New Delhi: Israel’s ambassador to India Naor Gilon on Saturday today, Saturday, December 3,posted a screenshot of a message he said he had received on Twitter, justifying the holocaust and praising Hitler, days after he intervened in a controversy surrounding the movie ‘The Kashmir Files’.

The ambassador also said he was withholding the identity of the person who sent him the message to protect him. In a follow-up tweet, Mr Gilon said he was also “touched” by the support he received upon posting the message.

The message came a few days after the Israeli envoy publicly condemned an acclaimed Israeli filmmaker, Nadav Lapid, who called ‘The Kashmir Files’ a “propaganda” and “vulgar movie” at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa.

Mr Gilon had, within hours of the denunciation, also apologised to India in an “open letter” on Twitter, on Tuesday, a day after filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who is heading the festival jury, slammed the movie at the closing ceremony of the festival yesterday.

‘The Kashmir Files’, directed by Vivek Agnihotri, revolves around the exodus and killing of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in 1990. It has been mired in controversy since its release in March, with many calling it a poignant depiction of a tragic period and critics alleging it is loose with facts.

Israeli ambassador, Gilon said Nadav Lapid had abused the Indian invitation to the judges’ panel in the “worst way”.

“In Indian culture, they say that a guest is like God. You have abused in the worst way the Indian invitation to chair the panel of judges at @IFFIGoa as well as the trust, respect, and warm hospitality they have bestowed on you,” he added.

Nadav Lapid had said the jurors at the film festival were “disturbed and shocked” by ‘The Kashmir Files’. Two days later, he offered a “total apology” if his remarks had been misinterpreted and said his aim was not to insult the Kashmiri Pandit community or those who had suffered.

Post a comment “But at the same time, whatever I said, and I said clearly that for me and my fellow jury members, it was, and it is a vulgar propaganda movie that didn’t have a place and was inappropriate for such a prestigious competitive section. I can repeat it again and again,” he told news channel CNN-News18.

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Participating in a panel discussion in the Raisina Dialogue, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav claimed that German dictator Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were the “products of democracy”

Taking a dig at the Opposition parties over their agitation against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), he said that those who lost in the “democratic process” converted the “streets into the democratic platform” and engaged in violence.

Without naming anyone and taking a jibe at the protesters he said, “When someone loses in the democratic process and makes roads into the democratic platform, involves in violence and say the government is not listening, that is not the democratic spirit.”

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Twenty seven days after Adolf Hitler was sown in as Chancellor of Germany and head of the coalition government, a fire broke out, arson, that brought the Reichstag down. The home of the German Parliament building was burnt down. Hitler used this incident to blame it on a murderous communist conspiracy, although later it was largely believed to have been the action of a lone Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe who was caught near the building. The hysteria and propaganda around the event was pivotal in consolidating power of Nazi rule in Germany.
News of the fire that started in the Reichstag building, was received by an alarm call of a Berlin fire station received shortly after 9 p.m. By the time the firefighters and the police arrived, the main Chamber of Deputies part of the Reichstag was almost completely destroyed, engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found van der Lubbe. He was arrested, as were four communist leaders soon after.
Adolf Hitler pushed German President Paul von Hindenburg to declare an emergency after passing a decree. This act suspended all civil liberties and allowed the Nazi brown shirts to hound the Communist party of Germany. Mass arrests of communists followed, including all of the Communist Party parliamentary delegates. With their bitter rival communists gone and their seats empty, the Nazi Party went from being a party dependent on others. to the majority, thus enabling Hitler to consolidate his power. In January 1933, the Nazis had only 32% of the seats.
In February 1933 itself, three men were arrested who were to play pivotal roles during the Leipzig Trial, known also as the “Reichstag Fire Trial”: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoy Popov (all Bulgarians). Who caused the fire? To date this subject is the topic of historical research. Historians disagree as to whether van der Lubbe acted alone, as he said, to protest the condition of the German working class. The Nazis accused the Comintern of the act. Some other historians endorse the theory, that the arson was planned and ordered by the Nazis as a false flag operation.
Trial
In July 1933, three persons were charged with setting the Reichstag on fire. They were Marinus van der Lubbe, Ernst Torgler, georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popoy and Vasil Tanev. From September 21 to 23 December 1933, the Leipzig Trial took place and was presided over by judges from the German Supreme Court, the Reichsgericht. The accused were charged with arson and with attempting to overthrow the government.
Hitler used the Leipzig Trial for state propaganda against communists and it was predicted that the court would find the Communists guilty on all counts and approve the repression and terror exercised by the Nazis against all opposition forces in the country. At the end of the trial, however, only Van der Lubbe was convicted, while his fellow defendants were found not guilty. In 1934, Van der Lubbe was beheaded in a German prison yard. In 1967, a court in West Berlin overturned the 1933 verdict, and posthumously changed Van der Lubbe’s sentence to 8 years in prison. In 1980, another court overturned the verdict, but was overruled. In 1981, a West German court posthumously overturned Van der Lubbe’s 1933 conviction and found him not guilty by reason of insanity. This ruling was subsequently overturned. He was however pardoned  in January 2008, he was pardoned under a 1998 law for the crime on the grounds that anyone convicted under Nazi Germany is officially not guilty. The law allows pardons for people convicted of crimes under the Nazis, based on the idea that the laws of Nazi Germany “went against the basic ideas of justice”.
Georgi Dimitrov began his testimony on the third day of the trial. He gave up his right to a court-appointed lawyer and defended himself successfully. When warned by Judge Bürger to behave himself in court, Dimitrov stated: “Herr President, if you were a man as innocent as myself and you had passed seven months in prison, five of them in chains night and day, you would understand it if one perhaps becomes a little strained.” During the course of his defence, Dimitrov claimed that the organizers of the fire were senior members of the Nazi Party and frequently verbally clashed with Göring at the trial.
Highpoint of the trial was on November 4, 1933, when Göring was in the witness box and was cross-examined by Dimitrov. Excerpts:
Dimitrov: Herr Prime Minister Göring stated on February 28 that, when arrested, the “Dutch Communist Van der Lubbe had on his person his passport and a membership card of the Communist Party”. From whom was this information taken?
Göring: The police search all common criminals, and report the result to me.
Dimitrov: The three officials who arrested and examined Van der Lubbe all agreed that no membership card of the Communist Party was found on him. I should like to know where the report that such a card had been found came from.
Göring: I was told by an official. Things which were reported to me on the night of the fire…could not be tested or proven. The report was made to me by a responsible official, and was accepted as a fact, and as it could not be tested immediately it was announced as a fact. When I issued the first report to the press on the morning after the fire the interrogation of Van der Lubbe had not been concluded. In any case I do not see that anyone has any right to complain because it seems proved in this trial that Van der Lubbe had no such card on him.
Dimitrov: I would like to ask the Minister of the Interior what steps he took to make sure that Van der Lubbe’s route to Hennigsdorf, his stay and his meetings with other people there were investigated by the police to assist them in tracking down Van der Lubbe’s accomplices?
Göring: As I am not an official myself, but a responsible Minister it was not important that I should trouble myself with such petty, minor matters. It was my task to expose the Party, and the mentality, which was responsible for the crime.
Dimitrov: Is the Reichsminister aware of the fact that those that possess this alleged criminal mentality today control the destiny of a sixth part of the world – the Soviet Union?
Göring: I don’t care what happens in Russia! I know that the Russians pay with bills, and I should prefer to know that their bills are paid! I care about the Communist Party here in Germany and about Communist crooks who come here to set the Reichstag on fire!
Dimitrov: This criminal mentality rules the Soviet Union, the greatest and best country in the world. Is Herr Prime Minister aware of that?
Göring: I shall tell you what the German people already know. They know that you are behaving in a disgraceful manner! They know that you are a Communist crook who came to Germany to set the Reichstag on fire! In my eyes you are nothing, but a scoundrel, a crook who belongs on the gallows!”.
The judge played safe in his verdict. Judge Bürger stated that while he believed that there had been, indeed,  a Communist conspiracy to burn down the Reichstag, he said that except for in the case of Van der Lubbe, there was insufficient evidence to connect the accused to the fire or the alleged conspiracy. Only Van der Lubbe was found guilty and sentenced to death. The rest were acquitted and were expelled to the Soviet Union, where they received a heroic welcome. The one exception was Torgler, who was taken into “protective custody” by the police until 1935. After being released, he assumed a pseudonym and moved away from Berlin.
Hitler was enraged with this outcome of this trial. He decreed that henceforth treason—among many other offenses—would only be tried by a newly established People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). The People’s Court later became associated with the number of death sentences it handed down, including those following the 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, which were presided over by then Judge-President Roland Freisler.
December 23, 1933 was the day Dimitrov was set free.
 

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Image credit: Quora

It is epic. An oedipal argument that demands the destruction of the old and the grand, so that the new edifice rises that much the higher. In the business of empire building, mere business or the politics of power, there is much bloodshed in the battlefield. And to the winner belong the spoils, the laurel crown on the brow, and the profile in marble and in gold.

No, the tallest statue in the world will not be his. It will remain as planned, that of Vallabh Bhai Patel, the Congressman from Gujarat. But everyone will see in the glum, brooding, motionless steel Patel, the lively reality of Narendrabhai Damodardas Modi. The man and his admirer are both important to the project, each impossible without the other.

To his critics, Modi may remain the man in the striped charcoal grey suit. Not suit and boots. No one wears boots in India, other than soldiers, and a few great grandsons of former rajas who still fancy themselves princes as if there never had been an Indira Gandhi who stripped them of their feudal titles. The stripes in his suit, as everyone knows, were letters of his name, woven into the expensive Rs 10 lakh fabric, in an unending chant to his glory.

He has often assumed the pose and posture, we have seen, and possibly sees himself at least in his dreams, as a true follower of his namesake Narendra Dutt, the modern-age warrior saint who rejuvenated Hinduism, and in his lifetime was called Swami Vivekananda. The students and government employees of the state of Madhya Pradesh will be reminded of this connect every day. 

The government of the state has asked all educational institutions to display portraits of the prime minister and the saffron-clad monk in his now famous pose, on their walls. After the outcry of Modi replacing Mahatma Gandhi in the calendars and official publicity material of the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, the state was clinically politically correct in putting Mahatma Gandhi and Babasaheb BR Ambedkar also on the wall. There are no options. You defy that order at risk of your job.

The brand building has been assiduous, intuitively by the man, but also with assistance from the experts in mass psychology resident in the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). They had spotted it early. Their recruitment was from unmarried men, bachelors and presumably celibates. This young man had been married, if only for a very brief period, and had then walked out on his young bride in cold-blooded pursuit of a future in the service of Mother India. Sterling material. The year 2002 would prove them right. And in turn, that commitment qualified him for higher office in 2014.

Modi has been, in a manner, in a warrior mode ever since. In suits, tunics, costumes of a dozen states and a score of nations, beating huge drums or sounding the conch in prayer, he remains the warrior, arms outstretched holding unseen weapons, his expensive watches, writing instruments and spectacles like so many pieces of body armour.

He chooses his targets well, sharply and placed well in the crosshairs of his eyepiece, much as Arjuna, the field commander, did. He too says he has been wronged, and his mother, the land, has been robbed, and he must avenge this insult. Above all, he says he is being targeted, and threatened with injury.

He seemingly is going by the book, following a script that Jawaharlal Nehru first wrote, and then Indira Gandhi. Nehru, the first prime minister, placed the assassinated Gandhi at the core of the new nation, born in a bloody partition, erasing the contribution of every other leader who had walked with the Mahatma. Most of them he had angered anyway, rejecting their chauvinism and their orthodoxy which they wanted perpetuated in new laws. They were therefore not even a memory in the mind of the generation raised in the first two decades of Independence.

Indira Gandhi was ruthless. She destroyed the old Congress, annihilating all those who had remained from Nehru’s purges. Going further than her father, she saw herself as the saviour of the combined heritage of Nehru and Gandhi, removing every vestige of the Raj and the hold that the industrial giants and moneybags had over political structures and the administration.

The ending the privy purses and egos, and political influence that went with the feudal principalities, she finally completed the task that Patel was apparently reluctant to do. He had got the princes to sign in as members of the new Union of India, but had allowed them their titles and allowances. They remained Their Highnesses in a republican democracy, anachronisms and agents of the status quo.

Indira Gandhi inevitably attracted sycophants, courtiers and satraps who paid her homage. Eventually this conflated her with India, the nation. When the notional Congress president, Dev Kant Barooah, said “Indira is India”, he no more than told her something she believed in, and was just waiting to hear. She did not plan the subsequent chain of events, but it was as if the time-chain had been designed by a higher power.

Civil disobedience of a different kind by a motley combination of old enemies and new internationally connected agitators inexorably led to a state of Emergency, and the suspension of the Constitution and the human rights and civil liberties that were enshrined in it. The police system was enslaved, and the Supreme Court, in self-preservation, evolved a suitable jurisprudence for the times. 

The evolution of the concept of a “national conscience” is in keeping with that errant tradition. The Khalistan movement, the emergence of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the army attack on him in the Golden temple complex, her assassination, and the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and other cities in 1984, are links of a macabre nightmare lived by so many.
 
Admired, loathed, hated and cursed, Indira Gandhi saw many moods of her people. She remains in their memory.

But even at the height of the Indira-is-India rhetoric and the hired crowds at her residence at Number I, Safdarjang Road in New Delhi, in the mid-summer heat of police surveillance, Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) and extra-constitutional centres of authority and their fawning officials, there was, in hindsight, a difference. The cadres, perhaps, were of the poor. Garibi Hatao, she had said, of her creed.  The critics were the rich, the once powerful, those who had once exercised control.

Like her, Modi has razed every edifice, every little milestone that could remind of the past political legacy. In destroying the virtual statues of Nehru and Indira, he has also destroyed the memory of the years of Vishwanath Pratap Singh who implemented the Mandal Commission report and gave political power to the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and communities to which Modi, a Ghanchi, himself belongs. And in true oedipal thrust, he has also erased the six years of Atal Behari Vajpayee.

The cadres now are the middle class, the power brokers, the bigots. The bigots grow the most, expectedly, nourished on a heady diet of supremacist cultural nationalism. Hate, targeted violence and state impunity intimidate, marginalise and alienate religious minorities as never before. It would seem there is a de facto state religion, that India is, in their minds, a theocracy. The super-rich, the crony capitalists, are entrenched, favoured and protected even in a globalised economy. Their wealth finds a short circuit to growth, feeding off the assets of what was the public sector.

This economy demands its own blood sacrifice. Trade unions are comatose, if not dead. The rights of the farmers and the tribals are no longer sacred. If anything, their sacred groves are being defiled, destroyed in reckless abandon. Their young men and women are incarcerated. Many executed, branded as extremists and foreign agents, enemies if the state.

To be a stable, profitable equation, this demands that the leader and his garrisons uphold each other, build each other as icons, larger than life. Indigenous industrial and economic progress, which led to the growth of the heavy industry sector, the big dams and the advances in space science and technology, and the birth of the Information Technology sector, is given a fresh coat of paint as Make in India.

To call it a cult will be to minimise its potential and its threat.  Modi is not the Fuehrer, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) not the Gestapo and the cadres, some in khaki long pants and the others in striped suits like the one he himself has worn at least once, are not Fascists and Nazis in jackboots.

This is a more sophisticated and malevolent regime and emerging political system.

Political scientists and public philosophers are yet to invent a name for it.
 
(This article is also published in Indian Currents weekly).
 
 
 

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Royal tomb mask from Calakmul, Mexico, ca. 7th c. / National Geographic

Indian liberalism makes a formidable claim: that the Republic is grounded in such a structurally elaborate and ideologically hegemonic liberal-democratic institutional framework that political forces of all hues are forced to consent to this framework, stake their claims and test out their fortunes within it, go in and out of the corridors of power through procedures of electoral democracy, and thereby further strengthen the liberal framework itself.

It is further claimed that since all political forces, from the communist to the fascist, are compelled to accept the norms of universal franchise and multi-party elections, they are further compelled to move closer to the liberal Centre as soon as they begin to participate in the exercise of governmental power. For the political Centre of this power is itself circumscribed by equally powerful institutions of the civil bureaucracy, an independent judiciary, a freewheeling fourth estate, as well as a vibrant and highly articulate civil society. And, indeed, more than enough empirical evidence is available for one to construct a plausible narrative of post-Independence India on such premises. Its plausibility is what gives to the claim such persuasive power.

On the other hand, the basic trajectory of Indian political life over roughly the past quarter century — 1990 to 2015 let us say, especially as it comes into sharper relief after the elections of 2014 — indicates a steady rightward shift that is both quantitatively and qualitatively so significant that it is not so much the right that moves closer to the liberal Centre, occasional tactical concessions notwithstanding, but the liberal Centre that keeps moving further and further to the right. The Indian polity of today seems to be undergoing a historically unprecedented process: the irresistible rise of the extreme right to dominance in vast areas of culture, society, ideology and economy, albeit with commitment to observe virtually all the institutional norms of liberal democracy.

This will to a 'long march through the institutions’ and to capturing total state power not through frontal seizure — as was once customary for revolutions of the left as well as the right — but through patiently engineered and legally legitimate takeover of those institutions by its personnel from within, while keeping the institutions intact, raises a very different kind of question: is there really an irreconcilable contradiction, an unbridgeable gap, between institutions of liberal democracy and takeover of the State by the extreme right? In other words, can the extreme right rule and pursue its own agenda through liberal institutions?

We shall come to some factual details shortly. Suffice it to say here that a power bloc has undoubtedly become dominant in India in whose ideology a religio-cultural definition of nationhood functions very much the way theories of race used to function in the Nazi ideology; and that the powerful backing in word and deed that Narendra Modi, the present prime minister, received during his bid for power by virtually the whole of the corporate apex, does remind one of Mussolini’s famous definition of fascism as a form of State in which government and corporations become one.

Unlike all the inter-war ideologies of the European irrationalist, extreme right — whether Nazi or fascist or merely militarist and unlike their Islamist counterparts — the Hindutva extreme right has fashioned no comparable discourse of rejection of or contempt for liberal democracy as such.

The question of fascism in this context will be addressed briefly in a later section of this essay. It is worth remarking, though, that unlike all the inter-war ideologies of the European irrationalist, extreme right — whether Nazi or fascist or merely militarist and unlike their Islamist counterparts — the Hindutva extreme right has fashioned no comparable discourse of rejection of or contempt for liberal democracy as such. The phrase 'extreme right’ here does not apply to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the current ruling party. The BJP functions as a political party but is, in its essence, a right-wing front of the extreme right that is represented primarily by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Instead they train hundreds of thousands of their cadres to build a well-oiled, invincible electoral machine for contest at the polls. They do propose many significant changes in the Indian constitution.

However, there is no rhetoric against constitutional, liberal democratic form as such, in contrast even to the Indian communist left which ritually criticises 'bourgeois democracy’ while participating, indeed, giving most of its energy to participating in all its rituals and procedures. This unconditional public commitment to liberal democratic norms contrasts sharply, however, with the self-organisation of Hindutva’s central organ itself, as we shall see below. In practice, this commitment to liberal democratic form is most pronounced in the arena of electoral politics. In the social life of the country, though, organised mob violence is utilised routinely but always presented as a response to misconduct by the Muslim and/or Christian minorities. Whether this absence of open opposition to liberal constitutionality is an abiding commitment or a pragmatic decision open to repudiation at a later stage remains unclear.

The intricate, multi-layered networks of this extreme right are spearheaded in today’s India by the RSS and, secondarily, by its political front, the BJP, while the RSS also commands, quite literally, thousands of fronts across the country, for every conceivable social category in Indian society, whether defined by caste or profession or language or region or whatever. This organisational form highly centralised in its fundamentals, multi-faceted and flexibly organised in others responds strategically to the fact that India is by far the most heterogeneous society in the world and welding it all together into a single hegemonic political project would take an enormous act of imagination and organisation that would have to be sustained over an unpredictably long period of time. The objective is not merely to win elections and form governments but to transform Indian society in all domains of culture, religion and civilisation. Acquisition of political power is seen as a means toward that end.

The RSS was founded ninety years ago, in 1925, on an uncannily Gramscian principle that enduring political power can arise only on the basis of a prior cultural transformation and consent, and this broad based cultural consent to the extreme right’s doctrines can only be built through a long historical process, from the bottom up.

The RSS was founded ninety years ago, in 1925, on an uncannily Gramscian principle that enduring political power can arise only on the basis of a prior cultural transformation and consent, and this broad based cultural consent to the extreme right’s doctrines can only be built through a long historical process, from the bottom up. What follows from this ideological articulation of the long-term strategy is that if the RSS succeeds in constituting a certain sort of social subjectivity for the great majority of Hindus in India who are said to constitute some 80 per cent of the Indian population (we shall come later to this claim) and if they can all be unified, positively, in pursuit of a civilisational mission, and, negatively, in permanent opposition to a fancied enemy (Muslim and Christian minorities in the countries), as the Nazis sought to unite the German nation against the Jews, then the demographic majority can be turned into a permanent political majority. In that case, what the left might designate as the extreme right could rule comfortably through the institutions of liberal democracy in India that have already adjusted themselves to low-intensity but punctual use of violence against religious minorities.

There is no analogue for this particular structure of thinking in the irrationalist authoritarianisms in the Euro-American zones during the inter-war years or after. The only approximate example I can think of is that of certain, not by any means all, but some strands in the Islamist political right: Rashid Rida and the group from whom the original conception of Salafism is descended; the foundational ideas of the Ikhwanal-Muslimun (the Muslim Brotherhood) of Al-Banna and others; some contemporary tendencies descended from that original Ikhwan, such as al-Nahda in Tunisia and Hamas in Palestine; highly influential and sophisticated Islamist intellectuals of the Brotherhood vintage located in the West today, such as Tariq Ramadhan.

The idea is, in essentials, the same: secure religio-cultural ideological dominance first, taking advantage of the fact that liberal institutions do not necessarily obstruct the power of the extreme right. And build enduring political power over time by combining religio-cultural conservatism and majoritarian violence with neoliberal capitalism within the belly of imperialism, as well as liberal democratic institutions of governance domestically. 

The RSS has also sought to address in practice a historic dilemma regarding the possibility of revolution in the liberal age, whether from the left or the right. Gramsci is, of course, the great thinker who addressed this dilemma at great length and with great intellectual splendour. However, he addresses it conceptually, never on the organisational level: how could he, organisationally, from inside a prison? The RSS has addressed the dilemma in its organisational practices, over decades, through trial and error, with remarkable success so far, even though it is unclear whether or not they will be entirely successful eventually. That dilemma has been posed to the Leninist tradition in the following terms: revolutions are made by cadre parties, the ones who are able to create something of a counter-state against a State seen by the people as illegitimate (Czarism; the colonial master), able to counter state violence with revolutionary violence, and, in a moment of ultimate revolutionary crisis, able to seize power through frontal attack, dismantle that state, erect a State of a new type.

However, once a liberal democratic system of representative government in all its intricacies has been erected, universalising a bourgeois political subjectivity which believes in norms of liberal legality and the primacy of representative democracy, the revolutionaries face a situation in which they can either refuse to participate in this "bourgeois democracy" and get politically marginalised, or they can participate in the electoral world of liberal democracy, renouncing the ambition of creating a vanguard revolutionary party and committing themselves to socialist transformation through electoral means.

This is a real, inescapable dilemma. In India, Maoism chose the path of revolutionary violence, condemning themselves thus far to political marginalisation and internal degeneration. The parliamentary left, as represented by both communist parties, CPI and CPI(M), chose the electoral way, effectively recognising the legitimacy of the liberal state and the specific form of Indian constitutionality, thus foreclosing the revolutionary option, rhetorical stances notwithstanding. There has been a blockage at both ends.

RSS documents are at best turgid and unreadable for the stupidity of their content. Their organisational practices, by contrast, have often been frighteningly brilliant.

The RSS addressed that question from the extreme right, not theoretically but organisationally. Their documents are at best turgid and unreadable for the stupidity of their content. Their organisational practices, by contrast, have often been frighteningly brilliant.

How so? That will be part of the argument below.

II

We can pick up the story with the general elections of 2014 and then trace it backwards. For those elections were in significant respects unique but their true significance can emerge only if we understand their context, not just immediate political context but their place in the larger historical process. The victorious party, the BJP, is not a normal right-wing party, like the British Tories or even the US Republicans. Its uniqueness in the general configuration of right-wing parties in the world is that it is not an independent party at all but only a mass political front of a seasoned and semi-secret organisation, the RSS, which describes itself as "cultural" and "non-political" but whose declared intention is to altogether transform India’s political, social, religious life, from the bottom up, and which has at its disposal, if we take into account all the front organisation it has spawned, what is easily the largest political force in the world of liberal democracies. And it has displayed a remarkable degree of what one can only call Olympian patience. It has pursued its objectives single-mindedly for ninety years and is still in no hurry.

From that standpoint, victory in one election is just one episode among others. Let us look at this episode and then assemble the necessary fragments of a deeper analysis.

The last time a political party garnered a majority of seats in the Indian parliament was in 1984 when the Indian National Congress Party swept the polls on an immense wave of sympathy after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her own bodyguards. Since then, it has come increasingly to be believed that the days of single party rule were over, that India had entered an irreversible era of coalition governments, that coalition governments were far more representative of India’s regional diversities and the strongly federalist structure of its polity, and, more dubiously, that coalition partners would exercise restraining influence if the leading party in the coalition tried to pursue any adventurist or extremist policy.

Such wisdom was laid to rest in 2014 when the BJP won 282 seats, up from 116 in the outgoing parliament and ten more than required to form a government all on its own. It had gone into the elections as part of an alliance of diverse political parties, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and chose to form a coalition government with insignificant partners that it does not need.

Equally significant, and perhaps more stunning, was the debacle faced by the Congress which was reduced from 206 seats in the previous parliament to a mere 44 in the new one, by far the lowest number since the founding of the Republic in 1947, and this, immediately after heading two successive  governments over the last decade, 2004-14. Another way of putting it is that it was able to win barely one seat out of every ten it contested. The Congress has dominated Indian politics for over a century, commands the aura of having led India to independence from colonialism, and has been seen by Indian liberalism subsequently as the natural party of rule, while this liberalism has typically looked at the BJP as an interloper.

There is something almost mysterious about the size and timing of this debacle, considering that there is hardly any difference between the two parties on a whole range of policy positions, except for a significant difference on what in India is called "communalism". This deep recession in its fortunes is historic, and it seems unlikely that the Congress will regain any of its past power in the foreseeable future. It continues to possess an elaborate, well-entrenched electoral machine and may get more seats in future elections, but paths to glory are now closed. The BJP owes some of the size of its electoral victory to the depth of the Congress collapse. There are other very significant factors contributing to the BJP’s success, however, which will be dealt with below.

Equally significant in its own way is a parallel decline in the electoral fortunes of the leading communist force in India, the CPI(M). Ten years ago, in 2004, the party won 43 seats in Parliament, with over 22 million votes, 5.66 per cent of all votes counted. Ten years later, it had been reduced to only nine seats, with its vote share declining to just below 18 million in a significantly enlarged electorate, thus being reduced to 3.25 per cent of the total. In 2004, the Left Front, led by the CPI(M) had 59 members, roughly 10 per cent of the strength of the House; in 2014, the Front won only 16 seats.

For the first time since Independence, the communist left has no significant presence in the Indian Parliament. By contrast, the average asset value of individual members of parliament has risen to $2.3 million, almost three times as much as was the case in the previous parliament ($850,000). In a country where the majority lives on less than $2 dollars a day, this is overwhelmingly a parliament of the rich.

Central to this configuration, as symbol and as chief actor, is the unique figure of the current prime minister, Narendra Modi. At least three aspects of this phenomenon can be isolated at this point. As the main accused in the pogrom-like ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Gujarat during 2002 when he was chief minister there, Modi is the most aggressive symbol of the extremist ethno-religious violence in India. As the elections approached and his victory at the head of the BJP became imminent, embassies of the US and the UK went into a frenzy because he had not been able to enter those countries thanks to charges related to the pogroms; the US had, in fact, formally denied him a visa.

By contrast, all the polls taken among the urban middle classes over more than five years inside India showed him far ahead of all others as the favourite prospective prime minister of the country. So belligerent were the middle classes on this issue, and so far-reaching the unity of major purpose between the BJP and the Congress, that Dr. Manmohan Singh, the liberal prime minister of India in the Congress government, had formally protested against the US denial of a visa to Narendra Modi.

That someone so well known for perpetrating ethnic cleansing should emerge so quickly as the darling of the middle classes, and would be defended by the Congress prime minister, speaks volumes about how far the Centre of gravity has shifted in India’s social imagination, and how much the liberal Centre has moved toward the extreme right.

That someone so well known for perpetrating ethnic cleansing should emerge so quickly as the darling of the middle classes, and would be defended by the Congress prime minister, speaks volumes about how far the Centre of gravity has shifted in India’s social imagination, and how much the liberal Centre has moved toward the extreme right. All this was already there well before the elections, indeed well before the hugely financed and stunningly executed election campaign got going with such power that it seemed unstoppable from the very start.

The second major aspect of Modi’s irresistible rise to power has been the fact that never in the country’s history has the fraternity of leading corporate CEOs united so strongly and volubly to promote a single politician to prime ministership as they did for Modi. Gujarat is the most industrialised state in India (and Gujarat’s poor among its most wretched), and the magnates of Gujarati capital are deeply connected with their counterparts in Bombay, India’s financial hub and home to some its leading industrialists, as well as with capitalists of Indian origin living in the UK, US and elsewhere.

As chief minister of Gujarat for a decade and a half, Modi did as much as he could to turn the state into a fief for crony capitalists, from inside Gujarat and elsewhere, eventually receiving enormous financial and other kinds of support from them. This helped greatly in transforming his image in the corporate media, electronic and print alike, from that of a bloodthirsty extremist to that of an economic genius who had single-handedly led the state of Gujarat from rags to riches, a veritable Development Man (Vikaas Purush) whose firm and visionary leadership India needed in this decisive moment of opportunity on the global stage.

This corporate support also helped him spend on his electoral campaign roughly the same amount as Obama had spent on his, while not a fraction of it was available to his opponents. With such resources Modi’s campaign went presidential on the model of the US electoral system; it all became an affair of electing one unique man, in what was until then a very different campaign style, more in keeping with the parliamentary system.

This money did wonders for Modi. It made him relatively independent of his own party; the money that builds the personality cult can also sideline and even buy off one’s opponents within the party. The money made him marginally independent even of the RSS that had nurtured him since he was a young kid; the phalanxes of the RSS cadres who streamed into his election campaign could now be paid off with corporate cash, so that they became more dependent on the electoral machine he had assembled than on the parent organisation.

Who does Modi represent? The simple answer is: the RSS and the corporate elite. But he is also filled to the brim with immense, megalomaniac self-love. Who will serve whom is yet to be seen.

The third truly notable aspect of Modi’s rise to power is that this is the first time that a man who had spent most of his adult life as a fulltime organiser/preacher (pracharak) in the shadowy wings of the RSS, a semi-secret organisation to start with, has become the country’s chief executive. AB Vajpayee, who headed a previous government of the BJP, was also a member of the RSS, as are virtually all the key leaders of the BJP. However, Vajpayee and others of his kind were mere members while they led other public or professional lives and went into politics early in their youth to become part of the rough and tumble of parliamentary life.

Not so Modi. We know that he joined the RSS as an adolescent but we know little else about the first thirty years or so of his life; and what we know comes only from him. By the time he came fully into public view, as an RSS organiser in and out of BJP offices, he was close to forty. When he was parachuted into Gujarat as chief minister, on RSS direction, he had had no career in electoral politics. He has become prime minister without any prior experience in Parliament. His closest crony in the national capital, Amit Shah, is his closest crony from Gujarat, a sinister fellow generally credited with many a murder.

Who does Modi represent ? The simple answer is: the RSS and the corporate elite. But he is also filled to the brim with immense, megalomaniac self-love. Who will serve whom is yet to be seen.
 

Burial figurines from Calakmul, Mexico, ca. 7th c. / National Geographic
 
III

What, then, about the "Long March" of the RSS? We will first address issues related its original formation and ideological articulations, followed by comment on its organisational innovations in the next section.

At the broadest level, the RSS arose in 1925 as part of a wider proliferation of such organisations across many countries during the inter-war years, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, that were part of a global offensive of the right in response to the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as a wider upsurge in workers’ movements and communist parties. The anti-Enlightenment European right lost faith in liberal democracy itself as having the capacity or the will to fight off such dangers, not just because its leaders were seen as weak-willed, but also because liberalism itself came to be seen as a variant of that same legacy of the French Revolution that had elsewhere led to Bolshevism. Regarding the rise of such parties in Asia or the Middle East primarily as effects of European fascisms would be erroneous; in all cases, domestic roots and exigencies were much too strong for that characterisation. However, a certain inspiration was also undeniable, even though different organisations imbibed it differently.

We don’t have space here to trace the fascinating parallels between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Indian RSS. Both subscribed to variants of religious majoritarianism and religio-cultural revivalism. Both found the Nazi ideology deeply attractive for its definition of nationalism in terms of race and religion, in opposition to the definition of nationhood descended from the French Revolution and based on the idea of equal citizenship for all regardless of race, religion, etc.

Some of the leaders of Hindu nationalism said openly that the German "solution" for the Jews could be fruitfully applied to Indian Muslims. From Mussolini, they learned the political uses of the golden classical past; and from Nazis and fascists alike, they learned the strategic uses of force, violence, militias and spectacular public rituals in the creation of a new, hysterical kind of political will. And they imbibed the cult of the leader, a politics of mass obedience as well as contempt for the democratic form in their own organisation.

The career of the RSS is remarkable: it reserves the classically Nazi organisational form of extreme centralised authoritarianism for itself, uses a variety of other fronts for exercise of violence and defiance of constitutionality whenever it so desires, even as it allows and organises obedience to constitutional norms for its political front, the BJP, the currently ruling party of India.

The career of the RSS is remarkable in this regard: it reserves the classically Nazi organisational form of extreme centralised authoritarianism for itself, uses a variety of other fronts for exercise of violence and defiance of constitutionality whenever it so desires, even as it allows and organises obedience to constitutional norms for its political front, the BJP, the currently ruling party of India.

There are moments when the BJP itself deviates from legality but, once the fruits of deviation have been reaped, it is brought back to the norm. In playing this game of a central cadre-based formation answerable to none, a political front that functions very much like a normal party in the Indian liberal-democratic milieu, and a plethora of other fronts that function at various levels of legality and illegality, the RSS has honed the "good cop, bad cop" technique to sinister perfection. We shall return to this point.

The RSS arose not as a unique expression of what came to be known as "Hindu nationalism" (as contrasted to the canonical "secular nationalism" of Gandhi, Nehru, etc.), but as one of many. Founded in 1913, some twelve years before the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha remained by far the larger organisation of that kind well into the 1950s when it began to decay and many of its members got assimilated into the RSS and its affiliates. Ironically, the Mahasabha continued to function from inside the professedly "secular" Indian National Congress until 1938; and after Independence, Shyama Prashad Mukherjee, one of its illustrious leaders, resurfaced as a minister in the cabinet of none other than Nehru himself. Certain strands of Hindu extremism and conservatism were thus not entirely alien to what I have called India’s canonical nationalism and which never tires of asserting its purportedly pristine secularism.

In its original formation, leaders of the RSS had hardly any ideology of their own and borrowed most of their beliefs from VD Savarkar, a fascinating and rather enigmatic character, certainly fascistoid in his thinking but also a one-time anti-colonial nationalist who had fallen out with Gandhi on the question of the legitimacy of violence and was inspired, rather, by methods of the "revolutionary terrorists" of Bengal. Even though he published Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, pretty much the Bible of the Hindu right, in 1923, just two years before the RSS was founded, and then lived on until 1966, Savarkar never in fact joined the RSS and preferred to take over the presidency of the Mahasabha before gradually withdrawing from politics altogether.

Overlaps and alignments were, however, so close that while the RSS was banned in response to Gandhi’s assassination, Savarkar was tried in court for involvement in that conspiracy; it so happens that Savarkar was acquitted and the ban on RSS was lifted quite soon. Founders and early leaders of the RSS, Hedgewar and Golwalker in particular, borrowed and reframed his idea for their own organisation, and it is only after the RSS emerged as the united church of Hindu nationalism, from the 1960s onward, that Savarkar came to be seen increasingly as its own chief ideologue.

Parenthetically, we should note that even today the RSS is by far the most important organisation of the Hindu right but by no means has any exclusive monopoly of it. There are many outside its own umbrella (or family — parivar — as its fronts like to be called). The most notable is the Shiv Sena, but countless small groups of the most violent sort keep cropping up all the time, and it is not always possible to know which of them are covertly
RSS outfits and which are not. 

Nor were the Mahasabha and the RSS the first originators of this outlook, or the first political expression of it. Certain upper caste clusters in late nineteenth century Bengal had provided a rather impressive nursery for the incubation of revivalist longing and nostalgia for a Hindu Golden Age in the classical past; some of these ideas had played a powerful role in the Swadeshi movement in early years of the twentieth century. At the other end of the country, highly influential political, social and educational movements were emerging already in late nineteenth century Maharashtra to combat the Brahminical caste order, for advancement of the untouchable castes and so on.

This challenge to Brahminism served to unite much of the Brahmin elite to defend their caste privileges but, predictably, as defenders of "Hindus" as such. It was recalled that the Peshwai kingdom of the Maharashtrians was the last to have been defeated by the British in India; as such, the Maharashtrian elite had not just the duty but the right to devise and lead a new kind of nationalism, a "Hindu nationalism" that excluded the Muslim usurpers and that would resurrect the ancient glory of the Hindus, purifying the culture of the land. The majority of the founders and early leaders of the RSS turned out to be Maharashtrian Brahmins.

There were countless such developments, large and small, not only among Hindus but among sections of Muslims as well. There is no space to retrace those histories. Even so, it would be useful to understand at least conceptually some fundamental aspects of the colonial dispensation that served to greatly strengthen the political valence of religious and caste identities.

The basic fact is that a colonial subject is not a citizen, and no colonial society can be based on rights of common citizenship. Conditions were thus exceptionally unfavourable for secular, democratic institutions and practices to take root and grow despite the sort of administrative modernity that the colonial authorities had assembled. Lack of the structures of popular representation, such as universal suffrage, meant that representatives were either appointed from above or claimed to represent "the people" by virtue of their class privilege, when no one had chosen them to do so.

Development of the classes of modern society itself remained weak, thanks to the colonial blockage of industrial development, which was then reflected in the weakness of class organisations and the proliferation of non-class pressure groups, organised from above; the proletariat remained small and rather few among the numerically very small modern bourgeoisie, who were particularly bourgeois in their social and cultural outlooks.

In such circumstances, organisations of the modern type arose more in the social arena than in the political, and most such organisations arose along the already available fault lines, such as denominational community, religious sect and caste association. Under colonial conditions, such entities lost much of their earlier amorphous character and gave to themselves, with no little encouragement by the colonial government, far greater solidity in social life and representational claim in the newly emergent political arena.

Prohibitions on the politics of equality, even in the simple juridical domain, served to enhance savageries in the politics of difference. Even the types of social organisation that worked for reform, such as educational societies or philanthropic trusts, arose mainly to serve caste and communal ends. If much "modern" education was dispensed through caste societies and denominational schools and colleges, most of politics was similarly conducted in the form of deputations and conferences representing castes and denominations.

In other words, the emergence of modern forms of power, in the shape of the state of colonial capital, required the emergence of corresponding political forms through which the colonised could represent themselves. However, in blocking collective representation in the form of equal citizenship rights and universal suffrage, the colonial state fragmented the emergent nation into its social units and greatly accentuated the existing cleavages, even though the fact of being governed by the same colonial state gave to each of these units a certain investment in nationalist rhetoric and some rudimentary form of nationalist consciousness.

The contribution of colonialism to the growth of communal and caste politics was thus not merely tactical ("divide and rule") but structural. So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as "equal respect for all religions."

Such remained the structure of the colonial polity until after the First World War. When the era of mass politics began, Indian colonial society was already organised, socially as well as politically, around the axes of caste, religion and region. The contribution of colonialism to the growth of communal and caste politics was thus not merely tactical ("divide and rule") but structural. So overwhelming was the weight of religion in all this, and so reluctant were the Indian liberal modernists to confront that power frontally, that even the canonical, multi-denominational, professedly secular nationalists simply redefined secularism as not a separation of religion and politics but as "equal respect for all religions", in the telling and broadly accepted phrase of Dr. Radhakrishnan, a conservative Brahminical scholar who served as the  second president of independent India.

That was quite consistent with Gandhi’s famous dictum that he regarded as sinful any politics that took its distance from religion. The specific ideological positions of Hindu nationalism need to be seen against the backdrop of this much wider landscape of heightened religiosity.

In its formative phase, Hindu nationalist ideology had three distinctive components. First, there was the nationalism of "blood and soil" descended from right-wing Romanticisms of the European nineteenth century which got re-inscribed in terms of race and religion in many nationalisms of the twentieth century, including the cultural nationalism of the Hindu right. Second, right-wing nationalism also inherited a colonialist reading of India’s history, already canonised by James Mill in his iconic six-volume The History of British India that started appearing in 1817, as comprising three historical periods: that of the Hindu Golden Age; that of the defeat and fall of Hindu civilisation at the hands of Muslim tyranny; and the then-dawning phase for which the British were represented as liberators of Hindus from that tyranny.

When Hindutva ideologues speak of the Hindus having suffered under "foreign rule", they routinely refer to the period of the Muslim dynasties, not to the British.

The latter element accounts for the great ambivalence of Hindu nationalism toward colonialism and imperialism. When Hindutva ideologues speak of the Hindus having suffered under "foreign rule", they routinely refer to the period of the Muslim dynasties, not to the British. And although they would like to claim some anti-colonial lineage, there is scant evidence of their actually having participated much in those struggles. Thanks to these powerful ideological legacies, their nationalism of today is remarkably devoid of any anti-imperialist positions and, thanks to the neoliberal consensus, devoid even of the sort of ideologies of self-reliance that Gandhian/Nehruvian variant of nationalism had envisioned for the development of Indian capitalism.

The "blood-and-soil" nationalism and mythologies of Muslim tyranny were combined with something else as well: anxieties among large sections of the upper caste elites as they were pressed by the upsurge of the lower castes from one side, and the rise of a multi-religious, multi-caste nationalism that was fast becoming a veritable mass movement with Gandhi’s shepherding of the Congress, especially after 1919. Ideas of the Hindu Golden Age and Muslim tyranny were elements often imbibed from colonial education, hence widespread among the educated Hindu elites.

In that respect, Hindu nationalism could appeal to them quite credibly. The intensities of Brahminical caste anxieties were a different matter, however, and those remained a major source for the isolation of the RSS in the heyday of the anti-colonial movement, 1919-47, and during the early decades of the Republic.

The Indian national movements mobilised more peasant households for mass agitation than any other political movement in history, a mobilisation that was, in this respect, rather comparable to the Chinese Revolution. Gandhi could not have achieved this level of agrarian unrest under bourgeois hegemony without anchoring his organisational structure for the countryside in the middle and rich peasantries who tended to be drawn from the middling castes, or without waging highly publicised campaigns on the question of untouchability, to appeal to the oppressed menial castes. That necessarily earned him the ire of the more orthodox among the upper castes even though Gandhi never rejected the basic four-fold division (the varna ashram) of the Brahminical caste system.

And one forgets now that Muslims counted for a quarter of the Indian population before the Partition, before two-thirds of them got regrouped in what we now know as Bangladesh and Pakistan. No leader or organisation that sought to represent the whole of British colonial India could afford to ignore this demographic fact or to define India as a purely Hindu nation. So leaders of the Congress declared themselves "secular" with varying degrees of commitment or conviction. By the same token, the hostility of Hindu nationalism to this "secular" nationalism was boundless.

Savarkar, the chief ideologue in the whole spectrum of Hindu nationalism, drew a sharp and enduring distinction: Gandhi’s was a "territorial nationalism" which debased the idea of the nation by associating it with mere territory, whereas his own was a "cultural nationalism" of the "Hindu Race" for which culture was synonymous with the whole way of Hindu life, including politics, society, civilisational heritage, family structures, form of government, etc. a primordial, all-encompassing Being of the "Race", as it were.

Some aspects of this cultural conservatism resonated with sections of Hindu society but, beyond a closed circuit of its adherents, this extreme definition of the Hindu nation had few takers as the anti-colonial movement kept gaining more and more demographic weight and diversity across the land, and it had few takers even after Independence as the Republic was sought to be organized on the basis of universal suffrage and what Nehru quaintly called a "socialistic pattern". The RSS remained a relatively marginal force until after the dust of Gandhi’s assassination had settled in the 1950s, even though sensibilities amenable to ideas of Hindu nationalism were far more widespread than the ideologues of Indian liberalism concede.

IV

For the first quarter century of its existence the RSS displayed no tendency toward innovation and concentrated on self-preservation and expansion, with the distinct novelty that it concentrated on recruiting as many young boys into its local branches (shakhas) as possible, in keeping with the view that cultural transformation can be deep-rooted only if a corps of cadres are indoctrinated into its protocols from an early age. Strikingly, it stipulates that any boy who comes to its shakha must do so with the prior consent and daily knowledge of elders in his family, assuming that there are countless families in the country who would welcome such an opportunity for their son and who will then get directly involved in the social life of the organisation.

During this first phase, the RSS seems to have wanted to shelter itself under state patronage, while it carried out its more or less clandestine work under the banner of "culture". It repeatedly proposed mutual cooperation with the British colonial authorities in opposition to the Congress and the communists. Soon after Independence, and even after it was briefly banned following Gandhi’s assassination, it proposed cooperation with the Congress against the communists who had emerged fleetingly as the main opposition in parliament.

It floated its first front organisation under duress for women, in 1936 to protect its own all-male character and to ward off pressure from some particularly enthusiastic and vocal women who wanted membership to be offered to women as well. No membership in the masculinist fraternity, the RSS declared, but you can have an organisation (a Samiti) for yourself under our guidance. Then a lukewarm attempt was made in 1948-49 to float a students’ front during the period when the RSS itself had been banned, but that attempt went nowhere and the students’ front got going seriously only a decade later. Today, that front plausibly claims to be the largest students’ organisation in the country.

The real turning point came in 1951, on the eve of the first general elections, when a political front was floated in the shape of a brand new political party to participate in the polls, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), which was then dissolved in 1977 to be immediately reincarnated as the BJP. The BJS won three seats in 1951 but as many as 35 seats in 1967, with 9.41 per cent of the vote, having united much of the Hindu right under its umbrella by then. But the majority of the Indian bourgeoisie continued to support the Congress, at times grumbling and sullen, and the minority of investors and traders who did not support it worked through other parties such as the short-lived Swatantra Party.

The RSS itself did not grow much between Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 and Nehru’s death in 1962; the aura of the Congress as the unrivalled leading light of the anti-colonial movement still held. After that the RSS grew steadily and at times rapidly, even though some of that aura lasted for the Congress through the Indira Gandhi years and collapsed only after she had abrogated civil rights and declared a State of Emergency in the country in 1975.

Other fronts followed thereafter. The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) for the working class, floated in 1955, has, by now, become the single largest central trade union organisation in India, claiming a membership of over ten million workers and affiliation of over four thousand trade unions. [8] The Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) came in 1964, with the purported aim of propagating Hindu culture abroad, and remained in the shadows for two decades when, in 1984, this particular front was selected to spearhead the vast machinery of violence and rabid ideological hysteria that rolled across the country over the next decade and which brought the BJP to power in Delhi, for 13 days in 1996 and then, at the head of a broad based coalition of political parties, for six consecutive years from 1998 to 2004.

BJP leaders have asserted time and again that its ability to rise from an isolated minority fringe in 1984 to secure governmental power by 1998 was owed very significantly to the mass mobilisations and the periodic pogroms that reached a particular intensity between 1989 and 1992, culminating in the spectacular destruction of the Babri Masjid.

BJP leaders have asserted time and again that its ability to rise from an isolated minority fringe in 1984 to secure governmental power by 1998 was owed very significantly to the mass mobilisations and the periodic pogroms that reached a particular intensity between 1989 and 1992, culminating in the spectacular destruction of the Babri Masjid, that the Supreme Court had sought to protect through agencies of the Indian government. However, Indian liberalism itself has never acknowledged that the reaping of such rich electoral dividends from years of violence by the RSS and its affiliates, and the fact that so many large and influential political parties have joined the coalition led by the BJP means that something very fundamental has changed in the very fabric of the Republic.

It was during those two years that Modi, the current prime minister, saw what was there for all to see: that communal killings, images of Hindus killing members of Christian and Muslim minorities, are good for winning elections. Since staging his own ethnic cleansing in 2002 he has not looked back. He increased his majority in the state assembly by a solid 10 per cent in the aftermath of those killings, won two more state assembly elections, and then led his party to spectacular victory in the recent national elections.

The RSS plays its fronts like pawns on the chessboard of Indian politics, mixing legality and illegality, electoral politics and machineries of violence, in full view of agencies of law and organs of civil society. This is rather a sinister variant on the famous formula : "hegemony = consent + coercion".

The RSS plays its fronts like pawns on the chessboard of Indian politics, mixing legality and illegality, electoral politics and machineries of violence, in full view of agencies of law and organs of civil society. This is rather a sinister variant on the famous formula : "hegemony = consent + coercion". And coercion has had and will continue to have a specific form: small doses, steadily dispensed; no gas ovens, just a handful of storm troopers, here and there, appearing and disappearing; and a permanent fear that corrodes the souls of the wretched of the land, while the liberal democratic machinery rolls on no formal suspension of civil liberties!

That, then, is the first innovation; a large inventory of very different kinds of fronts, to perform very different kinds of functions, at different times and in different spheres of society, to see if violence that is required for a revolution (from the extreme right) can be practiced alongside the pursuit of legitimacy through parliamentary elections as bourgeois legality and subjectivity require. Second is the issue of the relationship between political parties and affiliated organisations (fronts, in common parlance).

It is normal in India for large political parties to have fronts for different sections of society: women, students, workers, peasants and so on. The Congress has them, as do the parliamentary communists. By contrast, the innovation here is that the RSS, which floats and controls the fronts, is not a political party but intervenes comprehensively in all aspects of political and social life without taking any responsibility for what it does through its fronts ; that the political party, the BJP, is not, strictly speaking, a political party but only a front in which virtually all the key leaders and organizers are drawn from the RSS.

Moreover, all the other fronts are also fronts of the RSS, an extra-parliamentary entity; the BJP, being a front itself, has no control over those fronts. Fourth innovation: none of it is secret, as all is public and comprehensively documented, time and again just a normal part of liberal democratic freedom. Fifth, intricacies of law and constitution are carefully sifted through to determine exactly to what extent the RSS itself can function in the public domain as a legally constituted entity without having to reveal much of what it is and what it does. As a self-styled "cultural" organisation it is exempt from the kind of accountability that is required of political parties. Liberal protections are thus utilized for secretive authoritarian purpose.

In all this there are two distinct claims which the RSS throws around as if they were identical. It emphatically claims to be a purely "cultural" organisation, uninvolved in politics and, therefore, exempt from requirements imposed on political parties, such as revealing its membership or keeping accounts for public scrutiny. Simultaneously, it claims that it has a right to guide in all aspects of politics because, far from being an autonomous sphere, politics in Hindu society is one area of "culture", just as "culture" itself is an all-encompassing expression of the religion of the Race. The two claims are of course incompatible. Not for nothing did Mussolini declare that "we fascists are super-relativists".

And the final, most far-reaching innovation: the sheer number of fronts, running surely into the  hundreds, possibly thousands no one knows. The Anthropological Survey of India holds that the Indian population is comprised of thousands of distinct communities, sociologically so defined by custom, speech, location, cuisine, spiritual belief, caste, sub-caste, occupation, what have you. The RSS is the only organisation in India which has the ambition to have fronts for as many of these diversities as possible and does indeed go on creating more and more of them.

In this sense, it is a spectacular missionary organisation, and the mission is religious, cultural, social, economic, educational and of course political. The heart of this problem for the RSS is that even though the word "Hindu" is used by all as if the word referred to some homogeneous religious community or a unified social category, the reality is that all these diversities even immense differences of custom and religious belief exist among precisely the 80 per cent of the Indians who are considered "Hindu".

RSS' commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both Church and State simultaneously.

Contrary to this reality, the RSS has fairly precise ideas of what it means to be a Hindu, based on its own doctrine that being a Hindu is not merely a religious category, divorced from other kinds of subjectivity or conduct, but an entire way of life, from cradle to grave. It wants to make sure that the ideal type it has invented becomes the normative standard among that 80 per cent. Its commitment to creating a cultural homogeneity out of this ocean of diversities, and to translate that cultural homogeneity into a unified political will, means that it wishes to become both Church and State simultaneously. That ambition is at the heart of its fight against secular civility and the specific content of its authoritarianism. That so comprehensive a civilizational project would wholly succeed appears implausible. The undertaking is audacious, however, and the success so far, although partial, is also undeniably impressive.
 

© Ghulam Rasool Santosh, Untitled / Autarmota
 
V

India’s post-Independence history can be broadly conceptualised in terms of three phases. The first lasted from 1947 to 1975. It was premised on four values of the Nehruvian paradigm: secularism, democracy, socialism, non-alignment. The practice did not always correspond to precepts, and the paradigm kept fraying, especially after the India-China War of 1962, and Nehru’s death soon thereafter. Even so, a certain degree of liberal-left hegemony did survive and got eroded only gradually. Eventually, the accumulating crises came to a head with the outbreak of massive, right-wing, populist agitation in the mid-1970s and, in response, Indira Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties and Declaration of Emergency.

The end of the first phase and the beginning of the second coincide in the massive ambiguities of that movement famously led by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), an aging Congressman and once a friend of Nehru, who now forged a far-reaching alliance with the RSS and gathered a whole range of rightist forces as well as youth groups under the slogan of 'Total Revolution’, calling upon state apparatuses, including the security agencies, to mutiny. The RSS, with its thousands of cadres, provided the backbone of the anti-Emergency movement and then of the Janata Party government that arose out of the end of the Emergency, when Bharatiya Jana Sangh’s share of parliamentary seats rose from 35 in 1967 to 94 in 1977, with Vajpayee and Advani, veterans of the RSS, rising to occupy key cabinet posts.

That outcome of the anti-Emergency agitation leading to the first non-Congress government in the country is still celebrated in the (non-Congress) liberal circles as a moment when the sturdiness of Indian democracy prevailed over Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial tendencies. Yet that was precisely the process that served to legitimise the RSS as a respectable force in Indian politics and to confer on its political front a significant place in government for the first time in Indian history. I might add that the RSS made exponential strides between 1977 and 1982, for five years after the Emergency was lifted, owing to its newfound reputation as a defender of democracy against dictatorship.

On the whole, though, that force also got splintered owing to its own contradictions and the phase of relative political crisis of the bourgeois state in India continued, in which the older power bloc, led by the Congress, was no longer capable of stable rule but none other had emerged to replace it either. That crisis lasted for over two decades, ending fully only with the advent of the second BJP-led government in 1998 (the first had fallen after thirteen days in 1996).

The neoliberal policies that the Congress had inaugurated almost ten years earlier had by then taken root, inaugurating a new phase in which a drastically reorganised power bloc, consisting of all the non-left parties and ranging from the Congress to the BJP, gave a new stability to bourgeois rule in India regardless of which coalition of those parties wins the elections at one point or another. The decisive turning points had, of course, come earlier, nationally and internationally, during those momentous three years from 1989 to 1992.

Internationally, those years witnessed the historic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and in southeastern Europe more generally, with the US becoming an unrivalled global hegemon. The whole of the Indian ruling class and its state structures could now openly unite behind this "lone superpower" with no internal friction at all. Inside the country, those same years witnessed the onset of the neoliberal regime with the so-called Rao-Manmohan reforms, and that decisive turn in the institutionalisation of communalism in structures of the Indian state, which began with the tacit agreement between the Congress and the VHP at the time of Shila Nyas in 1989 and even more dramatically during the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Conditions remained highly unstable for a few years, however.

By 1998 neoliberalism had become a consensual position among the propertied classes and their representatives in various spheres of the national life. At the same time, the far right had made rapid gains and began concentrating on consolidation of its newfound power. Extreme violence of the early 1990s was no longer required. It was much more important now to give the BJP a mildly liberal face so that it could be accepted as a party of bourgeois rule and an alternative to the Congress. The coalition government it formed in 1998 lasted for six years, leading then to ten years of a Congress- led government that only ended with the return of the BJP in 2014 with a firm majority in parliament.

Remarkably, these changes in government have witnessed no appreciable changes in policy. In this sense India has become a mature liberal democracy in the neoliberal age, like the US and UK, where the two main competing parties or coalitions of parties function as mere factions in a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole. At the heart of this new consensus in the Indian ruling class is close alliance with imperialism externally, and the imposition of neoliberal order domestically.

In hindsight one could even propose that the promulgation of neoliberalism was the necessary moment for the various factions of the ruling class — hence the various parties that represent capitalist interest at the federal and regional levels — to obtain a firm base of unity and a new type of alliance with US capital in the altered national and international conditions. All these parties compete with each other now for the spoils of office, not on matters of policy or even ideology. This neoliberal order is what I call extreme capitalism and it has so far had broadly analogous consequences in the India of high growth rates and in the EU of low growth rates.

The Congress serves as the formally secular face of this class consensus while the BJP serves as its communal face, even though the Congress is quite capable of its own pragmatic uses of communalism as much as the BJP is often quite willing to have the more provocative aspects of its programme suspended so that it may remain at the apex of power in a broad coalition. Accordingly, Modi based his prime ministerial bid not on the Hindutva plank of blood-curdling rhetoric, which had propelled him into halls of power in the first place, but on exactly that rhetoric of "growth" and "development" that the BJP shares with the Congress.

Indeed, the Congress has always said, with much justice, that its own policies are what the BJP then implements. Modi is not uniquely a candidate of all corporate capital; it is just the case that he has united many more of the top CEOs behind him, much more openly, than his counterparts in the Congress ever could even when they tried.

Not that the punctual uses of violence as a strategic imperative have declined, killing of some members of the religious minorities is a common affair. A couple of Christians here, five or ten Muslim there; nothing spectacular, just low-intensity and routinised, nothing to disturb the image of a liberal, secular, deeply democratic India. There is no longer a significant political party in the country, with the exception of the communist left, that has not colluded with the BJP at one point or another since 1996 and especially so since 1998. At the time of the ethnic cleansing of Gujarat in 2002 numerous political parties united to prevent even a discussion of it on the floor of the House.

A majority of the liberals no longer know how much they themselves have moved toward the communal, neoliberal right.

Even the Congress colludes when necessary but rather quietly, not overtly because it is, after all, the main electoral adversary. Increasing communalisation of popular consciousness can now proceed from two sides. There is of course the mass work by the RSS and its affiliates which have gained more and more adherents over some eighty years, in what Gramsci called the quotidian, molecular movements in the quality of mass perceptions at the very base of society the creation of a "new common sense".

A majority of the liberals no longer know how much they themselves have moved toward the communal, neoliberal right. And now, for many years, these same shifts can also come from the side of the State, its political parties, educational enterprises, repressive apparatuses, often even the judicial branch. As India increasingly becomes a national security state, the bases for an aggressive, masculinist right-wing nationalism are bound to go deeper into society at large.

VI

Where, then, does the question of fascism fit into all this? I must confess that, in the wake of the spectacular events of 1992, this author was the first to raise this question comprehensively, first in a lengthy lecture delivered in Calcutta and then in another equally lengthy lecture delivered in Hyderabad. Several other prominent scholars, Sumit Sarkar and Prabhat Patnaik in particular, had expressed similar misgivings. There emerged on the left a broadly shared thinking that the RSS, its affiliates and allies had been distinctly influenced by the Nazi/fascist combine at the very moment of their origin, that they had carried many of those sympathies and principles into their own organisations and modes of conduct, and that many of their more recent strategies and practices were distinctly fascistic.

The CPI(M), a political party caught up in debates ranging all around it, even adopted the term "communal fascism" to stress a certain degree of fascist content as well as to specify the uniquely Indian twist to that content. I had further argued that the type of politics that we broadly (and sometimes imprecisely) call "fascism" is a feature of the whole of the imperialist epoch. Not for nothing did French "Integral Nationalism", sometimes credited as being the original form of fascism, arise in precisely those closing decades of the nineteenth century, which were, in Lenin’s typology, the original moment for the rise of what he called "imperialism".

In short, so long as one was not suggesting that the replication of the German and Italian experiences was at hand, it was perfectly legitimate to place the RSS into a certain typology of political forces that are fairly widespread even inside contemporary Europe itself, from Greece to France and from Austria to Ukraine. I had also argued, tongue in cheek, that "every country gets the fascism it deserves" in accordance with the "physiognomy" (a favourite metaphor of Gramsci) of its history, society and politics; and, I would now add, the historical phase that the country is going through.

What we have to grasp about every successful movement of the fascist type is not its replication of something else in the past, but its originality in response to the conditions in which it arises.

In other words, what we have to grasp about every successful movement of the fascist type is not its replication of something else in the past, but its originality in response to the conditions in which it arises. There is no getting away from the materiality of the "here and now". All revivalism is a contemporary rewriting of the past, a radically modern neo-traditionalism. All the contemporary parties of the fascist type respond to their own national milieux and to the broader fact that, with few and only relative exceptions, the working classes are supine globally, beaten back by neoliberal successes in the reorganisation of capital, and that political liberalism has itself made its peace with this extreme capitalism.

In this situation the proper stance is not: watch out, Nazis are coming. The real question is the one that Kalecki posed at the time of Goldwater’s bid for the US presidency in the 1960s: what would fascism look like if it came to a democratic industrial country that had no powerful working-class movement to oppose it? That is the general question, and I think it applies with particular force to the India of today: the far right need not abolish the outer shell of the liberal democratic institutions because these institutions can be taken over by its own personnel altogether peacefully and because most others are quite willing to go along with it so long as acts of large-scale violence remain only sporadic and the more frequent low-intensity violence can be kept out of general view, by media monopoly combined with mutual agreement between liberalism and the far right.

Meanwhile, the communists are now too small a force to be considered even for a ban. Of course, the question of fascism of the classical type may well resurface if a powerful socialist movement were to be re-founded, on whatever new premises and strategic perspectives that may now be necessary for that act of re-founding and reconstruction.

(Aijaz Ahmad is a leading Marxist thinker, critic and commentator. Among his books are Ghazals of Ghalib; In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures; Lineages of the Present: Political Essays; and Afghanistan, Iraq and the Imperialism of Our Times).

We thank the EMS Smrithi Organising Committee, Ayaanthole for allowing us to publish this essay from the Idea of India, Background Papers, EMS Smrithi Series compiled by MN Sudhakaran et al, Thrissur, June 2016.

This article was first published in indianculturalforum.in

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From left to right: Manu who inspired Friedrich Nietzsche who inspired Adolf Hitler

In his writings, Dr BR Ambekar unraveled the unholy ideological link between Manu who inspired Nietzsche, who in turn inspired Hitler, who in turn (along with Mussolini) inspired the most revered Manuwadis of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS: Balakrishna Shivram Moonje, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar.   

The foregoing analysis of the religious revolution showed that religious ideas as forms of divine governance for human society fall into two classes, one in which society is the cent
and the other in which the individual is the centre. The same analysis showed that for the former the appropriate test of what is good and what is right, i.e., the test of the moral order is utility while for the latter the test is justice. 

Now the reason why the philosophy of Hinduism does not answer the test of utility or of justice is because the religious ideal of Hinduism for divine governance of human society is an ideal which falls into a separate class by itself. It is an ideal in which the individual is not the centre. The centre of the ideal is neither individual nor society. It is a class — the class of Supermen called Brahmins. 

Those who will bear the dominant and devastating fact in mind will understand why the philosophy of Hinduism is not founded on individual justice or social utility. The philosophy of Hinduism is founded on a totally different principle. To the question what is right and what is good the answer which the philosophy of Hinduism gives is remarkable. It holds that to be right and good the act must serve the interests of this class of Supermen, namely, the Brahmins. 

Oscar Wilde said that to be intelligible is to be found out. Indeed Manu does not leave it to be found out. He expresses his view in resonant and majestic notes as who are the Supermen and anything which serves the interest of the Supermen is alone entitled to be called right and good. Let me quote Manu.

Manu’s is a degraded and degenerate philosophy of Superman as compared with that of Nietzsche [Hitler’s guru] and therefore far more odious and loathsome than the philosophy of Nietzsche – Dr. BR Ambedkar

X. 3. “On account of his pre-eminence, on account of the superiority of his origin, on account of his observance of (particular) restrictive rules, and on account of his particular sanctification the Brahman is the Lord of (all) Varnas.”
He proceeds to amplify his reasons and does so in the following characteristic manner —

I. 93. “As the Brahmana sprang from (Prajapati’s, i.e. God’s) mouth, as he was first–born and as he possesses the Veda, he is by right the Lord of this whole creation.”

I. 94. For the self–existent (Svayambhu, i.e., God), having performed austerities, produced him first from his own mouth, in order that offerings might be conveyed to the Gods and Manes and that this universe might be preserved.”

I. 95. “What created being can surpass him, through whose mouth the Gods continually consume the sacrificial viands and the manes the offerings to the dead?”

I. 96. “Of created beings the most excellent are said to be those which are animated; of the animated, those who subsist by intelligence; of the intelligent, mankind; and of the men, the Brahmanas.”

Besides the reason given by Manu the Brahmin is first in rank because he was produced by God from his mouth, in order that the offerings might be conveyed to the Gods and manes. Manu gives another reason for the supremacy of the Brahmins. He says —

I. 98. “The very birth of a Brahmana is an eternal incarnation of the sacred Law (Veda); for he is born to (fulfill) the sacred law, and becomes one with Brahman (God).”

I. 99. “A Brahmana, coming into existence, is born as the highest on earth, the lord of all created beings, for the protection of the treasury of the Law.”

Manu concludes by saying that —

I. 101. “The Brahman eats but his own food, wears but his own apparel, bestows but his own in alms; other mortals subsist through the benevolence of the Brahmana.”

Because according to Manu —

II. 100. “Whatever exists in the world is the property of the Brahmana; on account of the excellence of his origin the Brahmana is, indeed, entitled to it all.”
Manu directs —

VII. 36. “Let the King, after rising early in the morning, worship Brahmans who are well versed in the three-fold sacred science and learned (in polity), and follow their advice.”

VII. 38. “Let him daily worship aged Brahmans who know the Veda and are pure…”

VII. 37. “Let the king, having risen at early dawn, respectfully attend to Brahman, learned in the three Vedas and in the science of ethics and by their decision let him abide.”

VII. 38. “Constantly must he show respect to Brahmans, who have grown old, both in years and in piety, who know the scriptures, who in body and mind are pure; for he, who honours the aged, will perpetually be honoured even by cruel demons.”

IX. 313. “Let him not, although in the greatest distress for money, provoke Brahmans to anger by taking their property; for they, once enraged, could immediately by sacrifices and imprecations destroy him with his troops, elephants, horses and cars.”

Finally Manu says —

XI. 35. “The Brahman is (hereby) declared (to be) the creator (of the world), the punisher, the teacher, (and hence) a benefactor (of all created beings); to him let no man say anything unpropitious; nor use any harsh words.”

To conclude and complete the theory of supermen and of what is right and good let me reproduce the following two texts from Manu —

X. 122. “But let a Shudra serve Brahmans, either for the sake of heaven or with a view of both this life and the next, for he who is called the servant of a Brahman thereby gains all his ends.

X. 123. The service of the Brahmana alone is declared to be as excellent occupation for a Shudra; for whatever else besides this he may perform will bear no fruit.

And Manu adds —

X. 129. No collection of wealth must be made by a Shudra, even though he be able to do it; for a Shudra who has acquired wealth gives pain to Brahman.

Nietzsche’s supermen were supermen by reason of their worth. Manu’s supermen were supermen by reason of their birth. Nietzsche was a genuine disinterested philosopher. Manu on the contrary was a hireling engaged to propound a philosophy which served the interests of a class born in a group and whose title to being supermen was not to be lost even if they lost their virtue.

The above texts from Manu disclose the core and the heart of the philosophy of Hinduism. Hinduism is the gospel of the Superman and it teaches that what is right for the Superman is the only thing which is called morally right and morally good.

Is there any parallel to this philosophy? I hate to suggest it. But is so obvious. The parallel to this philosophy of Hinduism is to be found in Nietzsche. The Hindus will be angry at this suggestion.

It is quite natural. For the philosophy of Nietzsche stands in great odium. It never took roots. In his own words he was “sometimes deified as the philosopher of the aristocracy and squirearchy, sometimes hooted as, sometimes pitied and sometimes boycotted as an inhuman being.” 

Nietzsche’s philosophy had become identified with will to power, violence, denial of spiritual values, Superman and the sacrifice, servility and debasement of the common man. His philosophy with these high spots had created a certain loathsomeness and horror in the minds of the people of his own generation. He was utterly neglected if not shunned and Nietzsche himself took comfort by placing himself among the “posthumous men”.

He foresaw for himself a remote public, centuries after his own time to appreciate him. Here too Nietzsche was destined to be disappointed. Instead of there being any appreciation of his philosophy, the lapse of time has only augmented the horror and loathing which people of his generation felt for Nietzsche. This is principally due to the revelation that the philosophy of Nietzsche is capable of producing Nazism. His friends have vehemently protested against such a construction (M. P. Nicolas, “From Nietzsche Down to Hitler” 1938). But it is not difficult to see that his philosophy can be as easily applied to evolve a super state as to Superman. This is what the Nazis have done. 

MS Golwalkar (left) and KB Hedgewar: Inspired equally by Manu and Hitler

At any rate the Nazis trace their ancestry from Nietzsche and regard him as their spiritual parent. Hitler has himself photographed beside a bust of Nietzsche; he takes the manuscripts of the master under his own special guardianship; extracts are chosen from Nietzsche’s writings and loudly proclaimed at the ceremonies of Nazism, as the New German Faith.

Nor is the claim by the Nazis of spiritual ancestry with Nietzsche denied by his near relations. Nietzsche’s own cousin Richard Ochler approvingly says that Nietzsche’s thought is Hitler in action and that Nietzsche was the foremost pioneer of the Nazi accession to power. Nietzsche’s own sister, few months before her death, thanks the Fuehrer for the honour he graciously bestows on her brother declaring that she sees in him that incarnation of the “Superman” foretold by Zarathustra.

To identify Nietzsche, whose name and whose philosophy excites so much horror and so much loathing, with Manu is sure to cause astonishment and resentment in the mind of the Hindus. But of the fact itself there can be no doubt. Nietzsche himself has openly declared that in his philosophy he only following the scheme of Manu. In his Anti-Christ this is what Nietzsche says —
“After all, the question is, to what end are falsehoods perpetrated? The fact that, in Christianity, ‘holy’ ends are entirely absent, constitutes my objection to the means it employs. Its ends are only bad ends; the poisoning, the calumniation and the denial of life, the contempt of the body, the degradation and self-pollution of man by virtue of the concept of sin, — consequently its means are bad as well. My feelings are quite the reverse. 

“When I read the law book of Manu, an incomparably intellectual and superior work, it would be a sin against the spirit even to mention in the same breath with the Bible. You will guess immediately why; it has a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evil-smelling Jewish distillation of Rabbinism and superstition — it gives something to chew even to the most fastidious psychologist.

“And, not to forget the most important point of all, it is fundamentally different from every kind of Bible: by means of it the noble classes, the philosophers and the warriors guard and guide the masses; it is replete with noble values, it is filled with a feeling of perfection, with saying yea to life, and triumphant sense of well–being in regard to itself and to life — the Sun shines upon the whole book. 

“All those things which Christianity smothers with its bottomless vulgarity, procreation, woman, marriage, are here treated with earnestness, with reverence, with love and confidence. How can one possibly place in the hands of children and women, a book that contains those vile words: ‘to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband… it is better to marry than to burn.’ And is it decent to be a Christian so long as the very origin of man is Christianised, that is to say, befouled, by the idea of the immaculate conception?… 

“I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said to woman, as in the Law Book of Manu; these old grey–beards and saints have a manner of being gallant to woman which, perhaps, cannot be surpassed. ‘The mouth of a woman,’ says Manu on one occasion, ‘the breast of a maiden, the prayer of a child, and the smoke of the sacrifice, are always pure’. And finally perhaps this is also a holy lie — ‘all the openings of the body above the navel are pure, all those below the navel are impure. Only in a maiden is the whole body pure.’”

This leaves no doubt that Zarathustra is a new name for Manu and that Thus Spake Zarathustra is a new edition of Manu Smriti.

If there is any difference between Manu and Nietzsche it lies in this. Nietzsche was genuinely interested in creating a new race of men which will be a race of supermen as compared with the existing race of men. Manu on the other hand was interested in maintaining the privileges of a class who had come to arrogate to itself the claim of being supermen.

Nietzsche’s supermen were supermen by reason of their worth. Manu’s supermen were supermen by reason of their birth. Nietzsche was a genuine disinterested philosopher. Manu on the contrary was a hireling engaged to propound a philosophy which served the interests of a class born in a group and whose title to being supermen was not to be lost even if they lost their virtue.

Compare the following texts from Manu.

X. 81. “Yet a Brahman, unable to subsist by his duties just mentioned, may live by the duty of a soldier; for that is the next rank.”

X.82. “If it be asked, how he must live, should he be unable to get a subsistence by either of those employments; the answer is, he may subsist as a mercantile man, applying himself into tillage and attendance on cattle”.
Manu adds:

IX. 317. “A Brahmana, be he ignorant or learned, is a great divinity, just as the fire, whether carried forth (for the performance of a burnt oblation) or not carried forth, is a great divinity.”

IX. 323. “Thus, though the Brahmans employ themselves in all (sorts) of mean occupation, they must be honoured in every way; (for each of) them is a very great deity.”

Thus Manu’s is a degraded and degenerate philosophy of Superman as compared with that of Nietzsche and therefore far more odious and loathsome than the philosophy of Nietzsche.

This explains why the philosophy of Hinduism does not satisfy the test of justice or of utility. Hinduism is not interested in the common man. Hinduism is not interested in society as a whole. The centre of its interest lies in a class and its philosophy is concerned in sustaining and supporting the rights of that class. That is why in the philosophy of Hinduism the interests of the common man as well as of society are denied, suppressed and sacrificed to the interest of this class of Superman… 

It is therefore incontrovertible that notwithstanding the Hindu Code of Ethics, notwithstanding the philosophy of the Upanishads not a little, not a jot, did abate from the philosophy of Hinduism as propounded by Manu. They were ineffective and powerless to erase the infamy preached by Manu in the name of religion. Notwithstanding their existence one can still say, “Hinduism! They name is inequality!” 

(This article has been archived from the May 2000 issue of Communalism Combat. The cover story, “India’s Shame” traced how even 50 years after the Constitution proclaimed equality for all, over 160 million Dalits continue to be victims of a ‘hidden apartheid’, treated as untouchables and worse)

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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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Senior editor, Nikhil Wagle speaks eloquently on the dangers to Indian democracy and dissent from the supremacist and majoritarian forces that have Hindu Rahstra (Hindu Nation) as their aim.

He was speaking on Saturday, Match 5, 2016 in Mumbai addressing students.

Independence of the Media is a specific target of this majoritarian target and collaborator within the media, especially in television are actually whipping up mass hysteria and venom.
 
Credits: Satyen K. Bordoloi

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When I see the fundamentalists of today proclaiming their version of nationalism, I wonder whether the pluralism for which our forefathers fought has disappeared. My first encounter with the predecessors of today’s Desh Bakths was on  January 31, 1948 when some of them went round distributing sweets to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination the previous day.

Like those who celebrate Godse today, they too did not want the diversity that Gandhi and the freedom fighters stood for. One has, therefore, to ask whether the Hindu Rashtra that the rightist forces would like to build will allow diversity. Or is it to be exclusive like Hitler’s Germany? I was just six when the world war ended so I did not know much about Hitler but I studied about him at school.

And I ask myself whether I am imagining what look like parallels between his Nazism and what the rightist forces propagate in my country today. Is their nationalist exclusive and the opposite of the inclusive nationalism amid unity in diversity that independent India stood for? Hitler’s exclusive Nazism was founded on a Germany that belonged only to the Aryan race which he defined as blonde and tall though he himself was short and somewhat on the darker side.

Those who did not belong to his pure race, for example Jews and gypsies, and others like trade unionists and Communists who disagreed with him, were jailed or sent to the gas chambers. The difference with the “nationalists” of today’s India is that they are ready to tolerate Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Tribals and Women in their Bharat, as long as they accept to be subordinate second class citizens under the “owners” of the country.

My first encounter with the predecessors of today’s Desh Bakths was on  January 31, 1948 when some of them went round distributing sweets to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination the previous day. 

The events of the last few days and weeks make me wonder whether there is a second similarity. Hitler and his propagandist Himmler created an army of hooligans to attack their opponents.

They would first create myths showing their opponents in a bad light as anti-national and then attack them. One sees it happening in our country too. Those who shout slogans or write what the “nationalists” do not like are called traitors. Some of them like Pansare and Kalburgi have been eliminated, a few others like Prof. Kancha Illaiah, Dr Sandeep Pandey and Dr Sai Baha have been ostracised after accusing them of being Naxalites or anti-national.

Many others, for example the teachers and students of JNU and journalists who were covering their case, have been beaten up by lawyers and law makers. The freedom fighters stood for a different type of nationalism. The instructions of Gandhi to his followers were to exhibit their nationalism in the service of the poor.

That is what I witnessed in my childhood in persons like our neighbour homeopathic doctor Shastri (cricketer Ravi Shastri’s grandfather). He was the ward Congress president but he gave up politics and spent his life serving the poor particularly children in whose medicines he specialised.
The spirit of nationalism was thus shared in service, not imposed through violence and today’s “nationalists” seem to think that they should do. The police look the other way when they beat up their opponents even in a court of law as it happened in the premises of Patiala House.

The Nazis came to power by using the democratic system. Once in power they used the army of hooligans to destroy its institutions. One sees a similar process in India today. 

It is difficult to believe that the police can behave the way they did without instructions from those who control their department. The “nationalists” first created a myth that anti-national slogans were raised by the students of JNU and then beat up the “traitors”. The police arrested some students for sedition despite a Supreme Court judgement that slogans do not constitute sedition and that only a call for violence does.

That call has come from the “nationalists” some of whom have gone on record that they are ready to repeat their violent acts and even shoot some traitors. All that the police have done is to issue arrest warrants against some lawyers. They have not been arrested though they are highly visible and are staging demonstrations. They arrested an MLA, gave him tea and snacks and let him off after fifteen minutes. But some of those whom the “nationalists” accuse of being traitors are in jail or are under threat of being arrested because they made statements that the self-styled protectors of Bharat dislike.

Thirdly the Nazis came to power by using the democratic system. Once in power they used the army of hooligans to destroy its institutions. One sees a similar process in India today.

Dissent that is a basic feature of a democracy is considered sedition. People are beaten up inside the court premises thus preventing the judiciary from doing their duty. Their position of power is used to take control of the educational and research institutions because all thinking has to support their concept of nationalism.

Universities that encourage students and teachers to think for themselves become subversive. A democratic principle is that dissent has to be tolerated even when it goes beyond what moderate elements may consider unacceptable as long as it does not preach or encourage violence. But today’s “nationalists” invent sedition in all forms of dissent of questioning of established positions. Violence takes the place of debate and lawlessness overtakes law abiding citizens.

These developments should challenge people who love the country to come together and reflect on the type of India they want. India has the option of behaving as a civilised nation that encourages debate, dissent and creative thinking or join the banana republics in which creative thinking is sedition.

(The author is a former founder-director of North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati is at present senior fellow in the same institution; this article also appeared in the Shillong Times)

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