In The Indian Express (September 6, 2016) Prakash Karat, former general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has an opinion piece defending the BJP against its characterisation by sections of the Left in India as the external face of a fascist movement driven by the RSS and its vision of a non-secular, Hindu state. The threat that is sweeping through India today is one of authoritarianism, not fascism, he argues. Nor are the conditions present for a fascist regime to be established, even though a ‘determined effort is being made to reorder society and polity on Hindutva lines’. The crux of Karat’s argument is a conception of fascism lifted straight from the famous formula adopted by the Comintern’s executive committee in December 1933. “Fascism is the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.
 
Why is it that every time mention is made of Prakash Karat powerful images of rigor mortis rush through my brain? Is it because the young student leader from JNU days always impressed me as the pure type of the apparatchik, the social type that flooded the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the late 1920s, swamped it as the emerging base of Stalin’s rapid consolidation of power within the party and then in the country as a whole?

The apparatchik destroyed Lenin’s party but he couldn’t discard Marxism completely. He adapted to Marxism by converting it into a draw full of rubber stamps. Incapable of thought, much less of any more creative process like actual intellectual engagement, the building of theory, unfettered debate, etc., he (for we are dealing overwhelmingly with males) opened the draw to look for the right stamp every time some phrase or expression triggered a signal.

Stalin with Dimitrov

‘Fascism’, ah yes, what does the stamp say? It had Georgi Dimitrov’s name on it.  A definition of fascism first adopted by the executive committee of the Communist International at the end of 1933 became famously associated with Stalin’s favourite Dimitrov when it was taken over and circulated more widely in his report to the Seventh World Congress in 1935. This is the one I’ve cited in the preamble above, ‘Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship (etc.)’. It rapidly became orthodoxy on the Stalinist Left, the ‘official’ line on fascism.  

Karat reiterates it with a profound sense of loyalty and timelessness, citing it in the Indian Express piece. The implication here, of course, is that nothing that has been said or written about fascism since 1933–1935 has any relevance for him. We have gained not a whit (in understanding, knowledge, analysis and so on) since those (pre-Holocaust!) years. Do we have a better understanding of fascism today? Obviously not as far as Karat is concerned. That definition is ‘classic’, as he says. ‘Classic’ here means cut in stone, impermeable to argument, eternally true like some truth of logic. As Karat says, there is ‘no room for ambiguity’ here.

The Comintern had deliberately narrowed the definition to ‘finance capital’ to allow other sections of the capitalist class to join the fight against fascism once Stalin decided he desperately needed alliances (‘Popular Fronts’) with all manner of parties regardless of who they represented. For Karat the reference to ‘finance capital’ suffices. It sums up the essence of fascism, and fascism for him is simply a state form, a type of regime that breaks decisively with democracy (‘bourgeois’ democracy).

The response to this is simple: how did such a state emerge in the first place? Fascism must have existed in some form other than a state for it to become a state? Since Karat stopped reading Marxism decades ago, it may be worth rehearsing some of this for him. Before fascism succeeds as a state it exists as a movement. And fascism only succeeds in seizing power because it first succeeds as a mass movement.

The question the revolutionary Left simply failed to address in the twenties and thirties (with a handful of exceptions such the German Marxist Arthur Rosenberg and the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich) was why fascists are able to build mass movements. How do they create a mass base for the parties they form? As soon as we frame the issue in these terms (breaking with Karat’s myopic fascination with end results), the problem itself becomes a practical one. We have to look at the specific techniques used to generate mass support. We have to ask also how this ‘mass’ that fascism creates and dominates differs from, say, the social forces that Marx saw driving revolutionary movements forward.   

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

To suggest that fascism is largely or entirely about ‘finance capital’, that a handful of bankers could have created the fascist movements in Germany and Italy shows how detached dogma can become from reality when it ignores the formation of culture and looks simply at the economy as a force that affects politics without mediations of any sort.

Anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, Islamism, Hindutva, patriarchy, male violence, caste oppression, militarism, and (not least!) nationalism then become basically irrelevant; window-dressing on a beast (capitalism) that works in some purely economic way, as if the ‘formation of the authoritarian structure’ (Reich) which has everything to do with how reactionary ideologies come about in the wider reaches of civil society is not a process every bit as material as the economy.

What does Karat think he is debating? Is there anyone on the Left who claims that we are currently in the throes of a full-blown Hindu Rashtra in India, that the machinery of the law lies in ruins, that the media, servile as they are, have been taken over and remoulded by a self-defining Hindu state, that trade unions have been abolished, opposition parties banned, active opponents rounded up and murdered?  That would be India’s counterpart of a fascist state.

On the other hand, is there anyone (on the Left especially) who is naive enough to think that there is no danger of any of this? That the rampant cultures of communalism, attacks on minorities and repeated violence against them (this includes unlawful detention) are not being used (consciously used) as tools of fascist mobilisation of a spurious ‘Hindu majority’? That the Indian state has not been extensively infiltrated by the RSS at all levels, even down to the vice-chancellorship of JNU?

That the Gujarat cases had to be transferred out of the state of Gujarat by the Supreme Court, no less, speaks volumes for the court’s view of the shamelessly compromised state of the justice system in Gujarat under Modi’s government there. That the mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat became pivotal to the consolidation of Modi’s support-base in the state and then rapidly in other parts of India, leading to his emergence as prime minister; that Modi financed his campaign for power with the explicit backing of big business groups who were looking for a ‘decisive’ leader; that nationalism is now being used to whip up hysteria among the middle classes to try and justify the repeated use of charges like ‘sedition’ and justify attacks on freedom of speech, thought and politics; that the Right-wing in India has repositioned itself in the more totalising and utterly sinister discourse of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ to create the absurd sense of an Indian Volksgemeinschaft and construct definitions of the other as ‘anti-national’, a sort of fifth column of the nation’s enemies… if none of this reminds us of the way fascism emerges and builds itself up historically, then we have no memory, and certainly not a historical one.       

“India today confronts the advance of an authoritarianism…”, Karat argues, wanting to distinguish this from fascism. The issue surely is what form of authoritarianism we are up against in India today. While all authoritarianisms are not fascist, all fascisms are a form of authoritarianism. What is distinctive about fascist authoritarianism is its appeal to forms of mass mobilisation and attempt to create sources of legitimacy among ‘the masses’ – through cultural (e.g. pseudo-religious) and ideological domination.

'The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes'. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years.

This is why Hindutva becomes a marker of something more sinister than just authoritarian politics. In Karat’s mental map, as I said, culture and ideology play no major role; they are simply tools to divide people to allow those in power to implement what he sees as the truly dangerous agenda of ‘neo-liberalism’. They are a sort of sideshow, pure excrescences on a largely economic programme where capital remains the chief instrumentality.

Karat agrees that the RSS has a “semi-fascist ideology (and) the potential to impose an authoritarian state on the people when it believes that circumstances warrant it”. Why ‘semi-fascist’? What is its other half? When Golwalkar praised the extermination of the Jews as a possible model for the way a future Hindu state might want to deal with its minorities, was he being ‘semi-fascist’? Is the growing culture of intolerance and forcible suppression of political views the BJP finds abrasive ‘semi-fascist’?
 
And the qualification ‘when it believes the circumstances warrant it’? How do people at large tell the RSS has finally come around to that belief?  That it has so decided? The answer, alas, as with so much of the immobile Left, is – when it’s too late!
 
The German film director Alexander Kluge calls this approach to history and politics ‘Learning Processes With a Deadly Outcome’. If that mum with her three kids in the basement of this house in Halberstadt on 8 April 1945 had fought the Nazis in 1928 and millions of others like her had done the same, she wouldn’t be there now, on this dreadful day in April, sheltering from a fleet of 200 American bombers that will, in seconds, wipe out her entire town.
 
If Stalin and the Comintern hadn’t worked overtime to sabotage the possibility of a United Front between the German Communists and the Social Democrats and the two parties had fought fascism with combined strength; if the Left in Germany had campaigned more consistently and vigorously against anti-Semitism than it ever did and started those campaigns much earlier; if feminism had been a stronger force in German society and the patriarchal/authoritarian order less firmly entrenched in German families… and so on and so forth.
 
Learning processes that shape history, that affect its outcome, are those that strive consciously to learn the lessons that generate a politics that preserves and affirms life against the ‘deadly outcome’. Do we wake up one morning and say, India’s fascism was ‘majoritarian communalism’ after all!!    
 
“The political struggle against the BJP cannot be conducted in alliance with the other major party of the ruling classes”. This of course reflects a major rift within the CPI(M) itself and may well be Karat’s way of posturing for control of loyalties in the web of factional conflicts that have characterised the party for years. So why was the CPI(M) in alliance with that ‘other major party of the ruling class’ in the first place?
 
The alliance broke over a nuclear deal with the US but doubtless no similar deal with Putin would have occasioned a major crisis of that sort. Since the United Front has come up and Karat prefers the safety of a 'Third Period' position (short of calling the Congress, a former ally, ‘social fascist’; 'Third Period' refers to the politics of the Comintern in the period of widespread economic collapse that was said to have started in 1928), perhaps we can leave him with Nehru’s more Marxist grasp of this issue than he himself seems to have:
 

 
There is a constant sense in Karat’s opinion piece that neo-liberalism is as dangerous if not more dangerous than communalism. But this is a senseless position. To the extent that communalism leads to a fascist transformation of the state, it deprives working people of any basis for resisting capitalist onslaughts. Neo-liberalism disarms the working class economically, destroying its cohesion in an industrial, economic sense. Racism, communalism and nationalism (all nationalism, not just what Karat calls ‘chauvinist’ nationalism) do the same in more insidious ways, destroying the possibility of the working class ever acquiring a sense of its own solidarity and of what it really is.

(The writer is a well-known historian and Marxist intellectual).

The post Stalin’s Ghost Won’t Save Us from the Spectre of Fascism: A Response to Prakash Karat appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Courtesy: Orange-papers.org

‘Make in India’ has failed to resonate with businesses internationally because the accumulation of capital, worldwide, is driven by more than just propaganda and a fading charisma. But this hasn’t stopped the ruling party and government machinery from ‘making’ at a furious pace. It has manufactured the crisis at JNU as part of a wide-ranging assault on the control of higher education in the country.

To manufacture that crisis it has fabricated ‘sedition’ charges, evidence ostensibly implicating JNUSU leaders (videos, tweets), smear campaigns, hysteria (storm-troopers in black coats), even a conception of patriotism that identifies a country not with its people and their real conditions but with some mythical, half-deified abstraction before which people, real flesh-and-blood people, have to bow in a state of permanent genuflection and fear.

Behind this mixture of tragedy and farce looms the patriarchal shadow of the RSS. Of course, no one elected the RSS in 2014 but they feel they have the right to run the country and are effectively doing so. The ABVP is one of its many arms, extended ruthlessly into campuses to beat them into submission to ‘sanghvaad’. The ABVP has an assurance that it can mobilise the state machinery to enforce this drive to dominate the universities. JNU’s strongly left-wing culture and tradition have warded off this attack with a remarkable display of unity and good political sense.

The following write-up stems from a talk the author gave at JNU on 11 March. It isn’t a transcript but a reconstruction of the essential arguments in that lecture. It looks at fascism through the work of three writers, extracting major insights from each of them. It lays out three basic theses: 1. About the constructed nature of nationalism (or fascism’s use of the “myth of the nation”, Mussolini’s expression!); 2. About the family/patriarchy as the most important instrument of the state’s power; and, 3. About fascist violence as a product of what Sartre calls “the continuous action of a group on a series”.  To be able to confront fascism successfully, supporters of democracy have to be able to build resistance at each of these levels.
 

At a talk I gave in JNU recently I suggested that it was crucial for us to deal with the deeper forces from which fascism stems and not fall into the trap of thinking, for example, that fascism only emerges in a context of massive economic crisis or is even caused by economic crisis, as a lot of Marxists still think. I identified those ‘deeper forces’ with nationalism, patriarchy (or the authoritarian family), and the way organised groups are able to exercise domination over the largely unorganised mass of any modern society.

Each of these perspectives (1. fascism and the myth of the nation, or, if you like, the constructed nature of nationalism; 2. patriarchy as the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society; and, 3. the conception of ‘manipulated seriality’ as the heart of fascist politics) is embodied with special clarity in the work of at least one of three thinkers of the Left, viz. Arthur Rosenberg (1889–1943), Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). Sartre is too well known to say much about but the other two, Rosenberg and Reich, are worth introducing briefly.

Arthur Rosenberg was a historian who was also politically active. As a member of what became the KPD (German Communist Party), he was part of the left-of-centre grouping within the party called the ‘Berlin Left’. The Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch was also part of this grouping. Rosenberg was also a Reichstag deputy, that is, a member of the German parliament, but he resigned from the KPD in 1927 out of sheer disgust at the way the Comintern (under Stalin’s influence) kept interfering in the affairs of the German party. He fled from Germany in 1933, and eventually died in the USA (of cancer) some ten years later.

In 1934 he published Fascism as a Mass Movement, which argued that fascism only succeeds to the extent that it succeeds in becoming a mass movement. This raises the whole issue of what it means for the extreme Right (any extreme Right) to be able to construct a ‘mass’ base. How does it do that, given that its political agenda is so manifestly opposed to the economic and democratic interests of ordinary working people?

Wilhelm Reich moved from Vienna to Berlin in the late 1920s. He was a psychoanalyst strongly influenced by Freud but deeply critical of the latter’s separation between psychoanalysis and politics and of his excessive political timidity in the face of fascism.

When Reich moved to Berlin from Vienna he started a series of ‘Sexpol clinics’ which were hugely popular. The clinics attracted thousands of patients from largely working-class families, because they were literally the only places where ordinary people could discuss their sexual problems and their sexual lives in some overt way, especially the kinds of stress and/or distress they were experiencing.

To take one example, in 1931 there were some 1 million illegal abortions in Germany and a staggering forty-four percent of those resulted in fatalities! Reich began to confront the problem of emerging fascism partly through his experience in those clinics, and soon after Hitler came to power in 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, arguing that it was impossible to understand the appeal of the Nazis without its psychological roots, that is, without looking at the nature of families, domination within them and the sort of character-structures that lay at the back of the fascist success.

Reich was promptly expelled from the German Communist Party when he published Mass Psychology, then hounded by the authorities in all the countries he fled to by way of seeking asylum, and, like Rosenberg, ended up in the USA where he died in an American prison, under FBI custody.

Fascism and the Myth of the Nation

To Rosenberg fascism largely reiterated ideas that were widespread in European society before the First War. (“The ideology which is today called ‘fascist’ was already widespread before the War.”) In his analysis the conservative elites of 19^th-century Europe adjusted to the era of parliamentary democracy and mass politics with an aggressive nationalism imbued with racial ideas, one that canvassed active support for strong states wedded to expansion abroad and was unashamedly willing to use anti-Semitism “as a way of preventing middle-class voters from moving to the Left” (Weiss, Conservatism in Europe 1770-1945, p. 89).

Rosenberg argued that fascism lacked a coherent ideology of its own, it was a pastiche of motifs drawn from the ultra-nationalist political circles of the pre-war period. In this sense he reversed the direction of causality between ideology and politics. The Nazis emerged from a pre-existing ideological milieu dominated by a “stupid, fanatical nationalism”.

“Fascism developed the nationalist propaganda characteristic of the new kind of politics to perfection.” (Fascism as a Mass Movement, p. 27). Rosenberg called this a “demagogic nationalism” that “spontaneously seeks an object through which it can daily demonstrate its own superiority and release the delirium of its racial frenzy” (p. 32). 

With liberalism in retreat across most of Europe it was this aggressive authoritarian xenophobic nationalism that came to the fore. Secondly, the targeting of minorities such as the Jews in Germany became a mobilising strategy and led in Germany to the proliferation of numerous racist ‘action groups’ well before the Nazis themselves became popular.

What was peculiar to fascism, Rosenberg argues, was the storm-trooper tactic, that is, the active use of violent squads that attacked Jews, destroyed Jewish property and so on in pogroms that targeted them the way Muslims and Christians have been targeted in India, but also combated the unions, strikers, Communists, etc. Street clashes between Nazis and Communists dominated the late 1920s but failed to stem the growth of Nazism.

A still from the Hindi film, 'Parzania'

One reason was that the storm-troopers worked with the connivance of the state. The active complicity of the existing state authorities in condoning fascist violence is a key element of Rosenberg’s argument. The authorities turned a blind eye to illegal activities such as conspiracies and political murders and to the repeated atrocities against Jews.  The storm-troopers should have been tried and convicted in the courts of law but nothing of the sort happened.  Trials were used as further platforms for Nazi propaganda. The police and the courts connived in fascist violence instead of dealing with it as the law required.  State complicity for Rosenberg was a major reason why the Nazis could survive into the late 1920s to re-emerge rapidly as a mass movement.

What about nationalism itself?  In the talk at JNU I contra-posed two broad views of the subject, Gellner’s conception of the constructed nature of nationalism (nationalism exists before nations do, nations are simply their invention) and Benedict Anderson’s view of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.  For example, Eric Hobsbawm writes, “with Gellner I would stress the element of artifact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations. ‘Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying [humans], as an inherent … political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality’. In short, for the purposes of analysis nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’’

To explain this a bit more, to think of nations as somehow existing before and outside of nationalism is to reify them. Nationalism is not the self-awakening to consciousness of pre-formed, pre-existing entities called ‘nations’ but the process by which nations are defined and constructed to be or to look like what they are.

For his part, Anderson doesn’t explain who does the “imagining”. And what does it mean to say that the nation “is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship”?

Isn’t this a way of almost saying that the imaginary construct of the “nation” is an attempt to make people forget that in real life they are actually divided into classes, castes, genders, and so on and that these divisions are marked by deep inequalities and relations of oppression?

In her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity the American scholar Liah Greenfeld describes something she calls collectivistic nationalism. This it seems to me is an apt description for the sort of nationalism that the BJP and their handlers are trying to shove down our throats today. She writes, “Much more often a nation is defined not as a composite entity but as a collective individual, endowed with a will and interest of its own, which are independent of and take priority over the wills and interests of human individuals within the nation. Such a definition of the nation results in collectivistic nationalism. Collectivistic nationalisms tend to be authoritarian and imply a fundamental inequality between a small group of self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation – the leaders – and the masses, who have to adapt to the elite's interpretations.”

 We are up against an artificially engineered surge of collectivistic nationalism in India today, except that this one is strongly imbued with communal overtones.  But it’s important to see that much of the myth-making about the “nation” is part of a wider fascist agenda. As Mosse pointed out, nationalism is the “bedrock” upon which all fascist movements built themselves.

The indoctrination strats early

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia

Patriarchy as the Mainstay of the State

Reich’s perspective moves the focus away from broad historical movements to the mechanisms which allow ideologies like nationalism to gain a wider purchase. He locates those mechanisms in the structure of the family and the kinds of sexual repression that abound there. The authoritarian family, Reich argues, is a veritable factory of reactionary ideology and structure. As such it is the mainstay of the state’s power in modern (capitalist) society.

Patriarchy for Reich is characterised not just by the domination of women by the leading males of the family but by the sexual suppression of both women and children within the family. “The goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system” (Mass Psychology, p. 25).

Reich went further. He suggested that the submissive, authority-fearing character-structure moulded in this kind of family was the key reason for the emergence of Hitler-type political leaders, Führers or “mass leaders” with a commanding or overpowering presence that could mobilise and dominate “masses”. Fascism’s ability to dominate the middle class and wider masses beyond it could be explained by the way children and adolescents grew up to identify with authority in one form or another – with their employers, with the state authorities, with the state itself and finally with the “nation”.

This process of “identification” was one sense in which ideology could be seen as becoming a “material force”.  “The more helpless the individual is made by his upbringing, the more strongly does he identify himself with the Führer… This tendency to identification is the psychological basis of national narcissism, that is, of a self-confidence based on identification with the “greatness of the nation”.’ (Mass Psychology, p. 38)

Manipulated Seriality and the Climate as Worked Matter

Finally, Sartre. In his great work The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) there are two ideas specifically that we should try and integrate into our understanding of fascism. The first is his notion of “manipulated seriality”, the second his conception of the political climate or fascist violence as “worked matter”.  

Sartre divides modern societies into two sorts of ensembles, “series” and “organised groups”. Seriality is the condition of being unorganised, hence incapable of acting and therefore vulnerable to domination by those who are organised and who do act (collectively). That domination can take the form of manipulating seriality, that is, conditioning series or influencing them to behave in certain ways.

Political propaganda works on the same principle as advertising; it generates what Sartre calls the illusion of “totalised seriality”. The series (ensembles that are unorganised, hence sharply distinct from the “organised groups”) can do nothing, it is dispersed and inert, but through advertising, propaganda, the mass media, climates of fear, violence, etc. it can have a great deal done to it and even think of itself as somehow unified! Advertisers get consumers to buy things by suggesting that ‘others’ are buying them. Those ‘others’ don’t actually exist, since each potential consumer is other to the other and the whole chain forms an infinite regress.

The pogrom is a gruesome example of how powerful organised groups can even extract actions (dispersive acts of violence) from the series while the latter remain serial, that is, dispersed, unorganised and inert. They become the instruments of the violence orchestrated/perpetrated by organised groups. Sartre calls this sort of violence the “passive activity of a directed seriality”.

Advanced criminal jurisdictions in the world today seek to cope with these situations of violence by using a robust concept of “command responsibility”.  Climates of fear, violence, etc. that trigger a wave of lynchings, pogroms and so on are also worked matter, that is, they are the result of organised groups working serialities (or working on series), as if this was a production process where masses of people are literally the raw material of the labour (praxis, freely chosen activity) of organised groups. A climate of violence is created by organised groups as a conscious act/activity. Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics, Sartre argues in the Critique.

A still from Rakesh Sharma's documentary 'Final Solution' on Gujarat 2002 mass crimes

Fascist Origins of the RSS

What the talk at JNU did was to look at fascism through these complementary perspectives and suggest that they need to be seen as different moments of the same general development. Subservience to authority turns out to be a central theme in the conditions that allow for fascist emergence. It was the factor that Reich himself stressed most of all, linking it with the nature of the family and describing the family itself as “the most important instrument of the state’s power”.

The RSS understood this from its inception. Marzia Casolari has shown the reasoning that lay behind the emergence of the shakha. BS Moonje, friend and mentor of Hedgewar, RSS founder, described his 1931 meeting with Mussolini in his diary. Moonje, Casolari points out, “played a crucial role in moulding the RSS along Italian (fascist) lines”.

Here is what he wrote in his diary: “The idea of fascism vividly brings out the conception of unity amongst people… India and particularly Hindu India need some such institution [as the Fascist youth organizations] for the military regeneration of the Hindus… Our institution of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of Nagpur under Dr Hedgewar is of this kind…”.  The RSS would be publicly embarrassed to have these connections widely publicised since they show that its own model of moulding the minds of Indian youth stems directly from the experience of Italy and Mussolini’s recommendations.

Moonje was tremendously impressed by the way the Italian Fascist Party organised the indoctrination and training of Italian youth and transposed the model to India through the RSS. Italian fascism was defeated and overthrown in the 1940s but its legacy lives on, not just in the way youngsters in India are being trained for physical combat and indoctrinated in subservience to some mythical national utopia, but also in the structures that have allowed fascism to become a major threat to India’s democracy, not least among these being the manipulated hysteria of nationalism and the structures of patriarchy and the traditional family. 
 
 

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