sri Lankan state decimated its Tamil minority in a savage war to consolidate Sinhala Buddhist supremacy.
Whether it’s slow or quick, the AfD or the BJP, majoritarian parties share with nazism a steadfast, sinister, obsession with minorities. Whenever mainstream politicians begin to mutter about infiltrators, fifth columnists and failed assimilation, that smell of sulphur is fascism in the air.
Mukul Kesavan is an Indian historian, novelist and political and social essayist
