PERSPECTIVES

OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 36
This essay is dedicated to the memories of
Sheikh Abdul Rawoof and Nirmal Kumar
Chandra, the former, a Maoist revolutionary,
who passed away on 9 February 2014, the
latter, one of Indias nest radical economists,
who died on 19 March 2014. Their respective
aspirations lay beyond the narrow limits of
acceptable politics/adequate scholarship.
I am grateful to John Mage and Paresh
Chattopadhyay, and to my colleagues at EPW,
for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.
The text in its rst draft was in the form of
notes I prepared for a Rawoof Memorial
Lecture I delivered in Thrissur on 16 March
2014, and I beneted from the discussion and
the comments that followed. I assume
responsibility for any mistakes and
shortcomings that remain.
Bernard DMello (bernard@epw.in) is a
member of the Committee for the Protection of
Democratic Rights, Mumbai.
Where Is the Magazine?
Indian Semi-Fascism and the Left
Bernard Dmello
Following the ascendancy of
Hindutvavadi nationalism over its
secular counterpart, and a
majority, Modi-led government in
power at the centre, semi-fascism
is in the making in a milieu
characterised by monstrous class
polarisation, a sub-imperialist
tendency of the oligopolistic
business stratum/Indian state,
rotten liberal-political democracy
and widespread Syndicated
Hindu religiosity. What is this
semi-fascism? How may the
Left resist it? What may the
anti-semi-fascist magazine be
comprised of?
1 Introduction
You cant have ideas like mine and expect to
be left alone.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian poet,
lm-maker, novelist and political journalist,
shortly before his murder (assassination?)
on 2 November 1975.
O
verburdened by anxiety over
the sway of Hindutvavadi na-
tionalism after February 2002,
compounded by isolation at a workplace
breeding mistrust and back-stabbing, its
management steeped in the values of the
Dharmashastras, I was compulsorily
retired in the public interest. Among
other matters, the management just could
not take the few paragraphs I had written
about Bharatiya management studies
(DMello 1999: M-174). When I think of
those times, I invariably remember the
character Pinneberg, the little man or
nobody from the German novelist
Hans Falladas 1932 Little Man, What Now?
The novel hit the stands just before the
Nazi Party took over. Nothing lasted
but being alone those words from its
nal chapter say a lot about the solitari-
ness upon rejection of those who dont
belong. In 1935 Fallada was classied
by the Nazi regime as an undesirable
author. That was almost 80 years ago,
but now, master criminals are about to
run amuck once more, this time in 21st
century India, and not many will be
willing to see, tell or publish the truth
about the further contamination of Indian
society and the state.
I begin with the premise that liberal-
political democracy in India, however
rotten it may be (DMello 2013), is not
about to be discarded, for neo-liberal
capitalism and Indias nascent sub-
imperialism are not threatened; they do
not, as yet, need the application of the
ultimate safeguard fascism. Two proce-
sses, apparently running parallel to each
other over the last two decades, neo-
liberal capitalist development and the
oligopolistic business (in Marxist termi-
no logy, monopoly) stratums/Indian states
nascent sub-imperialist tendency, on the
one hand, and the reactionary Hindutva-
vadi nationalist movement, on the other,
have congregated once again at the
national level, greatly strengthened
com pared to such convergence at the
time of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-
led National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
government during 1998-2004.
I argue that the consequence can be
semi-fascism (conceptualised later on)
fascism hyphenated with a semi not
full-blown fascism, mainly, but not who-
lly, because electoral democracy, the ll-
ing of the posts, through universal adult
franchise, of the legislative functions of
the state, will not, as yet, be dispensed
with, given bipartisanism (concurrence
of the Congress and the BJP) as far as
both neo-liberalism and nascent sub-
imperialism are concerned. Big business,
even with Narendra Modi as Indias prime
minister and the BJP with a majority in
the Lok Sabha, will not encourage the
organisation of a fascist regime. And,
moreover, despite the Maoist movement,
the ruling establishment is not threat-
ened by revolution from below. But with
semi-fascism on the anvil, the question
naturally arises as to how the Left
should take on the challenge.
I start with a few observations on the
central fascist movements and regimes
in the history of Germany and Italy
(historical fascism), this because they
inform all accounts that try to theorise
about fascism/semi-fascism. I then briey
explore the monstrous polarisation that
has occurred in India in the neo-liberal
period and argue that, in certain circum-
stances, this can bring the monopoly
stratums/Indian states nascent sub-
imperialist tendency to the fore. From
here I probe the long process by which
the Hindutvavadi nationalist movement
has managed to bring the BJP to power
with a majority in the Lok Sabha its
designated leaders now hold the principal
ofces in the executive of the Indian state.
Hindutvavadi nationalism has triumphed
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 37
over secular nationalism. I go on to
conceptualise semi-fascism in the Indian
context, and come to what the Left can
do to resist the demon. I critique the
Communist Party of India (Marxist)s
(CPI(M)) and, in turn, the radical Lefts,
existing approaches to the challenge
that Hindutvavadi nationalism has, so
far, posed, and outline my own propos-
als of what might constitute a viable and
effective Left resistance based on a Unit-
ed Front (UF). But, in locating the maga-
zine of the resistance in its multiple
strands, I propose the idea of 21st

century
United and Popular Fronts.
Essentially, I am trying to understand
what fascism and semi-fascism are, why
they surface, and how they manifest
themselves. Equally, I am concerned with
the terrain of anti-fascism/anti-semi-
fascism. I make no bones about my ob-
jective: It is to present a point of view of
anti-fascism/anti-semi-fascism. I am con-
cerned with the urgent need for the
Indian Left to ally and organise against
semi-fascism, and in this endeavour, it
has a lot to learn from what other anti-
fascists have done in the past. I emphasise
that there is a great deal of continuity
between what the Congress Party and the
BJP have done in their political spear-
heading of Indias neo-liberal deve lop-
ment, as also in buttressing the monopoly
stratums/Indian states nascent sub-
imperialist tendency, as well as the re-
gimes severe repression of the oppre ssed-
nationality and Maoist movements.
I try to provide a quality intellectual
understanding of Indian semi-fascism in
the making. However, knowledge of the
past can only be a rough guide, if at all,
to the future, and so my comprehension
of Indian semi-fascism in the making is
provisional until something better comes
along. Also, let me sound a note of cau-
tion, a caveat, at the very outset: I may
have overestimated the effect of certain
objective conditions on the ground, as
also, the efcacy of the voluntarism of
the Hindutvavadi leadership in the likely
installation of semi-fascism. Concurrently,
I may have underestimated the impact
of other objective conditions, the progre-
ssive currents in Indian society, and the
will & resolve of progressives in under-
mining that reactionary transformation.
It is true, however, as far as the force of
opinion on public action goes, individual
reason often gets dwarfed by the inu-
ence of power, and here, the power of
Hindutvavadi discourse, more so with
the BJP sponsored by big business and
now, the loaves and shes of ofce.
2 Clues from Historical Fascism
Any analysis aiming to understand con-
temporary semi-fascism in the making
must revisit historical fascism, especially
in Germany and Italy.
1
I view the rise of
historical fascism as emanating from the
impact of the imperialist rst world war
on the economic and social structures of
some of the defeated developed-capitalist
nations. The Kingdom of Italy, of course,
joined the Entente in May 1915 urged on
by Mussolinis paid war propaganda, and
after secret negotiations with Britain
and France, bargained for territory if
victorious. But although in the victorious
camp in 1918, with the wretchedness of
life in the trenches, and poverty, misery
and degradation at home for the majori-
ty, Italys fate was much like that of the
defeated Central Powers. So the context
was the war, the defeat, the reparations
(in the case of Germany), hyperination,
deep despair and imagined-threatened
disintegration of the nation state.
To this one must add the build-up of a
reactionary mass movement anchored
in paramilitary formations, the subse-
quent emergence of a one-party regime
with a Fhrer or a Duce as the supreme
symbol of authoritarian leadership, a re-
pressive regime that was violently natio-
nalistic, racist (anti-Semitic, indeed, rac-
ist anti-Semitic, in the case of Germany),
intolerant of opposition, hostile to civil
liberties and democratic rights. And, lest
I forget, before fascism came to power,
there was its principal adversary, a for-
midable labour movement, with one
wing led by social democrats, and the
other, smaller, but headed by commu-
nists with revolutionary objectives. The
independent labour movement was am-
ong the rst targets in both Italy and
Germany, in both cases replaced swiftly
by a fascist all-inclusive labour move-
ment directly integrated into both party
and state. Fascism presented itself as an
authoritative alternative in the form of
militant, demagogic nationalism
2
and vio-
lence (with the use of storm-troopers/
Blackshirts in active complicity with
the state) against all those whom it sin-
gled out communists, social democrats,
the labour movement, and in Germany,
the Jews, the gypsies and the Slavs. Of
course, Mussolini fell in line with anti-
Semitic racism only from 1938.
When the reactionary mass movement
(fascists mobilised the masses from be-
low) and party upstaged the other right-
wing nationalist parties, cartelised big
business came eagerly on board. In both
Germany and Italy, the fascists came to
power by constitutional means, and only
then did they refuse to play the liberal-
political democratic game. However, the
important point is that the reactionary
mass movement heralding national re-
newal, whether in Germany or Italy, did
not by itself produce fascism. The Great
Depression, monopoly capitalism mired in
stagnation, and deep economic, political,
social and cultural decline in Germany
(in Italy, the fascists came to power
before the Great Slump), and importantly,
seriously undermining the very struc-
ture of capitalist rule, led to the rise and
consolidation of the fascist regime. And,
with the coming to power of fascism, the
strong state and one-party system fol-
lowed, and then, imperialist strategy
monopoly capital and the state came
together to extend their inuence, their
power, and their mutual interests beyond
the national borders.
There is just one more thing I need to
mention. With the establishment of a
strong state and a close state-big busi-
ness alliance, and with some sections of
big business losing favour (in Germany,
the Jewish capitalists were expropriat-
ed), some parvenus backed by powerful
fascist politicians entered the ranks of
big business. A virtual absorption of the
personnel of the top levels of big busi-
ness into the state apparatus then en-
sued the separate channels through
which the ruling class exercised its
political and economic power in liberal-
political democracy now tended to con-
verge into one under fascism.
This bare account of historical fascism
suggests that it would be best if fascism/
semi-fascism is theorised as a process,
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 38
keeping in mind the various aspects/
elements just mentioned, for then one
can avoid the pitfall of permanently x-
ing its meaning based on its historical
forms in Germany and Italy.
We are now ready to get to India today.
3 Monstrous Polarisation
Capitalism is based on exploitation pri-
vate appropriation of part of the product
of the labour of others and of the natural
resources of the commons and this gen-
erates inequality. Neo-liberalism exacer-
bates such inequality. It is a package of
policies coupled with an ideological frame-
work. The policies include free trade,
privatisation, nancial openness, the
elimination of government regulations
on capital, and scal conservatism leading
to reductions in social progra mmes, all
these appended with a facade of social
and governance issues, like, for instance,
ghting corruption. The ideo logy assigns
primacy to economic gro wth, believes in
the dynamism of the market and the pri-
vate sector, and celebrates inequality. As
a result of the adoption of such neo-lib-
eral orthodoxy in India in phases from
1991 onwards, money the standard of
all things, the measure of ones worth
now has many more avenues for pro-
table deployment than it had before.
Indeed, Indias moneybags now almost
have de facto the freedom to accumulate
wealth by any and all available means.
In an earlier essay (Bernie 2012), I em-
phasised the importance of the opening
of the energy, mining, telecommunica-
tions, civil aviation, infrastructure (ports,
highways, etc), banking, insurance, and
other sectors to private capital following
the International Monetary Fund-World
Bank prescribed stabilisation and struc-
tural adjustment progra mmes that India
undertook in the 1990s and the transfor-
mation of the character and composition
of the big bourgeoisie that was brought
about as a result. In particular, I stressed
upon the rise of a nancial aristocracy
(nancial big bour geoisie), including a set
of parvenus, which has been increasingly
calling the shots in the corridors of
power in India today.
3

Essentially, the nancial aristocracy
has been multiplying its wealth not by
production alone but by pocketing the
already available wealth of others, state
property and the commons, including
those of the adivasis. In emphasising the
rise of the nancial bourgeoisie, however,
I do not intend to convey the impression
that the industrial bourgeoisie (that
directly extracts surplus value from pro-
ductive labour) is not in the circuit of
political power, or indeed, that all the
other propertied classes have been ex-
cluded from the orbit of political power.
In particular, we must not disregard
the powerful brick-and-mortar industri-
al bourgeoisie. In the earlier essay just
mentioned, we followed the money; now
let us follow the labour that made it, and
then combine the two. Over the last two
decades, as part of a process of rapid
business expansion, the proportion of
regular workers in the total workforces
of units in the factory sector has been on
a downward trend, i e, the proportion of
temporary and contract workers in these
workforces has increased quite signi-
cantly, this with the complicity of the
state. The latter has turned a blind eye to
violations of labour law concerning the
terms of employment, wages, conditions of
work, including occupational health and
safety, as also retrenchment and com-
pulsory retirement. The ongoing struggle
of the workers of Maruti-Suzukis Mane-
sar plant the company is Suzukis most
protable subsidiary worldwide and the
solidarity they have got have helped high-
light these facts in the political realm.
3.1 Huge Reserve Army of Labour
Capital in neo-liberal India exploits a pre-
cariously employed exible workforce,
this with a vast reinforcement of poten-
tial workers at its disposal, what Marx
called the reserve army of labour or the
relative surplus population a vast pool
of the unemployed, underemployed, and
self-employed in petty commodity pro-
duction and/or trade (potential wage
labourers). Marx categorised the reserve
army in normal times into three compo-
nents, the oating, the latent and the
stagnant, and added on those engaged
in illegal activity, the lumpenproletariat.
The oating component would be
composed of workers who are unem-
ployed due to the normal ups and downs
of the business cycle, those who have
lost their jobs due to the introduction of
new capital and technology that makes
possible the production of a given level
of output with a lesser amount of labour
(technological unemployment), and those
who are laid off when employers can get
cheaper, younger workers to replace them.
But then, with no social security, many
of these persons will not be able to sur-
vive if they remained unemployed; they
desperately do what they can to earn a
living, so the actual number of the
unemployed is lower.
The latent component of the reserve
army of labour in the Indian context
should include those who work for sub-
sistence on own-account (self-employed
petty commodity producers/traders of
goods and services), including in agricul-
ture, as well as the other members of their
families who chip in as unpaid workers,
the proportion of which goes up in times
of economic distress. The stagnant com-
ponent is that part of the active labour
army that only manages to nd extremely
irregular employment (at best they are
intermittent workers). In the Indian con-
text, a signicant proportion of casual
wage labourers, including agricultural
labourers, would be in that category.
Basically, the reserve army of labour
presents capital with a pool of labour
available for hire; equally, it also forces
discipline and efciency on those who
are in employment. The threat of unem-
ployment and underemployment hangs
like the sword of Democles over the
heads of all those who have no other al-
ternative but to work for a wage under
capitalism, and this is the real source of
capitalist efciency, the real means of
increasing the rate of exploitation of the
active army of labour. As Marx put it in
Chapter 25, The General Law of Capita list
Accumulation in Capital, Volume 1, the
reserve army of labour or the (r)elative
surplus population is...the pivot upon
which the law of demand and supply of
labour works.
Our estimate of the size of the reserve
army of labour in 2011-12 is 226.9 million
persons the sum of a 24.7 million oat-
ing reserve, a 171.7 million latent reserve,
and a 30.5 million stagnant reserve
10% more than the size of the active
army of wage labour.
4
The pivot upon
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 39
which the law of demand for and supply
of labour works is thus very signicant,
both, in an absolute and in a relative
sense, in not only restraining the rise in
real wages, but also in moderating the
producer prices that the petty commodity
producers get (from merchant capital)
in the overcrowded and intensely com-
petitive supply side of the product mar-
kets they nd themselves in. If we now
assume that each person in the reserve
army of labour and each person in the
active army of casual labour supports
one dependent, then together this sec-
tion of Indian society which is at the
bottom of the class pyramid is made up
of 720.6 million persons, or 59.5% of the
countrys population.
The reserve army of labour and the
active army of casual labour are at the
bottom of a steep social-class hierarchy
at the apex of which are a relatively
small number of owner-controllers of the
oligopolies, beneciaries of the ske wed
distribution of surplus value. There is
thus a sharp class polarisation in neo-
liberal India islands of wealth, luxury
and civilisation in a vast sea of poverty,
misery and degradation. The ratio of the
income of a dollar billionaire to that of a
casual labourer is of the order of 10
6
! In
between, at different distances from the
apex and the base of the social-class pyr-
amid, are semi-capitalist landowners,
SME (small and medium enterprise) cap-
italists, the merchant and moneylending
classes, the administrative, professional,
scientic and technological sections of
the middle class, the labour contractors/
jobbers who recruit and man age gangs of
unregistered casual-contract wage work-
ers, and the regular wage workers. Such
relative immiserisation in Indias under-
developed capitalist system is not very
different from what Marx expected in
the course of capitalist development and
he articulated a general law of capita list
accumulation to that effect in Capital,
Volume I, Chapter 25.
One aspect of Indias underdevelop-
ment is the large (in relative and abso-
lute terms) contingent of petty commodity
producers/traders. A low level of develop-
ment of the forces of production prevails
in signicant parts of the economy, with
these spheres dominated by mercantile,
credit and semi-feudal capital. Indeed,
there has been/is a political and com-
mercial alliance between the semi-
feudal/semi-capitalist landowning classes
and mercantile-cum-credit capital which
has preserved the status and preroga-
tives of both. This and the preservation
of the large mass of oppressed peasants
and other petty commodity produ cers
are at the core of Indias under developed
capitalism. Importantly, this state of
affairs is concomitant with backward
capitalist and semi-feudal political, ideo-
logical and cultural traits.
3.2 Natural Order of Society!
Even learned economists seem to be
mystied by the economic system; one
has only to examine the false solutions
they propose to solve the problems of the
59.5% (three-fths) of the population
who are at the bottom of the steep eco-
nomic hierarchy. Basically, their diag-
noses of the problems are oblivious of
the real world of classes, wherein own-
ership entitles a few to substantial shares
of the output. Despite a trend annual
rate of growth of real national income/
product of around 6% (ofcial statistics
seem to overestimate services sector
growth) over two decades since 1991,
the distribution of that income which
is not merely a passive consequence of
production and exchange has prevented
the increment of aggregate income from
raising the levels of living of the masses.
Hardly anyone, even in the economics
profession, ever mentions Marxs labour
theory of value and his analysis of ex-
ploitation. Didnt he also say something
about the loop between the ruling classes
and the ruling ideas?
Any wonder then that the three-fths
of the population whose lives are ruled
by external economic compulsion can-
not understand the world around them
and are subject repeatedly to false prom-
ises. One might surely be dismayed by
the many visible strains of irrationality,
but with the extent of mystication and
superstition all around the three-fths
of the population who constitute the
poor, the miserable and the degraded,
the conservativeness of the administra-
tive, professional, scientic and techno-
logical sections of the middle class, the
pernicious inuence of mercantile, credit
and semi-feudal capital over the lives of
the petty commodity producers/traders,
its not hard to understand why so many
in India today are so utterly confused
and misinformed, why Hindutvavadi
natio nalism as an ideology has grown
in strength.
Class and caste distinctions, and Hin-
dutvavadi morality, are openly aunted,
especially by the nouveau riche, who un-
like its older counterpart, relates to money
as if it can buy anyone and anything.
This is not at all surprising, for liberali-
sation, privatisation and globalisation
have paved the way for the making of
fortunes (by the privileged) where they
were not many such avenues earlier, and
with a low incidence of income tax on
high incomes and a lack of a social code
regarding the extent of permissible rela-
tive poverty, the billionaire-casual wage
worker income ratio of (the order of) 10
6

is seen as part of the natural order of
society. Indeed, the nouveau riche also
denes Quality, and does it very care-
fully for those who come from dalit-
bahujan social backgrounds, this in
order to preserve that natural order.
3.3 Propensity of Overproduction
The relative immiserisation and the
monstrous class-polarisation that India
has witnessed over the last two decades
are consequences, not of any natural
order of society, but of the working out
of the very nature of capital as self-
expanding value. Marx put it wonder-
fully well when he wrote: The real bar-
rier of capitalist production is capital it-
self. With the sharp deceleration of real
GDP (gross domestic product) growth
(from an average of 8.3% during 2004-05
to 2011-12 to 4.6% in 2012-13 and 2013-14),
what is now unfolding is the contradic-
tion between the capacity to produce
and the capacity to consume. The proc-
ess of accumulation is predicated upon an
increase in the rate of exploitation, but
at the same time, the realisation of the
additional surplus is dependent upon
additional purchasing power of the mass
of consumers both are essential to spur
investment and economic growth. But
relative immiserisation has reached a
point where it is holding down growth of
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 40
the relative purchasing power of the masses,
weakening consumption and adding to
overcapacity, thus lowering expected
prots on new investment, and thereby
dampening the propensity to invest.
5

The neo-liberal path of capitalist de-
velopment followed over the last two
decades is suffused with a realisation
problem, and the oligopolists at the top
of the social-class pyramid, the main
beneciaries of the skewed distribution
of the surplus, are now trying to main-
tain their higher rates of prot by hold-
ing back on investments that would
otherwise have expanded the stock of
productive capital. A successful process
of accumulation requires a rise in mass
consumption, but when the capitalist
class does not concede a sufcient rise in
the incomes of the regular and casual
workers and the petty commodity pro-
ducers, the addition to productive capa-
city turns out to be more than what the
increase in consumption can possibly
sustain. In such a situation and with
self-imposed caps on civilian government
spending militarism and nascent sub-
imperialism, besides nancialisation, the
offsetting tendencies, come to the fore.
6

4 Sub-Imperialist Tendency
We have been labouring at the domestic
aspects of Indias neo-liberal capitalist
development, but its time now to turn to
the international ones. A prudential way
would be to move from the domestic to
the international via the intersection of
the two.
India has one of the most powerful
and wealthy big bourgeoisies in the
periphery of the world capitalist system.
But yet, in the process of advancing their
power, their inuence and their mutual
interests beyond the countrys borders,
the Indian state and big bourgeoisie are
dependent upon US imperialism, a depen-
dence that deepened following the col-
lapse of the Berlin Wall and the demise
of the Soviet Union. The Indian regime
began to alter its foreign policy, leading
on to a strategic alliance as a junior part-
ner with US imperialism. In emphasising
US imperialist agency, however, one should
not forget that Indias nascent sub-
imperialism is also the global face of the
monopoly stratum of Indian capital.
Indeed, Indias nascent sub-imperialism
springs from the very nature of its
underdeveloped capitalism with a strong
monopoly capitalist stratum that inclu-
des a transnational- corporate slice.
7
Sections of the big bourgeoisie have
gained unprecedented prosperity over the
last two decades, derived from high rates
of exploitation at home and the growth
of exports of information technology
(IT) and IT-enabled services, pharmaceu-
ticals, etc, mainly from arbitraging cheap
human capital. The relatively signi-
cant outward foreign direct investment,
even to the deve loped capitalist coun-
tries, mainly thr ough mergers and acqui-
sitions, must also be acknowledged.
We have already highlighted the rise
of the nancial aristocracy (nancial big
bourgeoisie), which is now increasingly
calling the shots in the corridors of pow-
er, but the consolidation of oligopolistic
market structures in the modern indus-
trial and services sector, reinforced, no
doubt, by foreign capital, must also be
noted. Indeed, Indian monopoly capital,
which was once a very different species
from its counterpart in the west when it
bore a closer family resemblance to pre-
industrial monopolies than to contem-
porary western monopoly capital (Chan-
dra 1979), now that it has been exposed
to two decades of constant pressures
from foreign institutional investors, this
in the presence of competition from and
collaboration with transnational corpo-
rations, and competition from imports,
and despite being technologically depen-
dent on western and Japanese monopoly
capital, it is now emulating its western
counterpart in more ways than one
might like to admit.
4.1 Financialisation,
Consumerism, and Militarism
With the globalisation of the countrys
nancial markets gross capital inows
and outows as a percentage of GDP in-
creased from 15.1% in 1990-91 to 53.9%
in 2010-11 international nancial capi-
tal that is seemingly disengaged from
any particular national capitalist inter-
ests is now a prominent structural
characteristic of the Indian economy.
Not to be left behind, Indian monopoly
capital has jumped on the nancial
ban d wagon. The registration of new
non-government public and private lim-
ited companies in terms of sheer num-
bers, 40,459 (43.8% of the total of such
registrations) in nance, insurance, real
estate and business services during 2012-
13, compared to 14,146 (15.3%) in manu-
facturing in the same year (part of the
trend in recent years), and cumulatively,
as on 31 March 2013, 2,82,093 (32% of
the total such companies at work on that
date) in the former compared to 1,96,314
(22.2%) in the latter, points to the ex-
traordinary growth of nance vis--vis
industry (Government of India 2014:
27, 29-30). With various kinds of non-
banking nancial companies (NBFCS)
within the fold of the large business
houses (units of large capitals), inter-
company investments nanced by debt
have made the process of centra lisation
of capital (gaining managerial control
over smaller capitals) less complicated.
8

La Grande Bouffe, so characteristic of
consumerism, is conned to the elite,
which imitates the consumption patterns
of its counterparts in the developed capi-
talist countries.
9
Much of this is en-
sconced in a corporate milieu wherein a
considerable part of personal consump-
tion is written off as business expenses,
and the very rich siphon off part of the
surpluses that they appropriate to tax
havens. As the saying goes, nothing is
enough for those for whom enough is too
little. Thorstein Veblens concepts of
conspicuous consumption and leisure,
and pecuniary emulation,
10
these in the
context of the monstrous class polarisa-
tion that we just touched upon, are more
relevant than ever before. Even as Indian
fascist leaders control people by bring-
ing them under the sway of Hindutvava-
di nationalism and other demeaning
passions through shared devotion to
Bharat Mata (Mother India) with their
ags, anthems (Vande Mataram), loyalty
oaths, symbols and myths consumer-
ism in a corporate capitalist milieu, with
its subliminal suggestions regarding the
criteria of success and the ruthlessness
with which afuence must be pursued,
virtually declares war on nature.
Loyalty to particular brands, just like
allegiance to Bharat Mata, is created
through symbols and images, basically
PERSPECTIVES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 41
by manipulation through emotional ap-
peal. However, at least with respect to
historical fascism, the demeaning pas-
sions did not last after its defeat, but
consumerism, it seems, is worse in this
respect; for those who indulge in it, they
apparently eetingly satisfy their basic
compulsions, but remain subjugated and
conned, slaves of those urges. I am
really echoing Pasolini, when I say this,
but it leaves me with a disturbing ques-
tion: Is consumerism strengthening the
incipient mass psychology of fascism?
Certainly, the impression that wallowing
in branded consumer goodies is equiva-
lent to the attainment of political liberty
and economic freedom, what Herbert
Marcuse called repressive desublima-
tion, has gained a lot of ground in the
neo-liberal period.
But now, in the throes of a realisation
crisis, with the economy having gener-
ated capacity faster than the growth of
demand, especially in consumer dura-
bles, including cars produced by the
multinationals, the further opening of
external markets in south Asia and be-
yond has become an imperative. And, with
the state tending to increase military
expenditure and import technologically-
superior hardware subject to the quid pro
quo of gradual indigenisation in Indias
own developing military-industrial com-
plex, the fusion of interests between
Indias defence ministry, military top
brass and Indian-monopoly licensees/
subcontractors and their multinational
licensors is solidifying. This might lay
the foundation for protable military
exports from India. After all, the Indian
state is a regional military power that
has built a nuclear weapons arsenal; and
besides, it even has a missiles and mis-
siles delivery development programme.
And, of course, it has, for long, been
ghting internal wars (Navlakha 1999a,
b, 2001; Reddy 2008).
4.2 Ruthless Measures
For Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism was
as she put it in her 1913 book The Accu-
mulation of Capital the political
expression of the accumulation of capital
in its competitive struggle for what
remains still open for the non-capitalist
environment (p 446), within ones own
borders and beyond, through militarism
and war. In this respect, one senses con-
tinuity vis--vis colonial capitalism in
the expansion of the Indian state and
monopoly capital, including transna-
tional corporate capital, into the tribal
areas of central and eastern India, and
the Indian states engagement in a war
against its own people in seeking and
securing raw materials and investment
opportunities.
As regards its internal non-capitalist
milieu, like colonial capitalism, contem-
porary Indian capitalism is engaged in
adapting it to its own imperatives by
drawing it into its orbit. Of course, in the
tribal areas of central and eastern India,
where there is revolutionary resistance,
the process of capitalist development has
turned increasingly violent and cata-
strophic, what with the escalation of
militarism and war by the Indian state
leading to an inevitable cultural and
economic ruin of the tribal communities
living over there. As Luxemburg puts it,
albeit with respect to what colonial
capitalism did in the non-capitalist parts
of the world, and I quote her because
her passionate account, in parts, might
well apply to what is presently happen-
ing in the undeclared civil war that the
Indian state has unleashed against its
own people in central and eastern India
(Luxemburg 1913: 365, 376, 452):
...primitive conditions allow of a greater
drive and of far more ruthless measures than
could be tolerated under purely capitalist so-
cial conditions. ...
The unbridled greed, the acquisitive instinct
of accumulation ... is incapable of seeing far
enough to recognise the value of ... an older
civilisation. ...
Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly
displayed without any attempt at conceal-
ment, and it requires an effort to discover
within this tangle of political violence and
contests for power the stern laws of the eco-
nomic process.
But apart from such ruthless meas-
ures within ones borders, what is of cru-
cial signicance is Washingtons Pivot to
Asia strategy in the wake of Chinas rap-
id economic development over the last
30 years, her securing of international
energy and raw material sources and
surface transportation routes for the same,
and Beijings accompanying geopolitical
ascendency, all of which have upset the
long-established US imperialist dominat-
ed order in Asia. The USs strategic alli-
ances with Japan, Australia and India
are aimed at containing China through
political, diplomatic and military means,
and Washingtons three strategic part-
ners are now being pressurised to, in
turn, forge strategic ties with each other.
As a junior partner of the US, the Indian
Navy is fast becoming the chief police-
man of the Indian Ocean, and the Indian
militarys dependence on the US military-
industrial complex is increasing, this via
supply of military hardware and a home-
land security deal with Israel too. Basi-
cally, India is being groomed for the role
of a sub-imperialist power by the US in
order to serve mutual capitalist interests.
4.3 Akhand Bharat
and Greater India
The question then naturally arises about
the link between Hindutvavadi nation-
alism and Indias nascent sub-imperial-
ism. The bolstering of the semi-fascist
project of the Hindutvavadi forces really
followed the US war on terror in the
aftermath of 9/11, and this provides the
connecting link of Indias nascent sub-
imperialism with Hindutvavadi nation-
alism. What is relevant here is Hindutva-
vadi nationalisms expansionist thrust its
call for the recreation of Akhand Bharat,
undivided India, geographically as it ex-
isted prior to Partition in 1947, indeed,
the territory of what the Hindutvavadins
would equate with that of the ancient
Bharatavarsha, puried culturally, and
embracing a hoary civilisational herit-
age, and yet, technologically modern.
The Hindutvavadi claim is that only
such a formation can usher in real free-
dom for Hindus. The building of such
castles in the air can be dismissed as
part of the irrational and mystical out-
pourings of Hindutvavadi ideology, but
even an Indian government under
Congress Party leadership has eagerly
played the role of the pawn that Hunt-
ington in his inuential book Clash of
Civilizations assigned to it, coming
close to the the US-Israel alliance
against the largely Islamic axis of evil
nations and positioning itself as
nuclear-armed bulwark against China
(Nanda 2009a: 108).
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 42
In such a defence framework, smaller
neighbouring states are considered mere
protectorates under Indias security sys-
tem. But further, it is the extension of
Indias strategic neighbourhood to the
whole area around the Indian Ocean
region adjoining the Persian Gulf (the
extension of the Indian Ocean through
the Strait of Hormuz), east Africa and
south-east Asia the Hindutvavadi na-
tionalist conception of Greater India
11

that is, from Washingtons point of
view, the geopolitical signicance of
India. More plai nly speaking, the junior
partners military presence at the core of
the arc between Washingtons military
consolidation both in the Persian Gulf
and in east Asia explains the geopolitical
relevance of India to the US.
Tragically, the ascendancy of Hindutva-
vadi nationalism based, as it is, on a
chauvinistic hatred of Muslims and an
irrational and mystical appeal to Akh-
and Bharat and Greater India will
further the sub-imperialist urging and it
is to this allegiance that we now turn.
Readers will have noted as to what kind
of nationalists these Hindutvavadins are
who like their Congress counterparts
endorse a strategic alliance of India as a
junior partner with US imperialism. Of
course, concomitantly they also play the
pretence card of strategic autonomy.
5 Ascendancy of Hindutvavadi
Nationalism
1,200 saalo ki ghulaami ki maansikta Hin-
dustaniyon ko pareshaan karti rahi hai.
(Colonial subjugation over 1,200 years has
plagued Indians.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his rst
speech in the Lok Sabha, on 11 June 2014.
Clearly, Narendra Modi expressed the
Hindutvavadi perspective of Indian his-
tory, wherein the Muslim civilisation
period is depicted in terms of despotic
tyranny, this in sharp contrast to the
earlier Hindu civilisation, portrayed as
2,000 years of a golden age. But, as far
as we know, there was not even a mur-
mur of protest or argument in Parlia-
ment. The long-drawn struggle between
(receding) secular nationalism and
(advancing) Hindutvavadi nationalism
seems to have moved quite decisively in
favour of the latter. How did this happen?
5.1 Militarisation
of the Hindutvavadi Project
The involvement of ex-armed-forces of-
cers and some in-service ofcers of the
Indian armed forces in the political
project of Hindutvavadi nationalism
quite a number of them leads one to
trace the historical roots of the phenom-
enon. What comes to mind is V D Savar-
kar when he headed the Hindu Mahas-
abha during 1937-42 urging Hindutva-
vadi nationalists to join the Army in or-
der to help militarise Hinduism to take
on the Muslims in the civil war he was
anticipating in India after the British
left.
12
Based on historical archival work,
Marzia Casolari has unveiled the exist-
ence of direct contacts between the rep-
resentatives of Hindutvavadi organisa-
tions and those of fascist Italy in the
1930s. B S Moonje (1872-1948),
13
who was
among the foremost of the Hindutvavadi
leaders from the early 1920s to the start
of the second world war, saw the political
reality of fascist Italy as a source of
inspiration. The result was the attempt
to militarise the Hindutvavadi nationalist
movement according to fascist patterns,
Moonjes scheme of the Central Hindu
Military Society and foundation of its
Bhonsla Military School being a concrete
manifestation, as also, the evolution of
the concept of internal enemy along
explicitly fascist lines (Casolari 2000).
Contemporary involvement of Hin-
dutvavadi militants in a series of terror-
ist acts bomb blasts in Malegaon (in
2006 and 2008), on the Samjhauta Ex-
press (in 2007), at Hyderabads Mecca
Masjid (2007), at the Ajmer Sharif Dar-
gah (2007), and Modasa (2008) includ-
ing an ex-army major and a serving
Lt- Colonel in one of these operations,
and evidence of RSS (Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh) sanction at the highest
level for these alleged crimes, seem to be
a clear indication of progress on Savar-
kars project. The confessions of Swami
Aseemanand who headed the Vanvasi
Kalyan Ashrams religious wing, the
Shraddha Jagran Vibhag in December
2010 to a magistrate, and in interviews
(four of them, between January 2012
and January 2014, see Raghunath 2014),
directly point to the fact that the terrorist
acts were sanctioned by Mohan Bhagwat,
the current chief of the RSS and the
Sanghs general secretary at the time.
Indeed, even Operation Janmabhoomi
could not have been elaborately planned
and meticulously executed without the
involvement of retired military ofcers
who trained a 38-member squad, a Lax-
man Sena, to demolish the Babri Masjid
on 6 December 1992, as a recent Cobrapost
probe has revealed. This inquiry has in
fact been indirectly given credence by
Central Bureau of Investigation ofcials
who have conrmed that there is no
new revelation in it and that all the dis-
closures had already been included in
the charge sheet that the agency has
led (Cobrapost 2014 and CBI response
in The Times of India 2014).
5.2 State-Temple-Corporate
Complex
Now, if Hindutvavadi nationalists of the
Indian Armed Forces have furthered the
militarisation of the Hindutvavadi na-
tionalist project, the captains of indus-
try have not been too far behind they
are on board. But, of course, their contri-
bution is based upon prot calculus. At
the last Vibrant Gujarat Summit, held
in January 2013, this is what Mukesh
Ambani, chief executive ofcer (CEO) of
Reliance Industries and Indias richest
billionaire proclaimed: In Narendra Bhai
(brother), we have a leader with a grand
vision. His brother Anil, CEO of the Anil
Dhirubhai Ambani business group, went
several notches ahead, hailing Modi as
king among kings! And, he went on:
Narendra Bhai has the Arjuna-like clar-
ity of vision and purpose. Ratan Tata,
CEO of the Tata business group from 1991
to 2012, was all praise for Gujarats in-
vestment climate, attributing it to Mo-
dis leadership: Today when investors
look for locations to make investments,
they would be looking for locations
which are investor-friendly. Gujarat
stands out distinctly in the country and
the credit for it goes to Modi.
Of course one might counter that this
support for Modi may indeed be on
pragmatic-business grounds alone rather
than those of ideology. In the case of
Ratan Tata, surely this is the case, but
one needs to probe a bit deeper into what
may be called the nationalistic Hindu
PERSPECTIVES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 43
religiosity
14
of the bourgeoisie and the
middle classes. Such religiosity accom-
panied by ostentatious rituals yajas,
bhumi pujas before the start of construc-
tion of projects, etc has made for a dis-
tinctly Hindu texture in the public
sphere. Indeed, even the representatives
of the then Left Front government parti-
cipated in the bhoomi puja performed by
Tata Motors in Singur.
Some of the same gurus and swamis
who have participated in and blessed the
Hindutvavadi politics of the Vishva Hindu
Parishad (VHP) have had generous bene-
factors in Lakshmi Mittal (of Arcelor-
Mittal) and Anil Agarwal (of Vedanta
Resources). Corporate patronage and
generous funding of Hindu religious
institutions is too well known, but land
gifted or sold for a song by the Indian
state to these institutions is not, besides
promotion of the Amarnath Yatra that is
said to bring spirituality and patriotism
toge ther. Indeed, reecting over all of
this and more, Meera Nanda (2009b)
disce rns an emerging State-Temple-
Corporate Complex that will wield
decisive political and economic power.
All this nationalistic Hindu religiosity
has contributed to the hegemonic rise of
Hindutvavadi nationalism, itself a part
of the global resurgence of right-wing
ideo logy since the 1980s, and sections of
the Indian bourgeoisie have embraced it.
5.3 Power of Hindutva Ideology
What accounts for the power of Hindut-
va ideology at this point in time? It must
be recalled that religious-communal
hate politics since the 1890s was given
an ideological content with the founding
of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1914 and the
RSS in 1925, and grew steadily in the
wake of Partition (the Great Calcutta Kill-
ings of 1946, communal clashes all over
north India and Bengal, the genocidal
cleansing of the Punjab, both in Paki-
stan and India), and its aftermath (of
Muslims in Hyderabad in 1948, of Hin-
dus in East Pakistan in 1949 and 1950).
15

The BJP has its roots in the political
project of Hindutvavadi nationalism,
which reformulated Hinduism as Hin-
dutva (literally, Hinduness), a formu-
lation that has proved singularly appro-
priate to political mobilisation. A Hindu
is dened, in V D Savarkars Hindutva:
Who Is a Hindu? (written in 1923) as a
person who regards the land of Bharat-
varsha ... as his fatherland, as well as his
Holy land that is the cradle land of his
religion, thus identifying pitrubhumi
uniquely with punyabhumi, (a)scribing
sanctity to the land of ones birth, and
thereby providing the link with nation-
alist discourse, but ensuring that Mus-
lims and Christians are excluded from
being identied as Indian nationalists
(Basu et al 1993: 8-9).
Hindus can thus claim to be the pri-
mary citizens of India because their reli-
gion and their ancestry are indigenous
to Bharatvarsha. And, besides the unique
identication of pitrubhumi with punya-
bhumi, a shared Hindu Sanskriti (cul-
ture based on Vedic foundations), a set
of languages originating in Sanskrit,
and the Dharmashastras (the Hindu law
books laying down the social codes,
inclu ding those related to caste and gen-
der) are all appealed to, which together
make for cultural nationalism and the
imagined community of the Hindus.
This Hindutvavadi nationalism has been
projected as synonymous with Indian
nationalism, sidelining what was anti-
colonial and secular in the latter.
There is just one more dimension that
we need to ag in the above theorisation
of Hindutva that Hindutvavadi national-
ism is identied with one particular ver-
sion of Hinduism. This is how, we think,
Romila Thapar would put it, but we are
perple xed with her contention that
Hindutva is in many ways the anti-
thesis of Hinduism. Of course, she says
this from the secular perspective of
oppo sition to the abuse of religion or
the vile-political use of religion. As
she puts it in her celebrated essay
Syndicated Hinduism:
The Hindu, it seems, is being overtaken by
the Hindutvavadin, who is changing the es-
sential nature of the religion. There is some-
thing to be said for attempting to compre-
hend with knowledge and sensitivity and
not just the verbosity of glorication, the
real religious expression of pre-modern
Indian culture, before it is sniffed out.
She is here recalling the Shramanism
(in relation to popular religious cults)
that sprung up in the latter part of the
rst millennium BC, which explored
areas of belief and practice different
from the Vedas and Dharmashastras
and often preached a system of univer-
sal ethics that spanned castes and com-
munities, in opposition to brahmanism.
She is also referring to the Bhakti (devo-
tion) cults from the seventh century AD,
as also to folk Hinduism the religions
of the dalits, tribals and other groups at
the lower end of the social scale. All
these progressive trends are being
snuffed out with the hegemony of Syndi-
cated Hinduism that draws largely on
brahmanical texts, the Vedas, the epics,
the Gita and accepts some aspects of the
Dharmashastras (Thapar 2014: 115, 163,
143, 146 and 160) and this is the version
of Hinduism that Hindutvavadi national-
ism identies with. One might then say
that Hindutvavadi nationalism, identify-
ing itself with Syndicated Hinduism, ac-
tively promotes it, through the auspices
of the VHP, as a guide to political and so-
cial life in India today political Hindu-
ism, if one might like to call it by that
name. In which case, how then is Hin-
dutva the anti-thesis of Hinduism if
the latter has largely become what
Thapar calls Syndicated Hinduism?
The insidious spread of Syndicated
Hinduism and Hindutvavadi national-
ism in public life in India is not new.
Even Jawaharlal Nehru, in his An Auto-
bio graphy (also known as Toward Free-
dom, published in 1936) wrote: Many a
Congressman was a communalist under
his national cloak. Madan Mohan
Malaviya (1861-1946), who was presi-
dent of the Congress Party in 1909, 1918,
1930 and 1932, espoused the ideology of
Hindutva and was one of the initial
leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and its
president in 1923. In the 1950s, Con-
gressman K M Munshi (1887-1971) ex-
ploited the so-called collective memory
of the trauma suffered by Hindus fol-
lowing the raid of Mahmud of Ghazni on
the temple of Somnath and encouraged
the turning of it into a political slogan.
Nehru would have been traumatised if
he had even an inkling that, as events
were to unfold after his death, it would
be his grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, of all
persons, who would decide to remove
the seals from the Babri Masjid in Febru-
ary 1986, and in 1989, allow shilanyas to
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 44
take place over there. Indeed, Rajiv Gandhi
launched his campaign for the 1989 elec-
tions from Faizabad, the town adjoining
Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid was lo-
cated, calling for the ushering in of Ram
Rajya (the rule of god Ram), the expres-
sion, unlike when Mahatma Gandhi used
it, now clearly invoking Hindutvavadi
connotations. And so the destruction of
the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 Decem-
ber 1992 came to be justied as avenging
the Somnath temple raid of 1025 AD, this,
after nearly a thousand years! In 1998 at
its Panchmarhi Convention to chart out a
political strategy, the Congress Party
even went to the extent of endorsing
soft Hindutva themes in order to steal a
march on the BJP (Desai 2004a).
I think that Christophe Jaffrelot (2010)
has a point when he argues that the
hegemony of the ideology of Hindutva-
vadi nationalism must be seen in the ex-
tended process of socialisation of gener-
ations of Hindus, through the RSSs web of
shakhas (from Hedgewars time) and
network of front organisations collec-
tively known as the Sangh Parivar
16
the
creation and diffusion of which explains
its hold in Indian society and politics.
Indeed, the political fervour of Hin-
dutvavadi nation alism seems to have
moved women in a special way, with
many making symbolic offerings of their
mangalsutras to the cause of God Ram.
And, in the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat, the
Hindutva nationalists managed to mobi-
lise even dalits and shudra jatis
17
and
adivasis as foot soldiers of the fascist mi-
litia. Indeed, the BJP has not found the
political difculties of integrating the
Other Backward Classes (OBCs) the
shudra jatis into the Hindutva fold in-
surmountable, for instance, in Gujarat,
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhat-
tisgarh (Desai 2004b),
18
and also, more
recently, in the 16th Lok Sabha elections,
in Maha rashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar
(Desai 2014), in the latter two, stealing a
march over the Samajwadi Party and
the Rashtriya Janata Dal, respectively.
The roots of the rise of Hindutvavadi
national chauvinism should be traced to
Indias conservative modernisation from
above, the development of underdeve-
loped capitalism that has failed to complete
the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution.
19
Clearly, such roots run
deep, beyond the bounds of the Sangh
Parivar. One has only to make a compari-
son of the Shiv Sena-led pog rom against
Muslims in January 1993 in Bombay
20

under a Congress government in Mahar-
ashtra with the one in Gujarat led by the
RSS and its Sangh Parivar organisations,
including the BJP, from 27 February to
mid-May 2002
21
when a BJP government
was in power.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and with
Washingtons declaration of the global
war on terror, the Sangh Parivar was
emboldened in Gujarat in 2002 to prove
that it could be more sinister, more evil
and wicked than the Congress and the
Sena had been in Mumbai in January
1993. I cannot but remember the nine-
month pregnant Kausar Banos killing
at Naroda Patia in Gujarat in 2002;
whatever the highly-paid lawyers defend-
ing the Hindutva brigade might have
argued, the barbarity, the savage cruelty,
nothing could have been more sinister
than that. And, even though this brings
forth, even today, feelings (in me) of
deep anguish, torment and despair
there was the mostly, silently complicit
majority Gujarati-Hindu population,
Gujarats mitlufer,
22
receptive to the
Sangh Parivars storm-troopers commit-
ting mass murder.
Narendra Modi, chief minister of
Gujarat at the time, is now Indias prime
minister, in power, no doubt, due to
majority support from an expanded all-
India Hindu mitlufer now claiming that
it voted for the BJP because it saw in
Modi the vikas purush par excellence. So
far, the Indian courts, despite prima facie
allegations of gross criminal misconduct
against Narendra Modi and other power-
ful persons, for instance, in Zakia Jafris
case, have been reluctant to initiate
criminal court proceedings against the
accused because of their high rank and
the power that they wield. Now that
Modi is in the prime ministers chair,
the chances that the principle of equality
before the law will be upheld in this
matter are minuscule. After all, even the
initial charges against Modi are of gross
criminal misconduct promoting enmity
bet ween Hindus and Muslims, making
statements that led to harm to Muslims,
acting in a manner prejudicial to inter-
religious harmony, engaging in acts that
promoted national disintegration, and
in unlawful activity with the intent of
causing harm to Muslims.
5.4 Supreme Symbol
of Authoritarian Leadership
That such a person is now the prime
minister of India, besides being a further
reection of the rottenness of Indias
liberal-political democracy, is also the
fullment of the classic fascist dream
the Hindutvavadi nationalist movement
has nally got its supreme symbol of au-
thoritarian leadership and what is now
being carefully polished is the RSS and
Fhrer/Duce principle of ek-chalak anu-
vartitva (translated as obedience to one
leader).
23
In a sense, the Hindutvavadins
are behaving as if they have achieved
their own swaraj with Modi as their
dictator. The gure of Modi representing
strong authority and whose legitimacy
derives from being the one who van-
quished the Other perfectly matches
the psychic desires of Hindutvavadins
socialised in caste-Hindu families. Per-
sonality traits such as puritanical rigidity,
narrowing of emotional life, massive use
of the ego defence of projection, denial
and fear of ... [ones] own passions com-
bined with fantasies of violence, as also,
conspiratorial painting of every Muslim
as a suspected traitor and a potential
terrorist (Nandy 2002), all these char-
acteristics t Modi very well for his role
as a sarsanghchalak-type prime minister,
since that which is paranoid and obses-
sive-compulsive in the individual, is in a
semi-fascist regime, normal and politi-
cally desirable (from the perspective of
its supporters) for the functioning of such
a system of government. Public events
around Modi are being carefully choreo-
graphed, his exaltation of youth, his mas-
culinity, how he relates to the masses.
The nancial markets have already
made known the collective judgment of
the moneybags on the additional expect-
ed protability of their investments as a
result of the ushering in of the new
political regime. The rst thing Modi did
after it was clear that his party had won
a majority was to emphasise strength
through unity leading to national
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 45
renewal. The truths that are being cul-
tivated about him are those that appeal
to the fantasy above all, the hearts and
only then the minds of youth. The pro-
motion of a lavish cult of personality is
on; any policy decision, if its legitimacy
is to be upheld, is claimed to have a cer-
ticate of approval from Modi. Follow-
ing the success of the Hindutvavadi na-
tionalist movement, then, isnt the semi-
fascist regime gradually taking shape?
6 What Then Will Indian
Semi-Fascism Be?
Taking into consideration what we have
come up with so far, Indian semi-fas-
cism, in the process of its coming into
being during a possible tenure of two
ve-year terms of a Modi-led govern-
ment at the centre, and if it does actually
emerge, will tend to have the following
characteristics and policy imperatives:
24
A further degeneration of Indias
rotten liberal-political democratic system
following a strong dose of authoritarian
democracy
25
wherein a sarsanghchalak-
type prime minister will seek and claim
spiritual connection with the people;
The affairs of the state will likely be
run in a manner wherein major interest
groups will address a vastly-strengthened
Prime Ministers Ofce (Groups of Mini-
sters abolished), which will claim to re-
solve matters in the best interests of the
general will of the nation in the manner
of corporatism and the corporatist state;
A greater infusion of money and
wealth in the hijacking of the electoral
process that will ultimately make econo-
mic policy totally business-driven with
the economic ministries restructured
along business lines (e g, the Ministry of
Environment and Forests with respect to
environmental clearances), framing pol-
icy mainly through interaction with
those who represent business interests;
More inroads of Hindutvavadi nation-
alist ideology inuencing the affairs of
the state, leading to
constitutional reform that reinforces the ex-
ecutive branch of the state, further undermin-
ing the independence of the j udiciary;
degeneration of Parliament and the state
legislatures;
stronger bourgeois private property rights,
including intellectual property rights;
further dilution of secularism (e g, no
guarantee of the rights of Muslims), freedom
of speech, and right to peaceful assembly;
escalation of internal wars, including the
civil war against the Maoists.
The use of state and vigilante terror
(the latter, with parallel structures), as
the ultimate weapons to maintain con-
trol over the objective/necessary en-
emy, using among other things, a vol-
untary espionage network to identify
possible criminals;
Advancing the immediate objectives
of the Hindutva nationalist movement,
like the building of the Ram Temple in
Ayodhya over the ruins of the Babri Mas-
jid, the scrapping of Article 370, and the
enactment of a uniform civil code aimed
at removing Muslim Personal Law;
Implementation of the RSSs wish list
in the elds of education and culture;
The launching of some spectacular
infrastructural and military projects;
Exacerbation of relative immiserisa-
tion as a consequence of practising neo-
liberalism with the gloves off;
More Seva Bharati-type NGOs dispens-
ing private charity with government,
corporate and NRI support, in effect, hu-
miliating the poor even as the donors
earn brownie points for fullling their
corporate social responsibility;
Extension of the low-wage arbitrag-
ing policy with changes in labour law
and severe repression of independent
trade unions, both to promote labour-in-
tensive manufactured goods exports;
A likely consolidation of Bharatiya
Mazdoor Sangh in a bid to put in
place an all-inclusive labour movement
close to the BJP and the Modi-led
government;
Foreign policy informed by the notion
of Akhand Bharat and Greater India;
Furthering the objectives of Washing-
tons Pivot to Asia strategy against
China to the extent that they correspond
with New Delhis;
A strengthening of the centrifugal
tendencies in the nation because of the
threat of, and/or actual resort to state
violence to smother aspirations of
sovereignty and force the oppressed
nationality movements to accept forms
of severely circumscribed autonomy.
Here then is our conception of Indian
semi-fascism in the making. Indian
semi-fascism in the making would, most
likely, manifest itself in terms of an
authoritarian-democratic regime and
sub- imperialist power in a corporatist
state, the regime maintaining a close
nexus of politics-as-business with big
business; nurturing and supporting the
Hindut vavadi nationalist movement to
the extent of being complicit in its acts;
and insisting on controlling its neces-
sary enemies through the use of terror,
thereby exacerbating the centrifugal
tendencies of the system.
And, from what we have understood
so far, it will not be hard to identify an
Indian semi-fascist when you encounter
one his/her ideology of Hindutvavadi
nationalism, his/her upper-caste, Aryan
superior manner vis--vis lower castes
and dalits, his/her reactionary right-wing
views, his/her support for the states
sub-imperialist ventures and use of ter-
ror against its necessary enemies. How
then may the Left resist the semi-fascism
that is in the process of happening?
7 Anti-Semi-Fascism
The Left now obviously has a huge re-
sponsibility thrust upon its shoulders.
With the massive electoral success of the
BJP and Narendra Modi in rm control
of the executive of the Indian state at the
centre, both the parliamentary and the
radical Lefts are up against the wall.
What should they do to shift the balance
of power in favour of the proletariat and
the petty commodity producers? To re-
store its credibility, the Left has to launch
a programme and a set of tactics that do
not lose sight of the actuality of the rev-
olution. Surely, this demands audacity,
and more.
7.1 CPI(M)s Popular Front
The CPI(M) claims a Marxist-Leninist
heritage, and so it might be useful to
briey comment on aspects of its anti-
communal politics and anti-neo-liberal
economics. The partys intention to forge
an anti-Congress, anti-BJP Third Front
of the parliamentary Left with an assort-
ment of secular and democratic regional
parties after the 16th Lok Sabha elec-
tions lacked credibility. Nevertheless, in
such alliances, the implicit model is that
of the Popular Front (PF) and even its
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 46
wider extension into a National Front
(NF), that is, if I am allowed to indulge in
loose, sweeping abstraction.
The PF was an electoral and political
alliance originally advanced by Stalin
and Georgi Dimitrov in the mid-1930s,
the latter, then heading the Comintern.
Communist and social democratic par-
ties, having come together as the united
forces of labour in a UF,
26
were called
upon to ally with the forces of bour-
geois democracy against fascism, even
support liberal capitalist governments,
and as a further step, form an NF that
would include all anti-fascist forces
(even right-wing parties and govern-
ments). It meant that the communists
were to mobilise their support base in
the service of coalitions with liberal and
right-wing (in the case of a NF) capitalist
parties and the pro-capitalist govern-
ments that the latter headed or might
head. But surprisingly, in the post- second
world war period too, long after the de-
feat of fascism,
27
and in the atmosphere
of the cold war, some communist parties,
by-and-large, continued to implement,
more-or-less, an adapted set of PF tactics.
Such political tactics, based on an im-
plicit PF with the Congress Party, were
practised by the CPI during the period
1970-77, in the name of supporting a
progressive national bourgeoisie aga-
inst the forces of reaction in the course of
the so-called national democratic revo-
lution. The CPI(M)s tactical alliance with
the Congress Party from 2004 to 2008
was essentially, in a loose sense, also of
that category this time, to keep the
communal BJP at bay. The partys more
recent tactic of an alliance of the parlia-
mentary Left parties forging a front with
an assortment of some regio nal parties
political outts dominated by the pro-
vincial propertied classes
28
can also be
viewed as part of the same genre. Frankly,
all such fronts have, more than keeping
the communal forces at bay, undermined
the credibility of the CPI and the CPI(M)
as left forces.
29
Indeed, in the 16th Lok
Sabha elections, the CPI(M) and other par-
liamentary Left parties cut sorry gures.
Let us then come to the CPI(M)s app-
roach to the nationality questions in
Kashmir and the North East. Its support
of the Indian state in the latters violent
suppression of the right to self-determi-
nation fought for by the nationality
movements over there is dubious to say
the least. In these matters, the CPI(M) is
very much a part of the bourgeois-
landlord state consensus on Indian natio-
nalism, which includes the BJP (Chatto-
padhyay 1996). Like the bourgeois-
landlord parties, it supports the Indian
states machinations aimed at co-option,
not caring to reach out to the people in
these areas through direct involvement
in their struggles. It is high time the
Indian Left adopts Lenins approach to
the question of the oppressed nationa-
lities. Even as he supported the nation-
alism of the oppressed, he did not envis-
age this support as an end in itself when
he wrote in 1916 in A Caricature of
Marxism and Imperialist Economism as
part of 6 The Other Political Issues
Raised and Distorted by P Kievsky (Col-
lected Works, Volume 23):
If we demand freedom of secession for the
Mongolians, Persians, Egyptians and all oth-
er oppressed and unequal nations without
exce ption, we do so not because we favour
secession, but only because we stand for free,
volun tary association and merging as dis-
tinct from forcible association. That is the
only reason!
7.2 Radical-Left Resistance
What then of the Naxalite/Maoist ap-
proach to taking on Hindutvavadi na-
tionalism? Recall BJP leader L K Advanis
September-October 1990 Rath Yatra
from Somnath in Gujarat, weaving its
way through parts of Bihar where the
Naxalite movement had a considerable
mass base, to culminate, according to
the BJPs plan, in Ayodhya, the site of the
Babri Masjid. It was this Rath Yatra that
catalysed a chain of events leading to
the demolition of the Babri Masjid on
6 December 1992. In an air-conditioned
Toyota suitably decorated to look like
the chariot of Arjun, a central character
in the Mahabharata, wherever Advani
went along the route, he contributed very
signicantly to deteriorating Hindu-
Muslim relations, building the mass
Hindu support needed to legitimise and
justify the impending demolition of the
mosque. But it was Lalu Prasad Yadav
who stopped the Rath Yatra on 23 Octo-
ber 1990 at Samastipur in Bihar, and
from then on, he could present himself
as a secular leader. It is here that we
might ask: Why did the Naxalite parties
in Bihar, the CPI (Marxist-Leninist)
(Liberation), the Maoist Communist
Centre, and the CPI(ML) (Party Unity),
and their mass organisations, not take
the lead in halting Advanis Rath Yatra?
Had they done so, this would have been
one of the most signicant early political
acts by the radical Left against the
march of semi-fascism in the making
in India.
30

Had the radical Left halted Advanis
Rath Yatra in October 1990 as it made its
way into Bihar, this would have created
an avenue for building mass support in
the cities. Of course, such support would
have come only if it had then followed
this up by taking on the Sangh Parivar
by allying with Muslim youth engaged
in defending the victims of the pogrom
in Bombay in January 1993 through the
organisation of focos, and later on, in
Gujarat, from late February to mid-May
2002. Remember, the Chinese commu-
nists, with Mao at their helm, played an
outstanding part in the defeat of Japanese
fascism on Chinese soil, especially from
1937 to 1945. Of course, it is not too late
for the radical Left, as a whole, to come
together and work out a far-reaching
plan of action that would mobilise their
followers and rally the people [against] the
fanatical Hindu fundamentalist forces,
as Sumanta Banerjee put it so well.
Indeed, the CPI (Maoist), in a Resolu-
tion against Hindu Fascism passed at its
Ninth Party Congress in 2007 promised
the Indian people thus:
The CPI (Maoist) pledges to ght resolutely
against each and every instance of the
tra m pling on the democratic rights of the
oppre ssed minorities and others by Hindu
fascists. It pledges to do its best to defend the
sections of the population targeted by the Hin-
du fascists. Our party is willing to unite in a
broad front with all the genuine democratic
forces which would be willing to ght back
the Hindu Fascist offensive [all italics, our
emphasis].
Sadly, the party is yet to full this
promise. What then may it have to do to
meet such expectations? Alongside focos
defending Muslim and Christian com-
munities in the wake of attacks by the
Hindutva forces, the radical Left will also
PERSPECTIVES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 47
have to implement the mass line in ur-
ban areas and thereby gain mass support
there. It will have to organise anti-impe-
rialist and anti-sub-imperialist strug-
gles, and reach out to those who are
most liable to be inuenced by semi-fas-
cist demagogy the unemployed and
underemployed, the petty commodity
producers/traders, and the casual and
regular wage workers.
7.3 Long Struggle for Hegemony
The other dimension is the lengthy war
of position (the long struggle for hege-
mony), in Gramscis sense, involving the
spread of democratic and socialist cul-
ture through, among other avenues,
lm, theatre, poetry, literature and
painting (taken together, art). The Left
will have to take from each nationality
the democratic and socialist elements of
its culture, in radical opposition to that
nationalitys bourgeois and Hindutvavadi
nationalist-cultural constituents. Theres
a rich experience in Andhra Pradesh in
this respect in the works of members of
the Revolutionary Writers Association
(Virasam) and the Jana Natya Mandali.
But beyond the sphere of art, in the
long struggle for hegemony, the radical
Left must be much more visible in the in-
termediate sphere (between the econom-
ic base and the repressive apparatus of
the state and parallel coercive politics),
namely, the educational system, cultural
institutions, the media, trade unions, etc
the institutions of civil society (the
complex of the ideological structure) in
Gramscis sense. It is these institutions
that socialise youth, shape public opin-
ion, indeed, structure the very thought
processes of the exploited and oppressed
to build consent for the authority of the
prevailing under developed capitalist or-
der. The ruling classes not only use the
repressive apparatus of the Indian state
to suppress dissent, but manage to do
this, most of the time, by establishing
their ideological hegemony (maintain-
ing ones authority not through coercive
force alone) over the exploited, the
oppressed and the dominated.
The radical Left needs to counter the
political, cultural and moral leadership
of the organic intellectuals of the ruling
classes over the masses by the ascendency
of radical working class, peasant (rural
schoolteachers, for instance), and mid-
dle-class (academics, doctors, lawyers,
journalists, etc) intellectuals in all the
institutions of the civil society. In partic-
ular, it has to nd more creative ways of
adapting Jotiba Phules agenda of unit-
ing the shudras and the atishudras (the
untouchables, dalits today), and even
Christians and Muslims, as active mem-
bers of its mass organisations. The Left
has to nd a way of overcoming what
B R Ambedkar called the graded in-
equality of the caste system, which
divides the dominated all along its
social hierarchy.
7.4 Toward 21st Century United/
Popular Fronts
Where are the weapons?
I have only those of my reason
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from his poem
Victory (1964)
31
The UF against Hindutvavadi national-
ism and Indian semi-fascism in the mak-
ing would be an alliance of the radical
and the parliamentary Lefts, with each
constituent maintaining its specic
political identity, and the gradual exten-
sion of it to south Asia, including
Afghanistan, for Indian semi-fascism in
the making is an expansionist/sub-
imperialist force. The Left has to tran-
scend its visceral sectarianism. The rev-
olutionary struggle and the striving for
democracy go together. In the latter, the
part related to remedying Indias liberal-
political democracy of its rottenness must
be undertaken alongside the longer-term
agenda of expropriation of the business-
es of the monopoly capitalist stratum
and the landlord class so as to make cap-
italism more compatible with democra-
cy, creating thereby the groundwork for
socia lism. The New/Peoples Democratic
Revolution is not a bourgeois-democratic
revolution. The Left must discard stages
theory; its approach to the 21st century
UF must be from the perspective of the
New/Peoples Democratic Revolution.
But what about the more immediate
political programme? In todays context,
given the fact that money and wealth
have virtually taken command of the
bourgeois-landlord parties, and even
those who claim they reject Hindutvavadi
nationalism are part of the consensus on
neo-liberalism and sub-imperialism,
and more importantly, with Hindutva
nationalist ideology so deeply embed-
ded in the social and political fabric, the
idea of a PF needs to be reformulated.
Basically it should include all secular-
democratic persons/parties who also
oppose neo-liberalism and Indian sub-
imperialism alongside imperialism (the
incubators of semi-fascism). The anti-
neo-liberalist component of the pro-
gramme needs to focus on reversing
nancialisation in all its various dimen-
sions the nancial-market speculation
of productive enterprises, banks and NBFCs
as well as the forced nancial-commerce
of households in the wake of only a slow
rise in their real incomes, and the with-
drawal of the state from the provision of
public housing, health, education, social
security, etc. Middle-class households
have literally been pushed into doing
business with banks and NBFCs, includ-
ing insurance com panies, for all the
above provisions, where the state has
relinquished its responsibility.
The CPI(M)-led Left Front governments
failure in the provision of adequate
healthcare through the public health
system in West Bengal, like that of other
governments elsewhere in the country,
and becoming more and more respon-
sive to capital in the private, including
corporate-controlled, healthcare busi-
ness, pushed even lower- middle-class
households into doing business with pri-
vate health insurers and private, includ-
ing corporate, controlled hospitals.
Couldnt this Marxist-led government
have learned from the example of the
Cuban healthcare system the latter re-
minds us of the one healthcare system
that works in a poor country, providing
healthcare to all its citizens. The CPI(M)
leadership only needed to set an exam-
ple in terms of serving the people, and
there would have been many doctors,
nurses and health support staff that would
have refused to follow the money, putting
healing before personal wealth, like
their Cuban counterparts (Fitz 2012).
32

The PF we are suggesting will have to
present an alternative to the neo-liberal
model
33
at the national, state and local
levels. Moreover, as Arjun Sengupta et al
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OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 48
(2008) have pointed out, there is a
close association between poverty and
vulnerability and ones social identity
(as SCs/STs, Muslims, OBCs). The Sachar
Committee too highlighted the social,
economic and educational backward-
status of Muslims in a comparative fra-
mework. The fact is that, historically, a
large proportion of Muslims have been
converts from the lower castes and dalits,
and in independent India they also face
discrimination on religious grounds.
One must therefore keep in mind the
class-caste conjunction difference
with respect to Muslims should not be
seen as deriving from religious identity
alone but also from structural inequa-
lity. Hope the struggle of memory
against forgetting the truth never dies.
7.5 Pasolini and Shahid Azmi
Where then is the magazine and where
are the weapons? Pier Paulo Pasolini,
the unarmed partisan who fought with
the weapons of poetry, cinema, literature
and political prose, says: I have only
those of my reason. In an audacious and
inspiring poem entitled Victory, pen-
ned in 1964, the bard dreams on a gray
morning that Italian partisans killed in
the resistance against fascism return from
their graves to see if those who survived
made the world worth their martyrdom.
But what they discover is betrayal, fas-
cism still in the ranks of Christian De-
mocracy, an Italy inimical to justice, trivi-
alised by the power of consumerism.
... At the end of the
Piazzale Loreto
there are still, repainted, a few
gas pumps, red in the quiet
sunlight of the springtime that
returns
with its destiny: It is time to make it
again a burial ground!
34

Piazzale Loreto is the square in Milan
where, after Mussolini was shot dead on
28 April 1945, his body was hung upside
down from some kind of scaffolding.
And, among the partisans who descended
from their graves, young men whose
eyes held something other than love,
was Pasolinis martyred sibling, Guido,
who had joined the Catholic partisans (not
the Catholic Church which, by-and-large,
connived with fascism) in the ght
against fascism, and whom the poet saw
off at the railway station, when, in 1944
at the age of 19, he left home to join the
armed struggle against fascism, never
to return.
Communists have never been the only
partisans against fascism. When Paso-
lini made one of the most distinctive
lms ever on the life of Jesus, The Gospel
Accor ding to Mathew in 1964, he said:
Someone who walks up to a couple of
people and says, Drop your nets and fol-
low me is a total revolutionary. Telling
the story of Jesus to the strains of sacred
music from Bach (Mass in B Minor and St
Mathew Passion), Odettas (she was The
Voice of the Civil Rights Movement)
spiritual (Sometimes I Feel Like a Moth-
erless Child), and even a Congolese mu-
sical genre, and more generally, the
mystery of life and death, and of suffer-
ing...questions of great importance for
human beings didnt meet the comrades
expectations of Socialist Realism! Just
as well that Pasolini dissociated himself
from their political grip.
Hannah Arendt, who was no votary of
identity politics, once said: When one is
attacked as a Jew one must defend one-
self as a Jew. I am reminded of Shahid
Azmi, the advocate who never turned
his back on Muslim youth falsely impli-
cated in criminal cases. He was our com-
rade in the Committee for the Protection
of Dem ocratic Rights in Mumbai. Having
been thro ugh acute suffering at the
hands of the police and the criminal jus-
tice system, he could empathise with the
suffering of others like him. As my friend
and comrade Monica Sakhrani put it,
roughly something like this: It would
have been impossible for him to live with
himself had he given up his work as their
advocate, for which he was assassinated
four years ago.
Some Muslims who feel the commu-
nity has been defeated, humiliated and
crushed by the forces of Hindutvavadi
nationalism with the active complicity of
the Indian state, and do not expect jus-
tice from the courts, do see terrorism as
the only weapon that can strike back.
From each crime of the Hindutvavadi
nationalists and the complicit state RDX
is delivered. Nevertheless, one has to
embrace humane values even in the
struggle against state and state-sponsored
terror. Just as the latter is criminal, so
also is the terrorism of the insurgent
Islamic groups ghting it. The desperate
followers of the leaders preaching
vengeance are as much victims as those
who perish in the attacks of which we
read and hear. But let us make no bones
about it state and state-sponsored ter-
rorism is the more dangerous, for it mas-
querades as justice. The ght against
terrorism, the cycle of senseless vio-
lence, will make headway only as part
of the larger struggle to do away with
the injustice that gives rise to it. In these
dark times, an Islamic liberation theolo-
gy might also be the need of the hour.
And, winning the political and legal bat-
tle to strip the state and state-sponsored
terrorists of their impunity and bringing
them to justice is an integral part of that
ght (Tigar 2001), for which Shahid
Azmi fought to the very end.
In his own way, Shahid Azmi had
something in common with Pasolini
they were unarmed partisans who, nev-
ertheless, fought against neo-fascism/
semi-fascism in the making with other
weapons, Pasolini with the weapons of
poetry, cinema, literature and political
journalism, Shahid Azmi with the weap-
ons of jurisprudence and the law.
7.6 Partisans in Common
Indias liberal-political democracy is rot-
ten and this makes the way easier for
semi-fascism; all the more those who
have been struggling to further the proc-
ess of democratisation, for instance,
some of the leaders of the Aam Aadmi
Party, should be welcomed to bring their
weapons to the magazine. A Subbarao
Panigrahi, like the guerrilla-poet in
Srikakulam, with his Jamukulakatha
(theatrical rendering of songs in a folk
idiom), brutally encountered by the
police, will surely be there, but so too
must a Gandhi, like the Mahatma with
his pacist resistance, risking his life in
Kolkata, Noakhali, etc, in trying to pre-
vent the anti-Muslim pogroms there,
even ready to confront the Hindutvavadi
mobs who were killing Muslims,
assassinated by a Hindutva nationalist
intolerant of his assimilationist concept
of Indian nationhood.
PERSPECTIVES
Economic & Political Weekly EPW OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 49
And all those who are committed to
the habitability of the natural environ-
ment and the security of everyone in
their sociocultural environments, im-
placably opposed to the monstrous class
polarisation that has been a consequence
of the accumulation process in the neo-
liberal period, and the associated hijack-
ing of the electoral process with the
power of money and wealth. A 21st cen-
tury UF must be one where non-party
but generally left-wing persons feel at
home in it. I am reminded of Samir
Amins (2007: 160) idea of a Fifth Inter-
national that draws its inspiration from
the First International whose 150th an-
niversary is being celebrated this year
the only International to recognise the
plurality of the socialist tradition, and
thats the principle a 21st century UF
should uphold.
35
Its Popular counterpart
will, of course, include all those who
regard Indian semi-fascism as a priori
intolerable.
The Supreme Court has re-criminal-
ised homosexuality, upholding the con-
stitutionality of Section 377 of the Indian
Penal Code, adopted in 1860, and the
RSS has now decreed that live-in rela-
tionships and homosexuality are inimi-
cal to Bharatiya sanskriti. So we might
soon have to reassure the authorities
that we are following the Love Laws
that lay down who should be loved, and
how. And how much (as Arundhati Roy
put it in The God of Small Things). Con-
rm in opinion that we are going along
with the Bharatiya sanskriti-approved
sexual orientation! There might soon be
a list of authors classied as undesira-
ble, like Hans Fallada was in 1935.
In his nal work, Sal, a very disturb-
ing allegory of fascist repression and in-
tolerance, Pasolini tried to track the
roots of fascism (and neo-fascism)
the socio-economic and psychological
conditions that gave rise to it. Above all,
what made the self-proclaimed Mas-
ters representing the landed gentry, re-
ligion and the law (the swelling book of
rituals and rules), nance capital and its
politics all lawless and without reli-
gion, and above all, consumed by the
lust for absolute power unleash the
horrors of Mussolinis Repubblica di Sal.
In the face of the Resistance though, the
Republic of Sal didnt last. But tragical-
ly, Sal goes on, forcing us to write this
essay and reach for the magazine. Now
that there is a dire need for the maga-
zine, where is it? It must have all the
weapons needed to win the ght
against Indian semi-fascism in the mak-
ing prevail in the battle for democracy
in India and south Asia.
Notes
1 This attempt to understand historical fascism
draws on Sweezy (1942: Chapter 18, Fas-
cism), Neumann (1942), Hobsbawm (1994:
Chapters 4 and 5), Rosenberg (1934) and Bana-
jis (2013a) introduction to Rosenbergs essay.
2 Benito Mussolini realised the signicance of
the volunteer corps retaking Fiume, and after
1921, he ensured that fascism became a
mass movement in the March on Rome organ-
ised by the National Fascist Party in October
1922.
3 See Bernie (2012). I use the designation nan-
cial aristocracy in a similar sense in which
Marx did in his The Class Struggles in France,
184850, when he described the nexus of the
nancial aristocracy with the upper rungs of
the polity during the July monarchy (July 1830
to February 1848).
4 In a separate, unpublished note, I have esti-
mated the sizes of the three different compo-
nents of Indias reserve army of labour with
data drawn from the National Sample Survey
Ofces Employment and Unemployment Situa-
tion in India, NSS 68th Round (July 2011-June
2012), Ministry of Statistics and Programme
Implementation, Government of India, January
2014. I am grateful to my colleague Abhishek
Shaw for some useful suggestions related to
the methodology.
5 For the Marxist theory we are drawing upon,
see Sweezy (1987).
6 For a succinct summary of the Marxist theory
we are applying, albeit, one that is more
relevant to an economy where monopoly
capital is in a commanding position, see
Sweezys 1990 essay, Monopoly Capital. The
Indian economy, however, has a long way to go
before it reaches maturity in the sense of
tight oligopolistic market structures with
excess capacity fullling mostly replacement
demand, and with modern infrastructure (for
example, urban infrastructural development,
including the highway system) already in
place, and therefore requiring very little large
Greeneld investment. So, from the capitalist
point of view, there isnt as much of a chronic
deciency of effective demand like there is in
the developed capitalist economies.
7 We must, however, reiterate the fact that the
economy/society is an underdeveloped-capi-
talist one; by no stretch of imagination can it be
characterised as monopoly-capitalist.
8 With nancialisation, the process of capital ac-
cumulation is increasingly a matter of adding
to the stock of nancial assets.
9 A considerable sales effort is now evident at
the upper ends of the markets for consumer
durables, including cars, and fast-moving con-
sumer non-durables in packaging, non-func-
tional product-attributes, throwaways, and
built-in product obsolescence.
10 For a deeper conceptual understanding, see
Baran (1957).
11 Hindutvavadins take great pride in the sup-
posed cultural imperialist past of India, its
large-scale acculturation, especially in south-
east Asia, including religious and spiritual
tutelage there. In a recent interview, Ashok
Singhal, the main patron of the Vishva Hindu
Parishad, articulates the idea of building a
cultural commonwealth of south and south-
east Asia (Hindustan Times, 17 July 2014).
12 Many of the early Italian fascists too were ex-
armed-forces personnel.
13 Mentor of K B Hedgewar (1889-1940), the
founding sarsanghachalak (supreme leader) of
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and
for many years the president of the Hindu
Mahasabha until he handed over charge to
V D Savarkar in 1937.
14 Such religiosity, in its demonstration of power
and wealth, exploits religious faith for political
and pecuniary gains.
15 See a brilliant essay by Dilip Simeon entitled
The Law of Killing: A Brief History of Indian
Fascism in Banaji (ed.), pp 153213.
16 The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (since
1948), the Jana Sangh (founded in 1951),
Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (from 1952), the Sar-
aswati Shishu Mandir network of schools (since
1952), the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (since
1955), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (since 1964),
the Seva Bharati (from 1979 onwards), and the
Bharatiya Janata Party (after the 1980 split of
the Janata Party), the Bajrang Dal (from 1984
onwards), the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas (1993
onwards), etc.
17 Asghar Ali Engineers remarks at http://www.
csss-isla.com/arch%20243.htm
18 The way in which politics inuences caste is as
important as the manner in which caste inu-
ences politics.
19 Incidentally, Barrington Moore Jr (1967) argues
that unlike in England, France and the United
States, in Germany and Japan, capitalism came
from an alliance of precapitalist landowners
and the rising bourgeoisie, and this fact is cru-
cial in explaining why the result in both was
fascism.
20 For Bombay 1993, we draw on LHS and CPDR
(1993).
21 For Gujarat 2002, we draw on Sonnenberg
(2014).
22 As far as I know, Jairus Banaji (2013b: 218) has
been the rst scholar to suggest the use of this
German term to designate the large section of
society that has been passively complicit in the
criminality of the regime and morally indif-
ferent to the fate of the regimes victims.
23 After a long and rambling interview with
Narendra Modi when the latter was a nobody,
a small-time RSS pracharak, the political psy-
chologist and social theorist, Ashis Nandy
(2002), a trained clinical psychologist, was left
in no doubt that Modi was a classic, clinical
case of a fascist.
24 In trying to identify the characteristics and
policy imperatives of an emerging Indian semi-
fascism, we look back and gaze forward.
25 Authoritarian democracy in the semi-fascist
regime is likely to be a diluted version of Gio-
vanni Gentiles he was the mastermind of the
fascisization of Italian culture formulation
of it (for Gentiles political philosophy, see Turi
1998). In keeping with such a concoction, au-
thoritarian democracy in India will be based
on the premise that the Hindutvavadi national-
ist movement has a broad popular consensus.
To attain such like-mindedness Hindu san-
skriti will be given a national form, this
through the widespread diffusion of Syndi-
cated Hindu religiosity, reshaping of school
syllabi, and the recruitment of more teachers
with RSS sympathies. Conformity and homo-
geneity will be sought to be achieved, followed
by consent, with the people constantly urged to
rally behind Modi. Intellectuals will be attracted
PERSPECTIVES
OctOber 11, 2014 vol xlix no 41 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 50
and absorbed (co-opted), and then enlisted in
the regimes cultural, educational and research
initiatives. They will not be asked to subscribe
to the Sangh Parivars ideology but to embrace
the values of the Indian nation state with
which the semi-fascist regime will identify it-
self. Pluralism and diversity will be deemed
dysfunctional; in these matters, the emphasis
will be placed on coercion, not on consensus.
26 Tragically, early on in the struggle against re-
actionary right-wing nationalism metamor-
phosing into fascism in Germany, at the 1924
Fifth Congress of the Comintern, social democ-
racy and fascism were viewed by the commu-
nists as two sides of the single instrument of
capitalist dictatorship! And worse, at the 1928
Sixth Congress of the Comintern, social de-
mocracy was condemned as social fascism,
no doubt making it easier for the Nazis to ulti-
mately come to power in 1933. I mention these
disastrous episodes in the history of the com-
munist movement because I am pained at the
huge blunder of the CPI (Maoist) in its mechan-
ical repetition of such abuse when it calls the
CPI(M) social fascist. Such sectarianism
would nullify any attempt to put in place a UF
against semi-fascism.
27 The exceptions were Spain and Portugal,
where, with Washingtons support, the two dic-
tatorships were deemed necessary till the mid-
1970s. Francisco Franco and Antonio Salazar
were reinstated by Washington in 1945.
28 This class characterisation of the regional par-
ties draws on Radhika Desai (2004b: 199; 2014:
50), for which she credits the late civil rights
activist K Balagopal (1987).
29 The CPI was so blinded by the dazzling light that
was directed at Indira Gandhis liberation of
Bangladesh, the signing of the Indo-Soviet Trea-
ty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, the
Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, and so on,
that it failed to even take account of the decima-
tion of the Naxalite movement, the massive
offen sive against the working class and the poor
peasantry, and even what the Indira Congresss
hired hoodlums did to CPI(M) cadres in West
Bengal. The CPI(M), in the more recent period
of collaboration with the Congress Party, even
though it was taken for a ride by the Manmohan
Singh-led government, it chose to act as a close
collaborator of the occupying Joint Forces of
the central and West Bengal governments in
Jangalmahal in order to decimate the Maoist-led
Lalgarh movement over there.
30 It was the radical journalist and political writer,
Sumanta Banerjee (2003) who rst raised this
question.
31 The poem is translated by Norman MacAfee
with Luciano Martinengo, and can be read at
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/
10/a_hitherto_unpu.html
32 For Cubas healthcare system, see Don Fitz (2012).
33 For a broad, general outline of the neo-liberal
model, see Arthur MacEwan (1992).
34 Excerpt from Pasolinis poem, Victory. See
footnote 31.
35 Note that I have not explored the organisation-
al implications of the political questions I have
raised. The question as to what may be the best
forms of organisation to move the anti-semi-
fascist struggle forward is, nevertheless, ex-
ceedingly important.
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