Sunday, January 29, 2023

Godhra, Where the Fall of India's Democracy Began

 

Godhra, Where the Fall of India's Democracy Began

The burning train on February 27, 2002 – and the lies and false narratives built around it – kept Narendra Modi in power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India.

This week is the 20th anniversary of the single most fateful event

in the history of Independent India.

 

Had carriage S-6 of the Sabarmati Express not burnt down outside

Godhra station in the early morning of February 27, 2002, killing

59 persons, the Gujarat riots would not have occurred, and Narendra

Modi would not have been the prime minister of India today.

Had that tragic event not taken place the Bharatiya Janata Party

could easily have lost the assembly election that was originally

scheduled for April 2003 but brought ahead to December 2002

at Modi’s urging to capitalise on the religious polarisation the

violence had caused. The BJP had lost the gram panchayat

elections in 2001 and three assembly by-elections the same

year, and was badly rattled. This was what had led to the

replacement of chief minister Keshubhai Patel, whose health

had allegedly begun to fail, with Modi in October 2001.

 

Modi faced the daunting task of shoring up the BJP’s support

base in Gujarat. Politically, the fire on the Sabarmati Express

came as an answer to the party’s prayers.The train was carrying a

large number of kar sevaks who had forcibly boarded the train at

Ayodhya.

 

When it arrived at Godhra,therefore, it was carrying 2,000 or more passengers against a capacity of 1,100.

 

When coach S-6 caught

fire, it was jam packed with some of these kar sevaks.

 

The presence of the kar sevaks, the fact that some of these had

misbehaved with Muslim vendors on the platform at Godhra both

while on their way to Ayodhya and on their way back, and that

an ugly spat had broken out on the platform minutes before the

train left Godhra on that fateful morning, made just about everyone in Gujarat jump to the conclusion that angry Muslims had chased the

train and set fire to the carriage, as an act of revenge.

 

By the afternoon of February 27, local Gujarati newspapers had

universally ascribed the act to Ghanchi Muslims of a nearby shanty

colony, who had been waiting with stones and rags dipped in

kerosene to seek revenge.

 

According to those news reports, no

 sooner did the train stop did they smash the windows and t

hrow flaming kerosene-soaked rags into the bogey and set them

on fire.

 

These reports formed the basis of the first police chargesheet

 in the case, with manufactured eyewitnesses, all from the

Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who presented identical statements

about kerosene being thrown into the coach from outside.

 

The pogrom that followed is now history. But, in another of history’s fateful ironies, this initial claim by the police about the train fire was completely unfounded and had to eventually be abandoned in favour of a supposedly more plausible but equally unbelievable theory. Having declared from day one that the fire had been a deeply planned (Muslim) conspiracy, all the facts had to be tailor made to sustain this claim.

 

 

The lengths to which the Modi-led state government went to reinforce and sustain a falsehood in the face of the anomalies that it could not explain, was not accidental. On the contrary, it was sanctioned and sustained by Modi himself, with the express purpose of creating a wave of Islamophobia that would  sweep the BJP back to power in Gujarat.

 

In 2005, the railway minister in the then UPA government, Lalu Prasad Yadav, appointed a retired Calcutta high court judge, U.C. Banerjee, to head an inquiry into its cause.

 

The Bannerjee commission appointed a five-man team of experts to re-examine the evidence. After a three-year lapse, the expert committee was left with only one way to do this: look at other carriages that had caught fire and compare the burn and smoke patterns in them to the one in S-6.

 

There were five burnt carriages preserved in the railway yards after earlier forensic examinations. In one of these, the burn and smoke pattern was almost identical to that found in S-6. The cause of that fire was known and not in doubt: it had begun in the centre of the carriage, possibly when someone knocked over a lighted cooking stove on which food was being warmed or tea made.

The flames had remained restricted to that area but the smoke the fire created had spread to the rest of the carriage, through the gaps

between the upper and lower berths, and along the underside of

the ceiling.

 

As in S-6, the majority of deaths had resulted from

asphyxiation.

 

This explanation gained credibility because the railways

were not using flame-retardant materials in second-class compartments then. So even a lighted match could start a fire and create large

volumes of toxic smoke.

 

What is more, cooking or warming one’s

own food on long train journeys was, and may still be, a common

practice among orthodox Hindus.

 

The BJP vociferously rejected the Banerjee commission’s report.

 

The party’s then spokesman, Arun Jaitley, raised procedural objections, saying that the railway ministry, even while belonging to the Union government, had no right to conduct such an inquiry.

 

“If it was an accident, what prevented passengers from jumping out?”

he asked, rhetorically.

 

Following a strategy with which we have now become familiar, the state government got one of the Hindus who had been injured in the fracas

on the Godhra platform in 2002 to challenge Justice Banerjee’s report

in the Gujarat high court.

 

The presiding judge then declared the

formation of the Banerjee Committee “unconstitutional, illegal and

null and void”, and called it a “colourable exercise of power with mala fide intentions”.

 

He went on to berate the railway ministry for daring

to set up the committee when the state government had already

appointed the Shah commission, later joined by retired Supreme

Court justice G.T. Nanavati, on March 8, immediately after the riots.

 

He also dismissed the right of the railways to set up a high-level

committee to ascertain how a fire had started on its own property,

in order to make sure that it did not happen again.

This judgment was extraordinary, to say the least, but one does not have to rely on the Banerjee commission’s report alone to question the official account of how the fire started.The report prepared by teams of experts from the Gujarat government’s own Forensic Science Laboratory in Ahmedabad after a site visit on May 3, 2002, formally debunked the police’s earlier explanation and concluded that the fire was consistent with what might happened if  “60 litres of flammable liquid had been poured using an unusually wide-mouthed container like a bucket” on to the floor of the coach and set alight.

Why did the Forensic Science Laboratory (FSL) so comprehensively

debunk the claims made in the police’s chargesheet?

 

The answer could be that  Modi had learned through the intelligence department that the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal (CCT), headed

by former Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, was planning to visit Godhra

in the beginning of May.

 

The Ghanchi Muslim revenge plot

explanation was therefore about to come apart.

This is what the CCT concluded after its own visit:

 

“On 7-5-2002, we inspected the coach and the site where it was burnt. The site where the train stopped is an elevated bund. From the ground level, the height of the bund could be about 12-15 feet and it is a slope. At the top, there is hardly enough space for 2,000 persons to assemble on either side of the track. Assuming that so many had gathered at that spot, the crowd would be spread over a much larger area than the stretch of coach S-6. This is only to indicate that if the government version is true, the other coaches would have been as easy a target as Coach S-6.

Again, if one takes into account the height of the bund and the height of the train, and if fire-balls were to be thrown at the train, the outside of the coach should have shown signs of being charred. But we found that there were no such marks below the windows; the charred marks were to be seen only around the windows and above that height. This is a clear indication that the fire started inside the coach and the flames leaping out of the windows singed the outside of the compartment, above window level (emphasis added). Therefore, even to the naked eye, it was clear that the fire was from within and not from outside.”

 

But if the fire started within, who could have possibly lit it? The Gujarat government needed an answer that would justify the collective punishment that the Hindu community had inflicted upon the Muslims in the days that followed. Building on the FSL’s ‘scientific’ analysis, the police came up with a new explanation. Investigating officers claimed that some Muslims had boarded the train when it stopped opposite Signal Falia, cut the vestibule connecting S-6 and S-7, forcibly entered S-6 and poured 60 litres of petrol down the corridor and set a match to it.

 

The absurdities in this theory have been pointed out many times in the last two decades. First, since buckets would have had to be carried by hand, and very few buckets have a capacity of more than 20 litres, a minimum of  three buckets would have had to be carried on to the train. Would a train jam-packed with hyped-up kar sewaks spoiling for a fight have allowed three persons carrying buckets of a fluid whose smell is easily recognisable to board the train at a place where a large crowd of hostile Muslims had already collected? Clearly not, which is why the police could not find a single passenger to corroborate this absurd claim.

 

Curiously, the FSL’s ‘experts’ based their 60 litres calculation upon how far the liquid would travel in an empty carriage, not one that was jampacked with people whose shoes, and luggage, would have come in the way. For, as the tally of the dead and injured showed, there were at least 108 persons in the carriage when the fire broke out, not counting those who escaped before the rush of panic-stricken passengers to the doorways began. It is inconceivable that forensic experts could have made such an elementary mistake. So the only explanation is that they were commanded to find another explanation that would continue to point the finger of blame at the Muslim community. And they obliged.

 

In Ahmedabad, on February 27, 2002, VHP cadres roamed the streets announcing that a large number of kar sevaks returning from their holy mission in Ayodhya had been burnt alive by Muslims in Godhra. On February 28, they took processions through the city, holding the charred (and unrecognisable) corpses high to build up the mountainous wave of hate that broke upon the city the next morning. However reprehensible their actions were considered, no one doubted them, and almost no one doubts even today that these were indeed the corpses of kar sevaks. But a close analysis of the identities of the passengers in the ill-fated S-6 carriage shows that most of those who died were ordinary passengers who had boarded the train at Lucknow and intermediate stops, before it was swamped by kar sewaks in Ayodhya.

 

The railway booking chart for the carriage at Lucknow shows that 43 of the 72 berths in carriage S-6 had confirmed bookings. Of these 19 were for adult males, 19 were for adult females and five were for minors. More than half of the booked passengers were families travelling together. Another 23 passengers had boarded the train at intermediate stations. Since they all had berths, few if any would have been near the vestibules at the two ends of the carriage, and therefore in a position to escape when the fire started.

 

The first to die would have been the weakest among them, the women and the children. The forensic examination of the dead, carried out three days later, confirmed this for it showed that whereas 20 of the dead were men, 26 were women, and 12 were children. In all, 38 of the 58 dead were of the wrong sex and age to have been kar sevaks. Even among the male casualties, a large number, probably the majority, would have died because they stayed with their families, trying to get out till the smoke overwhelmed them.

 

The number of kar sevaks killed may have been even smaller for, as the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer pointed out, all but a fraction of these were physically fit young men who, having muscled their way on to the train, were more likely to be at the ends of the carriage than the middle, and would have been able to muscle their way out of the burning carriage with relative ease. That many did indeed do so is suggested by the fact that of the 43 persons who are known to have managed to escape from the carriage, only five needed to be hospitalised. Taking all this into account, it is unlikely that even a dozen of those killed were kar sevaks.

 

Looking back at the events of  February 27, 2002, it is difficult not to conclude that it was the day when India’s voyage to modern nationhood began to fail. For Godhra brought Narendra Modi to power in Gujarat, and started him on the road to becoming the prime minister of India. Modi consolidated his party’s power in Gujarat by sowing fear and suspicion between communities. He is now doing the same in India. And there is no one to stop him.

 

Prem Shankar Jha is a senior journalist and former editor. He is the author of Dawn of the Solar Age: an End to Global Warming and Fear (Sage 2017) and is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre for Environment Studies, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

On Understanding RSS Neo-Fascism

 

On Understanding RSS Neo-Fascism as India’s Biggest Threat and the Immediate Task of Building up the Anti-Fascist Movement 

in India  by P J James  14/01/2023

RSS

 Approaching RSS Fascism

BJP with 180 million-membership (as claimed by it in 2019) and wielding India’s state power today is the political tool of RSS, the longest-running and biggest fascist organization in the world.

The RSS with Manusmriti as its ideological basis was founded in 1925 with Hedgewar as the first Sarsanghchalka almost at the same time when ‘classical’ fascism appeared in Europe.

 In the case of India, the decade of the 1920s when RSS originated was a turbulent one that challenged not only the colonial rule but also the feudal order and Brahminical caste system. Inspired by Mahatma Phule and then led by Dr Ambedkar, the ‘untouchable’ Dalits, had started entering into the political mainstream from inaccessible social peripheries.

Including this, it was the challenges to the upper caste elite domination that prompted the Brahmin leadership to reassert its hegemony through the formation of RSS.

Before the formation of RSS in 1925, Savarkar had laid down Hindutva, or ‘political Hinduism’ (which is different from Hinduism) as its ideological background. In his manuscript, ‘Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?’, Savarkar had argued that ‘Hindus were a nation unto themselves’, excluding Muslims, Christians and all other minorities in India.

After Hedgewar’s death in 1940, Golwalkar who became the second Sarsanghchalka of RSS expanded it as a militant Hindutva organisation with its Manuvad approach to the untouchables together with its commitment towards stigmatization and elimination of Muslims as nation’s principal enemies.

From the very beginning, RSS had its close association with European fascism (classical fascism) that originated in Italy and Germany during the biggest political-economic crisis during the interwar period, and the RSS leadership of that time had established direct contact with fascist Mussolini along with its adulation of Nazi Hitler. 

For instance,  Moonje, the mentor and political guru of Hedgewar, who had visited the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini in 1931 and inspired by the Fascist Academy of Physical Education that trained paramilitary “storm troopers” and goons like Black Shirts, started the Bhonsala  Military School in Nasik in 1937 for imparting military training to RSS cadres and Hindutva goons under the management of Central Hindu Military Education Society.

Bhonsala School’s links with terrorist actions by Hindutva extremist groups including the 2008 Malegaon blasts are a much discussed topic.

Golwalkar who had high regard for Hitler, upheld the latter’s doctrine of racial purity.

 He praised the Nazi method of purging the Semitic races, the Jews by Hitler, and even suggested the same as a good lesson for India to resolve the Muslim question.

According to the core ideology of RSS or doctrine of Hindurashtra, “Hindus and Hindus alone, constitute the Indian Nation”, whereas for Golwalkar, casteism was synonymous with ‘Hindu Nation’, though India has been historically multi-religious, multilingual, multi-ethnic, multicultural and comp

However, as a fascist organisation, RSS from its very inception has been Islamophobic, anti-Christian, anti-communist, anti-woman and anti-Dalit, and has been in the habit of using violence to achieve its objectives.

Under colonial oppression, nationalism and patriotism for the oppressed countries were invariably anti-colonial in essence. But the ‘cultural nationalism’ of RSS was a camouflage for its betrayal of the anti-imperialist struggle.

Along with its genocidal hatred towards Muslims, extreme servility to British imperialism has been inherent in RSS from the very beginning.

 On account of this, it totally dissociated itself from the independence movement during the British period.

Top RSS leadership even advised its cadres not to waste their energy fighting the British but save it for fighting ‘internal enemies’ such as Muslims, Christians and Communists.

As such, the organization continued to remain on the periphery of Indian politics.

When Constituent Assembly was drafting the Indian Constitution, RSS came  forward vehemently opposing the adoption of that Constitution and suggested ‘Manusmriti’ (the sacred book of chaturvarnya or varna system that identified women and Dalits as subhuman) in its place on the ground that a Republican Constitution would give equality to all castes against the interest of the elite castes.

In fact, much before its objection to the Constitution that was drafted under the leadership of Ambedkar, the RSS’ mouthpiece, Organiser in August 1947 had opposed the tricolour National Flag also.

Of course, following the assassination of Father of the Nation in 1948, the RSS was banned for a few months, and one of the conditions that Sardar Patel put forward for lifting the ban on RSS on July 11 1949 was “loyalty to the Constitution of India and the National Flag”.

 However, it took more than  half-a-century for the RSS to hoist the National Flag during the time of the Vajpayee government which also unveiled Savarkar’s portrait in the central hall of Parliament in 2003.

Obviously, as in the case of European fascism during the interwar period, it is the sharpening of the inherent contradictions and crisis of the ruling system that create the opportune moment for the ascendance of fascists who are the most reactionary sections of corporate capital.

In other words, when the crisis cannot be resolved through normal methods of loot and exploitation and when people’s struggles become uncontrollable, the political-economic situation and social tension become favourable for the fascist forces to capture power. 

As far as India is concerned, it was the crisis of the 1970s and declaration of Emergency by the Indira Gandhi regime that enabled RSS which till then remained outside the mainstream to come to the political limelight.

As is obvious, it was the absence of a progressive-democratic alternative that enabled RSS to effectively utilise the situation to come to the forefront of the anti-Emergency movement.

Within no time, replacing the Jan Sangh, RSS constituted BJP as its political tool and the rest is part of contemporary history.

Leading hundreds of open, secret and militant organisations and outfits, and widening and deepening its clout across space and time and with its far-right economic philosophy and unwavering allegiance to the US-led imperialist camp, today RSS still claiming itself as a cultural organisation, has grown into the biggest fascist organisation in the world with innumerable overseas saffron extensions and affiliates backed by immense corporate funding.

The sudden shot up of RSS during the recent period spanning half-a-century is to be seen in the broader context of the emergence of global neoliberalism.

For, following the advent of the first major postwar crisis called ‘stagflation’, and taking advantage of the ideological-political setbacks of the international Left, the bourgeois state abandoned its welfare mask and resorted to a change in the capital accumulation process through what is called neoliberalism.

As noted above, the political-economic crisis that confronted India in the 1970s leading to the proclamation of Emergency by Indira regime in 1975 was integrally linked up with this international context.

Though Emergency was lifted in 1977, the post-Emergency period saw Indian state’s abject surrender to neoliberal diktats and intensified neocolonial plunder by imperialist-corporate capital.

It has been in the context of this extremely crisis-ridden period of India resulting in its further integration with global corporate capital and consequent abandoning of the Nehruvian ‘state-led model of development’ and consequent embrace of neoliberal policies that RSS designed its well-thought-out strategy of eventually transforming India into a Hindurashtra, i.e., a Hindutva fascist state by floating BJP as its political party.

And, effectively taking advantage of the facilitating role of the soft-Hindutva pursued by the Congress and with immense corporate-backing, it has been easy for RSS to transform BJP as India’s biggest ruling class party within a relatively short span of time, leading to fascist usurpation of state power with its multidimensional repercussions at micro and macro levels integrally linked up with the ascendance of neofascism at the global level.

It is not intended here to draw out the whole trajectory of the process that facilitated RSS to establish its fascist tentacles in the entire political, economic and cultural spheres.

 Unlike Mussolini-Hitler fascism that suddenly shot up from the political-economic crisis of the 1920s, Indian fascism led by RSS is rooted in a systematic, steady and long drawn out process spanning almost a century with deep-rooted and multi-dimensional penetration into the entire civilian and military apparatuses of the Indian state.

And unlike classical fascism which had sharp contradictions with other imperialist forces, Hindutva fascism from the very beginning has been subservient to international finance capital during the colonial and postwar neocolonial period.

However, in the neoliberal period, this process has started with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement since the 1980s, demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 in the context of Rao government’s abandoning of Nehruvian model and embrace of far-right neoliberal policies, the ‘second generation of globalisation’ under Vajpayee government in the late 1990s and early 21st century, Gujarat Pogrom in 2002, the ascendancy Modi regime in 2014 and its reiteration as Modi.2 in 2019, which are some of the important milestones towards this neo-fascist transformation.

As is obvious, under Modi.2, in the background of all round privatisation-corporatisation of the economy and saffronisation of both civilian–including constitutional and administrative and institutional spheres and military structures (ranging from RSS initiative to start Military Schools to the Agnipath scheme), RSS is now moving towards its ultimate goal of establishing the Hindurashtra, which is an intolerant theocratic state unequivocally defined by Golwalkar in 1939 in his magnum opus, ‘We, Our Nationhood Defined’ and in conformity with the principles of Manusmriti.

All specificities of Hindutva such as anti-Muslimness as manifested in the multi-dimensional discrimination towards Muslim migrants through CAA, Uniform Civil Code, etc., (culminating in, for instance, depicting the Rohingyas whom the UN characterised as “the most persecuted” minority on earth today as “infiltrators”), pan-Indian homogenizing drive of deconstruction and subjugation of the oppressed caste organisations aimed at integrating them into Hindutva, rejection of all values of modernity such as rational-scientific thinking, fostering the cult of tradition and obscurantism, treating dissent and disagreement as treason, worship of heroism and elitism, anti-communism together with uncompromising integration with corporate finance capital are manifestations RSS neofascism.

Neofascism or Fascism Under Neoliberalism

At this critical juncture, concrete understanding of neofascism – i.e., fascism under neoliberalism where old terms and practices connected with fascism have become irrelevant — is indispensable for building up the anti-fascist movement and defeating fascism. No doubt, fascism’s inseparable integration with the hegemony of most reactionary corporate-finance capital is its universal character.

 However, ascribing a static form or pattern to the emergence of fascism for all situations is erroneous, and it will impede the building up of anti-fascist struggles too. For instance, in the context of building up the wide 

Anti-Fascist People’s Front, the 7th Congress of Comintern (1935) that defined fascism in relation to its firm foundations in finance capital, had also underlined different course of development of fascism in colonial and semi-colonial countries where “there can be no question of the kind of fascism that we are accustomed to see in Germany, Italy and other capitalist countries”.

That is, depending on the specific political, economic and historical conditions of countries, fascism may assume different forms.

There is a macro dimension to this crucial question today. No doubt, fascism is the government of the most reactionary and terrorist elements of corporate-finance capital directed against the entire progressive-democratic sections, working class, peasantry, oppressed peoples and intelligentsia of the country. 

 However, when ‘classical fascism’  emerged during the interwar years of the 20th century, finance capital or imperialism was in its colonial phase.

On the other hand, today in the postwar neocolonial phase, and especially in the neoliberal period today, wealth accumulation is taking place through  globalisation or internationalisation of capital as manifested in the limitless and uncontrollable cross-border movement of corporate capital.

 With the aggravation in the crisis of accumulation since the dawn of the 21st century, and especially since the 2008 “sub-crime crisis’, using the advancements in frontier technologies such as digitisation, global capital is engaged in further shifting of its burden to the shoulders of world people.

In this context neofascism is intensified to enforce the tyranny of corporate capital at a global level effectively utilising reactionary, racial, chauvinistic, revivalist, religious fundamentalist, xenophobic and obscurantist ideologies as its political basis, according to the concrete conditions of countries.

Thus, neoliberal fascism or neofascism needs to be analysed with respect to the logic of corporate accumulation today. Of course,  globalisation has resulted in a restructure of the erstwhile ‘nation-centred production’ by superimposing a new international division of labour and unleash a worldwide super-exploitation of the working people, thereby temporarily overcoming its crisis of accumulation.

On the other, taking advantage of the ideological setbacks of the Left and by utilising the heterogeneity and diversity among working and oppressed people of different countries and through the effective use of a whole set of postmodern ideologies such as “identity politics”, “multiculturalism”, etc., finance capital has also succeeded in creating division among working class and oppressed by diverting attention from corporate plunder thereby disorganising and fragmenting resistance to capital.

Thus, given the internationalisation of capital along with its terribly destructive reactionary essence and decadence, fascism has become transnational in character today. 

To be specific, unlike ‘classical fascism’ which was specific to capitalist-imperialist countries, neofascism, i.e., fascism under neoliberalism has become global in character cutting across national borders.

For instance, a concrete evaluation of the international situation today amply makes it clear that majoritarian religion everywhere is amenable to be used by finance capital as the ideological basis of neofascism (for instance, Evangelism in the Americas, Political Islam in West Asia, Hindutva in India, Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Myanmar).

Another example is the manner in which the financial oligarchs of Europe have initiated a pan-European neofascist alliance against workers, migrants and refugees.

Today, neofascists everywhere are working overtime to take advantage of the mass  psychology of social and economic insecurity created by the loss of livelihood, employment, habitat and environment arising from corporate plunder as well as people’s loss of faith in mainstream traditional parties including ‘social democrats’ who have no alternative to neoliberal policies. Making use of the specificities of countries, neofascists in general pursue an exclusivist and majoritarian line by propping up the so called ‘homogeneous’ part of the population pitting it against the ‘heterogeneous’ sections often composed of religious, ethnic/racial and linguistic minorities, migrants, refugees, dalits, tribals and other marginalized and oppressed sections of society.

 Using them an all round depoliticising and social engineering is resorted to prepare a fertile ground for the flourishing of neofascism. In this context, with its own specificities, the BJP regime in India is a typical example of neofascism (corporate-saffron fascism) today. Basing itself in unbridled neoliberal-corporatisation, the Indian regime today is engaged in establishing a Hindu theocratic state or Hindurashtra in accordance with the RSS ideology of aggressive ‘Hindu nationalism’ or Hindutva.

On Building Up the Anti-Fascist Movement

Viewed in this perspective,  the antifascist offensive is to be initiated based on the lessons from past experiences but also on the basis of a concrete evaluation of 21st century laws of motion of finance capital in relation to country specificities.

Obviously, as already noted, neofascism is the regime of the most reactionary sections of corporate-finance capital under neoliberalism.

 Therefore, though ruling class/bourgeois parties are basically neoliberal in orientation, all of them are not fascistic and, of course, there are sections who stand for rule of law, bourgeois-democratic rights, freedom of expression and press, free and fair election, etc.

However, their class character with roots in neoliberalism and links with corporate capital along with electoral politics as the only sphere of action, make these parties incapable to take initiative in the struggle against fascists who have usurped the entire micro and macro spaces of social life.

Hence, an electoral victory alone is not sufficient as the threat of fascist come-back  ( as is evident for the recent neofascist coup attempt in Brazil) will be there until and unless fascist tentacles are wiped out from their already occupied strategic positions.

This is so because, along with the control over the organs of the state, the saffron fascists through their vast and unparalleled organisational structure also have established spectacular control over ‘street power’ through lumpen and paramilitary goons.

Even when electoral option of challenging fascists through the parliamentary route is theoretically there today, free and fair elections are also becoming increasingly difficult too.

 Hence mere preoccupation with parliamentary work, devoid of a nation-wide and  broad-based anti-fascist people’s movement, cannot confront the fascists, an aspect that the non-fascist ruling class parties often ignore.

Coming to the case of the broad ‘left spectrum’, it ranges from the ‘social democrats’ (e.g., CPI and CPM ) to adventurists (e.g., Maoists).

The latter section that does not make a distinction between pro-fascist and non-fascist sections of the ruling classes (fascism for them is a mere change of regime among the ruling classes) fails to put forward an ideological-political position towards the most reactionary and terrorist class essence of neofascism.

For the CPM, on the other hand, fascism is yet to come to India, and according to its ideologues, Modi regime is “on the verge of turning fascist” and only “symptoms of fascism” are there. Here it is to be stated that this evaluation arises from a stereotyped approach to fascism, a way of looking at fascism as a textbook copy of the ‘classical fascism’ of the interwar period.

This mechanical approach to neofascism is contrary to the scientific analysis that any social phenomenon when transforms and develops further in a new historical context and in a different social formation will inevitably adapt itself to the particularities and specificities of that concrete situation.

 Even under the veil of parliamentary democracy, fascism today has become capable to use terrorist methods of ethnic and racial cleansing, oppression and extermination of minorities, immigrants, refugees, and women, elimination of hard-earned democratic rights, super-exploitation of the workers through new technologies, plunder of nature leading to climate catastrophe and all round militarisation. 

No doubt, the mechanical approach to fascism by ‘social democrats’ is related to their own position as implementer of  far-right neoliberal policies wherever and whenever they are in power.

These varying perceptions on fascism, however, should not be a justification for refraining from the immediate and indispensable task of building up the broad anti-fascist movement for resisting and defeating RSS neofascism.

No doubt, an ideologically equipped, politically and organisationally strong Left movement is the need of the hour.

At the same time, we cannot wait till such an all India movement is ready, since it will be suicidal.

Hence taking care to avoid both sectarian and opportunist deviations, efforts are needed on the part of  left-democratic forces to ally with non-fascist sections of the ruling classes in fighting the most reactionary corporate crony capital and the neofascist state propped up by them.

However, in doing so, the genuine left, progressive and democratic  forces must be aware of the overlapping, interpenetrating and complex neoliberal inter-linkages and interests among different sections of ruling class parties today.

That’s while joining with nonfascist ruling class parties and even with social democratic parties untiring ideological struggle should be carried forward upholding the long-term and strategic interests of the working and toiling people and all oppressed. 

Any laxity on the part of progressive democratic forces in this issue will lead to surrender of the interests of the working and oppressed people in  the interests of “anti-fascist unity”. 

To avoid such a possible mistake, it is high time to build up a coordination of the country-wide people’s struggles against corporate-saffron fascism and its manifestations.

Many peoples movements have been there  that combine struggles against both Hindutva fascism and far-right neoliberal policies.

The Anti-CAA Movement or the people’s movement against denying citizenship to Muslim migrants, and the historic Farmers’ Movement against the corporatisation of agriculture were two examples in this regard. 

Along with them, many struggles of  workers, especially the vast unorganised sections, peasantry, oppressed peoples including women, Dalits, adivasis, minorities, especially the persecuted Muslims, youth and students are emerging throughout the length and breadth of the country against corporate onslaughts, displacement from habitat, environmental destruction, caste atrocities, communal oppression, violation of democratic rights and so on.

While engaging in these struggles through appropriate organisational forms, progressive and democratic forces have to take conscious efforts to initiate debates and discussions on a political alternative against neoliberal policies and RSS neofascism.

Such initiatives at the level of states can lead to a national coordination based on a common minimum program against corporate-saffron fascism.

 If proper interventions are made, this move can be extended to tactical alliance with non-fascist fascist parties in the coming elections for isolating and defeating  the most reactionary  neofascists, also utilising the contradictions among ruling class parties in the process.

Here a specific note is also required on the particular relevance in building up effective resistance against Manuvad and growing inhuman Brahmanical caste practices against Dalits.

Hence appropriate ideological, political and cultural interventions joining with all progressive intellectuals and like-minded people against Manuvadi-Hindutva, the ideological basis of Indian fascism.

 This is essential since,  it is based on the the Hindutva ideology that RSS is engaged in the maddening pace towards transforming India into a full-fledged theocratic state with the material backing of corporate capital.

P J James is general secretary of CPI ML (Red Star)

 

Thursday, January 12, 2023

. Copyright of Hitler’s agenda, infringed upon by Narendra Modi in India — by Sumanta Banerjee

     Copyright  of  Hitler’s  agenda,  infringed  upon  by  Narendra     Modi in India — by Sumanta Banerjee ;I  am  raising  a  serious  issue  that  touches  upon  a  person’s  legal  right  of  exclusive  possession  of  his/her  personal  creation  –  whether  a  scientific  formula,  or  a  literary  piece,  or  even  a  political  programme. This  is  known  as  copyright,  or  patent  in  relation  with  certain  products.  If  anyone  uses  that  material  without  the  permission  of  its  original  author,  or  fails  to  acknowledge  credit  to  its  producer,  he  will  be  liable  for  prosecution. Now,  may  be  I  am  being  the  devil’s  advocate,  as   I  am  raising  a  hypothetical  question.  Suppose  if   Hitler  were   alive  today  (thank  God,  he   isn’t  !),  under  the  prevailing  copyright  and  patent  laws,  wouldn’t   he   have  been  entitled  to  sue  Narendra  Modi  for  infringement  of  copyright  of  the  Nazi  model  which  Hitler  alone  designed  in  Germany  in  the 1930s ?  After  all,  it’s   Hitler’s  ideas  and  tactics  that  Modi  has  plagiarized  from  the  Nazi  text  book.  Modi’s speeches,  like  those  of  Hitler’s   are  filled  with  misinformation,  religious  majoritarian  and  nationalist  chauvinist  sentiments,  and  aggressively  promote    his  personal  image  to  the  mindless  cheer  of  the  mob.  His  lieutenants  in  the  BJP,  in  their  public  utterances  and  lectures,  spread  vitriol   against  Muslims,  and  political  opponents  who  are  branded   as  urban  Naxalites  –  in  the  style  of    the  same  hate -filled   anti-Jewish  and  anti-Communist  propaganda  that  was  spewed  by  Goebbels  and  other  Nazi  leaders . Similar  to  Germany  in  the  1930s,  we  witness  today  in  India,  armed  marauders  and  murderous  gangs  of  the  Sangh  Parivar,  the  Vishva  Hindu  Parishad,  Bajrang  Dal  and  other  outfits  going  on a  killing  spree,  in  the  footsteps  of   the  Nazi  Storm  Troopers,    shouting  `Jai  Shri  Ram,’  almost  sounding  like  `Heil  Hitler !’ Even  India’s  official  snooping  department,  the  NIA  (National  Investigative  Agency),  has  taken  a leaf  out  of   the  book  of  the  Gestapo  (`Geheime  Staatspolizei’  –  the  Nazi  secret  police). Like  the  Gestapo  which  hounded,  imprisoned  and  killed  Hitler’s  political  opponents  and  other  intellectual  dissidents,  the  NIA  in  India  today  is  hauling  up  social  activists,  students  and  youth  participants  in  civil  liberties  movement,  independent  journalists  who  expose  cases  of  the    violation  of  human  rights  both  by  state  agencies  and  the  ruling  BJP  leaders. They  are  arrested  and  put  behind  bars  for  years,  without  trial.  (I  have  dealt  in  detail  with  the  neo-Nazi  functioning  of  the  NIA  in  my  article:  India’s  `Gestapo’ –  National  Investigative  Agency  in  Countercurrents,  26/12/21). If  we  turn  to  another  institution  –  the  jails  in  India  –  where  these  social  activists  and  political  dissenters  are  imprisoned,  we  again  find  that  the  Modi  government  is   stealing   the  patent  of  `concentration  camps’  that  Hitler  invented.  He  created  the  camps  in  Dachau,  Buchenwald,  Auschwitz  and  other  places,  and  established  a  strict  model   whereby  the  prisoners  were  to  be  exterminated  through   different  methods  –  gas  chamber,  torture,  starvation,  denial  of  medical  treatment  among  other  means. Narendra  Modi  has  adopted  some  of  these  methods  from  the  jail  manual  that  Hitler  fashioned  for  his  concentration  camps.  Instead  of  spending  money  on   setting  up   separate   gas chambers,  Modi  has  modified  Hitler’s  model  by  turning  the  Indian  jails  into  mini-gas  chambers. Thanks  to  the  suffocating  toxic  environs  within  their  premises,  polluted  drinking  water  and  food,  and  denial  of  medical  treatment,  the  number  of  deaths  in  these  jails  increased  by  seven  percent  from  2019  to  2020   –  according  to  the  officially  released  Prison  Statistics  India,  2020  report. Among  the  victims  of  these  mini-gas  chambers    in  Indian  jails,  there  are  prominent  social  activists   and  political  dissidents. To  mention   two  recent  cases  –  the  octogenarian  Father  Stan  Swamy  who  was  imprisoned  for  organizing  the  tribal  poor  to  assert  their  rights,  died  in  Taloja  Jail  in  Maharashtra  on  July  5,  2021,  after  having  been  denied  medical  treatment  by  the  jail  authorities.  On  August  25,  2021,  in  Nagpur Central  Jail,  a  political  activist  Pandu  Narote  died  –  again  following  similar  denial  of  necessary  medical  care.   Pandu  Narote  was  a  co-accused  with   G. N.  Saibaba,   a  professor  of  Delhi  University,  who   remains   confined   in  the  same  Nagpur  central  jail,  on  the  charge  of   association  with  Maoists.  Wheelchair-bound  Saibaba  is  90%  disabled,  and  is  confined  in  isolation  within  a  narrow  cell  which  is  shaped  as  an  oblong .  Known  as  `anda cells’  (egg-shaped  cells), similar  cells  have  been  set  up  in  other  jails  too  for  the  solitary  confinement  of  political  prisoners  and  social  activists. In  fact,  the  Modi  government  has  improved  upon  the  Nazi   model  of  concentration  camps  by  inventing  the  `anda  cell.’ In  the  Nazi  concentration  camps,  while  the  prisoners  could  at  least  share  each  other’s   company  and ordeals   (and  often  put  up  collective  resistance),  in  the  `anda  cells’,  the  individual  prisoner  is  left  alone  to  protest  against  acts  of  injustice,  and  wrestle  within  his  own  mind  to  protect  himself  from  sinking  into  mental  depression. Judging  by  the  record  of  the  style  of  governance  by  Narendra  Modi,  as  described  above,    Modi  should  acknowledge  his  debt  to  Hitler –  along  with  his  `gurus’  in  the  Sangh  Parivar  –  from  whom  he  derived  inspiration. He  should  not  have  any  qualms  in  including  a  foreigner  among  his  political  teachers,  or  even  placing  him  on  a  higher  pedestal,  in  his  altar  of  devotion. To  recall  the  past,    Narendra  Modi’s  Hindu  guru  M.S.  Golwalkar  way  back  in  1939,   paid  tribute  to  Hitler   by  praising  him  for  exterminating  the  Jews,  and  advised   Indians  to  imbibe  that  model  by   destroying   their  Semitic  counterparts  in  India,  the  Muslims.  Following  is  Golwalkar’s   infamous   statement: “To  keep  up  the   purity  of  the  Race  and  its  culture,  Germany  shocked  the  world  by  purging the  country  of  the  Semitic  races  and  the  Jews. Race  pride  at  its  highest  has  been  manifested  here….  a  good  lesson  for us  in  Hindusthan  to  learn  and  profit  by.”  (We  or  Our  Nationhood.  1939). Shouldn’t   Narendra  Modi  in  public  announcement,  pay  tribute  to  Hitler  for  `learning  and  profiting  by’  him  ? Only  by  this  acknowledgement,  he  can  overcome  the   allegation  of   stealing  Hitler’s  copyright   and  patent  rights  –  an  allegation  that  might  be    hurled  against   him  by  the  present  day  neo-Nazi  followers  of  Hitler  in  Europe  and  elsewhere. Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008);

Monday, January 9, 2023

Islam phobias in India

 

Islam phobias in India; JAN 08, 2023; Between the 17th and 19th of December last month, a large collection of major religious leaders, right-wing activists, fundamentalist militants and Hindutva organisations came together at Haridwar. The event they held, called ‘Dharma Sansad’or ‘religious parliament’, witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of hate speech calling for a genocide of the Muslims of India. But despite the violent exhortations hurled over the course of three days, authorities in India did not make a single arrest. Under the regime of Narendra Modi, right-wing hate and violence against India’s Muslims has acquired a sense of normalisation. But while they, along with India’s Dalit community, make the usual targets, it was only a matter of time till the hate spread on to other minority groups as well. On January 2, a mob in Chhattisgarh vandalised a church after right-wing leaders accused the Christian community of carrying out ‘forcible conversions’. While the global community has been slow to react to India’s slide towards Hindu nationalism, observers in Western capitals too are beginning to notice. As the year 2022 came to an end, outgoing Democratic Congressman Andy Levin warned: “I have been a vocal advocate for human rights in places like India, which is in danger of becoming a Hindu nationalist State rather than a secular democracy, the world's largest democracy.” In an exclusive interview with The Express Tribune, renowned Indian-American anthropologist and professor at the New York University Arjun Appadurai unpacked the historical ingredients that enabled an environment widespread right-wing Hindu nationalist sentiment in India. In conjunction with a global erosion of democratic ideals and yearning for quick results, he explained how India has found itself in a perfect storm of Hindu majoritarianism: I am among the very large number of people who are trying to tackle this big question of a kind of a worldwide trend, which is very apparent, although the differences among the locations where this is happening cannot be ignored.

 

It's difficult to see this in the way that one might, for example, see the Coronavirus where you can actually see it moving. The thing about the shift to autocratic authoritarian governments is you cannot see an obvious sort of circulation path although many of the leaders in these cases are aware of each other. But it's not easy to say that they're sort of mimicking or learning something, and we are forced to look for deeper trends.My main view is that though there are huge differences in the electorates and the populations in these different countries, a common element might be that many of these populations whether in Turkey or Hungary or the US, or India, have lost patience with the slowness of liberal democracy, to deliver whatever it is they want. There's a loss of patience and consequently, they are more ready than ever to vote for leaders who promise quick, essentially overnight results. The cost of writing that cheque is that we will have to get rid of this and that procedural hurdle. But other ideological attachments to these leaders then creep in and in many cases, that lubricant which lets people accept the promise that results will be delivered overnight is some form of majoritarian racism – a sense that some majority, however defined, has been poorly treated, and now their moment has come to restore their place.I used the word democracy fatigue in an essay I wrote about four years ago soon after Trump was brought into office, saying that people are exiting democracy by democratic means that is through elections and so on. In some other places, of course, even elections are dispensed with, but the disturbing phenomenon is places that have ostensibly democratic institutions, democracy itself is being dispensed with. The conventional storyline is not at all wrong, which is that for some reason, institutions – the democratic ones, the courts, the media, the press, the legislature and indeed the executive – in India by all accounts were quite healthy, vibrant and strong in the decades up to let's say, the early 2000s, when we begin to see the rise of the BJP culminating now in the in the very troubling situation under Modi. But in that long story, we must recall, of course, that even under Indira Gandhi's rule, we had the emergency, which was only a year but still showed a certain readiness on the part of even the liberal Congress to crack down hard on dissent. Likewise, the 1984 opprobrium on Sikhs or the whole Kashmir position of the Indian state starting with the birth of the two nations has been a very hardline position. I think it had some potentially flexible moments in Nehru’s early years, but quite quickly became the rigid view that we see today. There is a mystery about why this descent into right wing religious fundamentalism and majoritarian autocracy could happen relatively fast. You could make a longer history from Babri Masjid to today or you could make a shorter history from Modi's period as chief minister in Gujarat to today. But in any case, you can say it was obvious from 1947 that India was doomed to become a right-wing majoritarian state. It's hard to fully spell out what has happened, but its consequences are clearly massive and it has clearly led to the rise of very militant Hinduism, which has historical precedent. And it's a history that is now closely tied to a very powerful centralised state – it's not just regional rules, or doing little wars and business here and there, it's got a kind of elevator straight to Delhi.  India is a land only of minorities. Not also of minorities, but only of minorities. There is nobody who has a big writ. Even if you take these big categories like Hindu, Muslim, and so on, they have slowly crystallised over time, especially during the colonial period. It is very difficult to see a macro idea of Muslims and Hindus and so on as big identities. If you look even closely at riots in places like Lucknow in the 16th, 17th or 18th century, it's Shias vs Sunni. Nobody is holding up the flag of you know, the Ummah or some massive global Hinduism. It's all highly fragmented and this relates to caste as well, but not only to it.

 

No one was not a minority in India over a massive part of its history. The big question is how does a majority get produced in this place? In a place like Serbia or Japan, there are of course minorities, but you can also see there is some objective basis for a certain group of people to say we are the majority. We look and talk the same, and eat the same and these ‘untouchables’ in Japan or Okinawans, or Kosovars in Serbia, are different. Now, in all cases, it is my belief that the majority has to be built, whether it's Serbia, Germany or here. It is not off the shelf. But in a place like India it is a huge task because of the minoritisation or the fact that you're in small cells, which have this quality that is so hardwired. I don't think we have fully plumbed the dynamics of the way a credible majoritarian identity has been not only created but also installed, you might say in digital terms, into the population. I think the big force, which I don't understand well enough personally, is the RSS and its affiliates. They have clearly done a huge job in installing this majoritarian software on a place-to-place basis. And of course, Modi was a lifelong RSS person, a fact we sometimes forget. Each of these answers raises more questions. Still, I would say a preliminary shot at it would be that the BJP did the wise thing to keep the RSS relationship very alive. Otherwise, it would be like every party going up and down with electoral fortunes. So, whether you go slightly up in Punjab or down in Rajasthan or down in Bengal, there is a steady force keeping your political apparatus in place as a national affair and it's not the BJP alone, because the BJP alone, you know its leadership has a very particular configuration of essentially Gujarat, UP, and a couple of other states and the key actors. But RSS is in all those places. So somewhere there may be an answer to your question. I think he deserves to be taken very seriously. For one thing, he's the only person I would say at the national level who has genuine large-scale appeal and charisma. If you made a charisma index, he's close to 100 and everybody else is below 50, and most people are below 20. No one can take away from it. He's an incredible speaker. He knows how to make his appeals; he's also mastered how to make the cocktail of visibility and invisibility. He’s there all the time in front of you, but never at press conferences. You'd never see him with his hair out of place or him laughing. He's a purely hologrammed brand and you can't escape him. Modi has mastered what in the US in the 50s was called image politics. I admire that skill. He's also been extremely shrewd, considering that he's not a scientist – to put it mildly, not highly educated. He's been extremely smart on the IT front. These BJP IT cells are amazing to me. The IT game has totally been lost. He also has made a considerable effort, though this I think has largely been a failure, to bring the military in which is the big X Factor. The military is the 800-pound gorilla slightly off scene. General Bipin Rawat was the first exception, the line crosser, who lined up with the regime and said, hey, you know, this is the way to go and I'm at the service of this regime and its vision. But it's not clear how far down you see that interest in getting into the frontline of politics is in the Indian armed forces. But there are many other things in which Modi has been very shrewd, one of which is the question I still ask myself: how could this man in especially Europe and the US have a very benign reputation to this day? Erdogan has not achieved this. Nobody else has achieved this. Orban has not achieved this, Trump has not achieved this. Boris Johnson has not achieved this. But Modi is still seen as a wise and strong leader in developing countries. So he also gets credit there. I don't know whether credit is at the sending end in how he manages his image and statements or the receiving end that there is some, which has been my theory, that the receiving end has India locked in a kind of 1970s image, struggling democracy, developing country, and they just don't understand that a new chapter, a new drama has been going on for 10 to 15 years. There's a kind of arrest on the reception side. That's my private theory or my personal theory. But there too, we have to go because he's not allowed his image to correspond more to the reality of his policies. Gandhi represents the exact opposite of what Modi represents in terms of tolerance, abhorrence of violence and so on and so forth, commitment to truth. All these really put him in the opposite place. Conceptually, he's still the main alternative because Nehru was too much involved in day-to-day politics. Gandhi still has a certain special status, which sometimes is used to also distance him and say who cares, he's somewhere up in some other realm. But still, he is a kind of conscience for India. There is however, another side which is more tricky for where Gandhi feeds into the hardwiring of Indian politics and society in a way that is not totally separate from the world of Modi or others and that has to do with these ideas about Hindu and Muslim. Even if he had a different idea how they should connect, the idea became, I think, quite important him. Several people also have complained about Gandhi over the decades that while he was extremely humane, especially at partition towards the Muslim population of the Subcontinent, he never really understood Islam much in the way that he understood, say Christianity. There was a kind of imagination limitation – not a genocidal impulse but something soft, a lacking. Gandhi also had a certain social conservatism on caste on the order of things. You can attempt to reinterpret his writings but the landscape is there, such as the idea of Harijan, a term the Dalits hate. Although someone like Modi is not a subtle intellectual or historian, I think at a gut level he knows that Gandhi had a conservative Hindu side. Gandhi made it as humanistic and universal as possible, but the DNA was there. Modi just took that social conservatism and put it on steroids. Having said that, Gandhi was not genocidal or believed in majoritarianism – that's a Modi copyright. Gandhi would have been horrified and would literally be turning in his grave seeing this. I'm a firm believer that Mahatma Gandhi would have not supported what is happening in India. No doubt. I was recently stimulated by a colleague with whom I was in one-on-one correspondence to look at the election results for Modi over the last two elections. The numbers are not staggering – 40% or fully 45%. I mean, Nehru sometimes had 70 or 80% vote. So, the question is who's in that 40 or 45, and who's in the 60 or 65? Modi has managed to get a large part of the population to overcome their parochial or localised sectional interests to go for this big message that is true. No one has succeeded in mobilising the other side in the same way, which is made up of bits and pieces. Modi’s side have been successful aggregators. The numbers are not overwhelming but it's a number enough to dominate the parliament. He has leveraged that number in a brilliant way. I think one thing has to be kept in mind and it holds not only for Modi, but all his predecessors Manmohan Singh, Narsimha Rao, basically the Indian Congress leadership, which is the topic of corruption. What do we mean by it? How do we measure it? Is it getting worse or better? No one would deny the flow of black money and other dubious money into Indian elections is one of the scandals of all democracies today. If you take the amount of rupees flowing in from black accounts, unknown people both used to manipulate elections and to launder that money in elections. That is a very large amount of money so we need to be cautious about fetishising elections, because this is not just a Modi issue. Modi has been very smart about how to capture elections, because elections without cash in India are a thing of the past. Modi has captured the national pot so that means he also captured the election machinery. The place where we can see his brilliance as far as elections are concerned is in Gujarat. He showed himself as the master of Indian electoral politics in terms of speeches, rhetoric, and mobilisation, and also how you control the money flow. This is definitely true about that aspect of the whole Indian electoral system that responds to national and international issues. Of course, a lot is going on, which is totally local. When those things are subordinated to issues of a bigger scale, I think what you say is absolutely true. The observation I would add to that is it is the same coin, which has two sides. One is creating a uniform commitment to Modi and to the BJP among people who have a lot of sectional interest but getting them to transit, in other words, producing a majority of some kind. The other side of the coin is that somebody has to be denigrated. So polarisation always means one side is becoming solid and the other side has to be liquefied, conceptually speaking. For me that is the most basic kind of anthropological sociological human issue I've been struggling with more or less my entire career. What is the ‘we’ they think, to produce a strong and aggressive ‘we’? Why is there always a need for ‘they’? Why can't I just say we are all Hindus and we are good people, let's all be together. No, until you say that those other people are responsible for all our troubles - they are spies or Pakistani agents, this or that. In a slightly different way, it applies to Christians and in a murky way to Dalits as well, who are both ‘us’ and ‘not us’ – ‘us’ as long they remain quiet and obedient, but not as soon as they talk back. But Muslims are in a permanent default state of ‘otherness’. The deep question that very few social scientists have been able to answer and I certainly cannot answer is why is a ‘they’ required in order to produce a ‘we’, both perennially in human history and in the era of modern nation states. The ‘they’ involved can be a religious idiom or an ethnic one. It can be a migrant idiom. But no one can say they promote a vigorous nationalism without any sense of some dark spectral figure that needs to be managed in prison or eventually removed. In India, this genocidal impulse exists because the numbers are so large. It’s not like there are a handful of Muslims. And the minute you think about Muslims this way, you ask, “what about Dalits, are they on our side?” People have pointed out to me that BJP has succeeded in co-opting a significant number of Dalits. But I still think that number is not large and those in the Dalit community who think radically against the BJP are many, and very vocal. However, it's obvious that BJP has not co-opted Muslims and the Muslims are quiet because they are afraid in India. The ‘we/they’ problem [in this region] is a historical question. Why has Modi succeeded in mobilising or intensifying that feeling which clearly has a longer history? There was always some deeper issue, at least as far back as Jinnah and Nehru. Modi did not manufacture the ‘us vs them’ problem but he has leveraged the hell out of it. I think the elected government has made inroads into the other independent branches of government massively. That's why I think, just as in Pakistan, you can talk about the establishment, we can talk about the BJP regime because there's more than just the prime minister's office doing its job with the court keeping an eye and the legislature doing its own work. It's become all too close and too tight. That's my reason for using the word. It is too deeply involved in the others for it to be a healthy democratic condition. Separation of powers is at the very heart of the idea of democracy. When all of these are very closely aligned with the current ruling party you have to find some word for that. My fears are that we are approaching something resembling a tipping point, which will go in one of two ways. One of them is where the BJP and Modi consolidate this regime and dissent is more or less eliminated. While the talk we have been noticing from some quarters is technically genocidal, that project is impossible in India with its 200 million people. Rather, it’s about producing fear and compliance on a large scale. Will that happen? Or will Dalits, farmers, urban intellectuals, Marxists, women, Sikhs, etc. find a way to make common cause and push this government out. I think that would require a new order of leadership – either one person or a few, who can rise to Modi levels of credibility. But the tipping point could go that way as well. It's a very troublesome and troubling question. I haven't really thought about that. Calling for genocide is one thing and carrying it out is another thing in the current year. The numbers are too big to make it possible. I think all these tactics are ways to produce fear. They are threats and statements of impunity about the vision, not the execution. Anybody in their right mind knows it cannot be done and is an extremely risky path to embark on. You can trigger many things, including overseas intervention. Do Modi and his allies want to run those kinds of risks? I think that the pragmatic, utilitarian part of this current government, which is also deeply concerned with facilitating massive corporate profit making, sets limitations to the actual execution of a genocidal vision. I take great comfort in that. But I still think the ability to say these things is alarming. And we have to ask, what is that agenda about? And secondly, how can we nip that in the bud – through legal means, public opinion means, elections or whatever else is possible? https://tribune.com.pk/story/2394796/the-makings-of-a-hindu-nationalist-state