29.05.2014
India: Modi-fication of democracy
The seeds sown by Congress have borne authoritarian fruit, writes Murzban Jal
Race is the body of the nation, and … with its fall the nation ceases to exist.
- MS Golwalkar: We, or our nation defined
Nazism provided undeniably the saviour of Germany
- VD Savarkar: Hindu Rashtra Darshan
The sins of the fathers are visited on the children
- H Ibsen: Ghosts
This article aims to theorise on the conservative political past of contemporary India, and especially how the founders of militant Hindu nationalism - namely MS Golwalkar and VD Savarkar - nurtured an entire class of political activists on a violent fascistic ideology.
But first let me remind readers of the facts and figures concerning the 2014 national elections. The neoconservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under its authoritarian and allegedly charismatic leader, Narendra Modi, won the elections with 282 seats (31%), whilst the Congress Party, which has ruled India for 52 out of the 67 years since independence, got only 44. This represents the greatest ever defeat of Congress. Other parties, including those based on region or caste, won 148 seats. The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, which had a large presence in the states of West Bengal (where they ruled uninterruptedly for 34 years from 1977 to 2011) and Kerala, got a dismal 12 seats. And the total number of seats for the Left Front, which had peaked at 59 in 2004 and fell to 24 in 2009, has now been halved to just 12.
These results have delivered the clearest verdict on the Congress Party - back in 1984, in the wake of the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, it won 49.1% of the vote and 427 seats. The previous best performance of the BJP was in 1998, when its share of the vote was 25.6% (182 seats).
A scientific and philosophical analysis of this verdict is necessary. For one, the BJP is not a mere imitation of the European and American neocon parties. It is a party that emerged as a political wing of the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Voluntary Corps, that was nurtured on German fascist ideology, including its celebration of the ideas of race and the racial nation. Nor should it be forgotten that this same party was also actively involved in the Balkanisation of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. It is in this space that a revolutionary critique has to be constituted.
Seemingly there are two choices open to the BJP - either go in for Muslim-hating fascism or turn to a neoliberal, neoconservative form of politics. For the latter to happen, as the liberals in India are wishing, the BJP will have to disown its parent organisation (the RSS) and the peculiar fascist-type package that it carries even now. The term that one ought to use is not ‘fascism’, but ‘communal fascism’ - although ‘communal’ ought not to be confused with the European version. It is not gemeinschaftlich. It has nothing to do with the idea of community (Gemeinschaft) used particularly by Marxists. Instead the south Asian version of the discourse of communalism implies ‘estranged communitarianism’ and the clash of religious and ethnic communities - especially the clash between Hindus and Muslims. That this theme corresponds to the one formulated by Samuel Huntington and practised by American foreign policy should also be noted.
Liberals who had supported Congress earlier have, in their typical spineless fashion, been saying that Modi did not campaign on the communal lines usual to the politics of the BJP, but on ‘development’, which, it seems, won out (or so we learn from the liberals) over a certain form of lethargy. The liberals called this lethargy ‘socialism’ or, to be precise, ‘Nehruvian socialism’. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no such thing as ‘Nehruvian socialism’. What one had was a type of state-capitalist model with inherent feudal remnants within both the economy and the polity. And under the Congress regime, from Nehru to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Indian state also had part of the welfare model inscribed in its ideological cranium. What has happened since 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi came to power, was the slow but systematic intrusion of the neoliberal model. The triumph of the neo-model started in the early 1990s, when Narasimha Rao was prime minister and Manmohan Singh finance minister. It has culminated in the victory of Modi.
What has happened now is that there are competing versions of capitalism - the liberal-secular model nurtured by Congress, and the authoritarian, fascist one that Modi represents. But there is also a third: the Stalinist version of capitalism, as propagated and practised by the CPM, which led ultimately to their downfall in West Bengal in 2011. What has happened now is that the Modi brand of authoritarian capitalism has totally outstripped the liberal and Stalinist versions.
One also has to understand that this is not a mere electoral victory. It is the beginning of a counterrevolution against Indian democracy. And it is a victory led by a man who was said (as a child) to be a chaiwalla (tea seller), who has now gone through a strange metamorphosis to become ‘mazdoor (worker) number one’. As with the classical version of fascism, one has to understand the importance of its mass base and that it is counterrevolution ‘from below’. And to understand this counterrevolution one has to understand the secretive organisation (the RSS) to which Modi belongs.
For alongside (and beneath) this authoritarian model of capitalism lies the RSS with its entire complex of organisations knitted closely together. The media industry (especially the visual media: NDTV, CNN (IBN), Times Now, Headlines Today) has been almost totally silent on the role of the RSS, especially its fascist nature. The Times of India calls Modi “SuperModi” (trying to rework the American comic book hero into an Indian superman), who they say has “pulled the BJP back from the brink”.1 The same newspaper says that “Muslim women pray for NaMo” (meaning Narendra Modi) to become prime minister.2
If the media industry is run only according to the logic of profit-making, it must be noted that the RSS is run with a great deal of secrecy and has multiple fronts: from the communal, pro-imperialist Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) to the Bajrang Dal, which organises communal mobilisation when needed - and also unleashing riots against Muslims. One instance is in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP has moved from almost no presence for a decade to total power (winning 71 out of 80 seats). This is due to extreme caste and communal polarisation - riots in Muzaffarnagar (in Uttar Pradesh) displaced more than 50,000 people in August-September 2013. Consequently the two local parties that had previously been dominant, the Samajwadi Party (Socialist Party) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (Majority People’s Party), were decimated in national elections.
But there are also other secret organisations like the Abhinav Bharat (Young India Society), whose cadres, including a serving military officer in the Indian army (now dismissed), have been involved in terroristic activities like the 2007 bombing of the Indo-Pakistan Samjhauta rail service (the ‘Friendship Express’). Even the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai - engineered by CIA agent David Headley with the help of the Pakistan-based fundamentalist, Lashkar-e-Toiba - featured the invisible hand of rightwing sections in the Indian state, which does not exclude the RSS.3
So the triumph of the BJP is not a triumph of the innocent will - it is a triumph that is soaked in the blood of the innocent. Its political and ideological roots in the teachings of Savarkar and Golwalkar cannot be forgotten.
Allegory
The 2014 national elections remind one of two allegories - allegories of the type Walter Benjamin talked of in the era of the rise of European fascism.4 The first is what is called the ‘Modi-fication’ of politics in India - Modi literally modifies politics in the fascistic sense. The second is a direct reference to Nazi symbolism. It is also a narcissistic one, where Narendra Modi has been marketed by the media industry as “NaMo”. Whilst this may seem to be only a passing gesture, what one needs to point out is that Nano is the name of the Indian version of the Volkswagen (literally ‘people’s car’) first produced in Nazi Germany in 1937.
The relation between Hitler and Modi is not accidental, for the very party that he belongs to is silently directed by the fascist-inspired RSS ideology However, the relation between fascism and the emergence of Modi as the now seemingly undisputed leader of India runs even deeper, with special reference to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. The first reference is that Modi, like Hitler, has mass support. The second is that Modi has been tactically supported by the Indian liberals.5 This implies that the latter have not only been weak in fighting this Indian version of fascism, but also have almost actively supported him. The other, more alarming trend is the decimation of the established left in these elections.
Now, whilst it may seem surprising to many that this rightwing, conservative party has won with what seems to be an astonishing majority, a deeper reading of both the political economy of capital accumulation in India and the political crisis that besieges not only the liberal Congress Party, but the motley crew of regional, caste-based parties and the established left, suggests that there is nothing to be astonished about. After all, the second wave of pro-globalisation reforms that Congress unleashed implies that an authoritarian party like the BJP is what is needed to govern India, and that late capitalism with its multiple crises could no longer use the liberal Congress Party as the flag bearer of neoliberalism.
What is alarming is that the BJP is different from all political parties in India, in the sense that for it the politics of secularism is not important, and secondly that it is basically a political front of the paramilitary RSS that was modelled on European fascism. The RSS, right from its inception in 1925, based its ideology on the political ‘theology’ of Hindu supremacy called Hindutva, or the ‘essence of Hinduism’, which in turn was modelled on the feudal-monarchical idea of European Christendom. In this fascist borrowing, the Muslims, according to the now discredited ‘science’ of eugenics, are deemed to be the enemies of the nation. But it is ‘race’ that is central to the RSS - the nation is driven by the “race spirit”. And, according to this macabre fascist logic, there are two races: the Aryan (Hindu) one and the Semitic (Muslim) one. It is impossible for these two imagined ‘races’ to co-exist. Consider the following:
The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must hold to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu religion and lose their separate existence, to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment - not even citizen’s rights.6
The question thus remains: how could the BJP, that was until the early 1990s an extremely marginalised party, suddenly grip the imagination of the Indian masses? To understand this, one has to understand how it could transform the ‘melancholic’ character of mainstream Hinduism into an organised form of mass hysteria. This it did in 1992 via the concocted issue of the Ayodhya temple, where Hindus were mobilised to destroy the historical Babri mosque. This was followed by anti-Muslim riots nationwide. That this coincided also with the era of the downfall of the Soviet Union and the formal introduction of neoliberal capitalism in India by the then finance minister, Manmohan Singh, should also be mentioned. It also spells the close of the era of the welfare state. A number of things happened. First the monopoly of the Congress Party came to an end; and the era of coalition politics began with the close coordination of caste-based parties with the BJP in the Northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It is in these margins that the BJP developed its programme of capturing power in New Delhi. Their programme was shrewd but sure. The architect then was Lal Krishna Advani, who rode a Toyota car fashioned as an ancient Indian chariot. Little did one note at that time that Narendra Modi would soon take the reins of the chariot.
Muslim question
To understand the anti-democratic character of the BJP, one once again has to see the original manifesto of the Indian fascists:
There are only two courses open to the foreign elements: either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture; or to live at its mercy, so long as the national race may allow them to do so, and to quit the country at the sweetest will of the national race.7
In this sense one needs to ask, how can a political party be ethically legitimised when it cherishes the grotesque ideals of Mussolini and Hitler and the war of imagined races? One must note that this is not a theme of the past, but an inherent part of the thinking of the RSS. Recently, just before the elections, a BJP leader from Bihar, Giriraj Singh, said that those who do not vote for Modi will be deported to Pakistan. Not only that: he also said that all terrorists are from one particular religion only (namely Islam). Also note this statement of Giriraj Singh: “Pakistan is the hurdle in Narendra Modi’s path of becoming PM, and there are some people in India who are pro-Modi. Some are pro-terrorism and their political Mecca-Medina is Pakistan. These people should be in Pakistan, not India.”
It must also be noted that for the RSS the model is Nazi Germany, with its purging of Jews.8 And considering that this fascist ideology was put into practice in 2002 in Gujarat under the stewardship of Narendra Modi, where state-sponsored genocide was committed against the Muslim population, these references to the origins of the RSS are not academic. Of course, it is not that there have not been riots resulting from many causes in India. But this time the master rioter is now metamorphosed as the single leader able to change the destiny of India for the better. For the type of politics that Modi represents, Muslims and Christians cannot become citizens of what they call the “Hindu nation”, since India may be their “fatherland”, but never their “holy land”.9 The Hindus are the “original national race” who are perpetually in war with “foreign races”.10
Whilst this fascist version is well known, albeit hidden under the phantasmagorical carpet of parliamentary democracy, what is not known is that even the Indian liberal once believed (and still probably believes) in this fantastic theme of the “Hindu nation”. Consider this liberal version:
Existence of the Hindu nation in a position of domination in India or Hindustan will not only be a salvation to the Hindus only, but it alone can be an unfailing guarantee to all the minorities of different nations living in this country for the preservation to their religious and cultural rights.11
The problem is that this view has never been systematically challenged by liberals. For them, except for a section of the left liberals (Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Congress Party member, is one such case), this form of majoritarianism is said to be the natural order of things. What is alarming is that, when in the ideology of the RSS, the Muslim is the ‘hated other’, fit only to be destroyed, then this spells even greater trouble in the era of a late imperialism which is in perpetual crisis and governed by the ideology of Islamophobia.
Keeping in mind this observation about how imperialism governs the RSS ideological mindset, we turn to what we may call the ‘Muslim question’. It must be noted that it arose in colonial India, especially after the 1857 First War of Independence, which must be borne in mind in relation to the recent election victory. Like the ‘Jewish question’ that emerged in the early 19th century (recall Marx’s 1843 On the Jewish question), the ‘Muslim question’ is both very real and a burning issue. Since the ‘Jewish question’ could lead firstly to Nazism, Auschwitz and the genocide, followed by the formation of Zionist Israel, the ‘Muslim question’ should be given greater importance than ordinarily imagined. The fact that things have shifted from the 1857 perspective to the now Zionist-inspired one, and the focus of this question is tied down so inexorably to imperialism and the American empire, gives the issue a much greater dimension.
And if this ‘Muslim question’ is tied to imperialism and the military arms complex, there can be no complacency in its understanding. For the BJP, any talk of minorities, especially Muslims, is what it calls a “pseudo-secular” question. Like the global fundamentalists - from Washington to Tehran and from Tel Aviv to Islamabad - secularism represents a false, inauthentic, pseudo-understanding. For polity to survive a lethal dose of religion is necessary.
What one needs to do (besides locating the hand of imperialism behind this question) is not merely talk of secularism, but also differentiate between the liberal and the Marxist version of secularism through the deeper, revolutionary discourse of both political and human emancipation that Marx talked of in On the Jewish question. It must be stressed that there is a deep relation between these two forms of emancipation. One cannot tear one from the other, as has been done by both the liberal Congress Party and the Stalinist left (they both believe in political emancipation, but not human emancipation).
Both political and human emancipation are essential ‘moments’ in the revolutionary and democratic movement. It must be stressed that it is this alienation of one from the other which brings confusion in its wake. This confusion, which Marx accused the Young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, of generating, seems to live on when one discusses the ‘Muslim question’ in India. Remember, Bauer claimed that the Jews in Prussia could not demand rights as Jews (ie, rights as a minority). How could they do so, Bauer’s reasoning went, when by and large, the citizen of Prussia had no rights? For Bauer this proposal of rights as Jews in Prussia was legitimating particular interests. Do we not hear the same theme in contemporary India? Do we not hear that the offering of rights as Muslims is nothing but the appeasement of minorities? Do we also not hear that one should have rights for all (ie, rights of the abstract citizen or, in other words, abstract rights), but not rights as Muslims?
What we say, following Marx, is that the question of rights in general and the rights of minorities is etched in this dialectical, theoretical problematic of concrete analysis of concrete conditions. What we also say is that, if one removes the dialectical and historical-materialist character in understanding the question of the rights of Muslims, then one lapses into a form of Islamophobia inherent in the politics of both American imperialism and the BJP. It must be noted that Bauer, after his sojourn in Hegelianism, went over to the anti-Semitic camp. Bauer could not understand the concrete particular (the Jewish minority in Prussia) and thought of the abstract ‘man’ devoid of religion and ethnicity.
It is not only the BJP that occupies this space of phantasmagorical abstraction: the Indian liberal thinks the same way. That is why the liberal has ignored the extremely pitiable conditions of Indian Muslims and simply done nothing about it. Deep down the Indian liberals, like Bauer, are abstract universalists: they want an ‘abstract Indian’ devoid of the plurality inherent in Indian society. Those in contemporary India who also talk of ‘man’ in general - ie, ‘man’ independent of real, living people - or those who talk of citizenship devoid of real people, are doing nothing but mimicking this discourse of the abstract and phantasmagorical universal.
We get thus two conflicting terrains: (1) the original fascist version of the RSS; and (2) the version through which the political front of the RSS veils and modifies this aggression. Consider how the prior incarnation of the BJP, the Jan Sangh, posed this issue of the ‘abstract Indian’:
We are pledged to the service not of any particular community or section, but of the entire nation. Every countryman is blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh. We shall not rest till we are able to give to every one of them a sense of pride that they are children of Bharatmata [Mother India].12
One, however, must insist that this is only a cover - a cover likewise adopted in the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto. Remember that Hitler came to power not through a coup, but through victory in the 1933 elections. It has also been said many times that he respected legality, but allowed Göring to Nazify the Berlin police.13 Modi and the RSS will do exactly this. Hindutva will never be abandoned. It will link its political project with corporate capitalism. And it is here that the question of ‘development’ expounded by Modi comes up.
Development as brutality
It is strange that when the BJP under Modi talks of development it is supported by economists like Jagdish Bhagwati. Earlier (especially in the 1980s) its idea was based on the fight against “corruption” in a veiled form through asserting high-caste ‘purity’ (the corrupt are the secularists). Then since the late 1980s the fight has been for “religious sentiment” that is damaged by Muslims. How then did ‘development’ enter the BJP’s vocabulary? What lies behind this ideology?
Under neoliberal political economy, the Indian elites have lost contact with the classical liberal ideas of rights and individual liberty. Whilst the rights question did remain part of Congress ideology, in reality rights were continuously being violated. Riots continued unabated. Under the United Progressive Alliance regime led by the Congress, ‘progressive’ laws were continuously passed in parliament: the Right to Education, Women’s Reservation, etc. But these were never fully implemented. What was implemented was the formation of ‘special economic zones’, which in plain words (to borrow a phrase from David Harvey) represent nothing but “accumulation through dispossession”. Congress thus started this process; the BJP is perfecting it. And, thanks to this dispossession, the large pool has been created, making up the industrial reserve army and the dispossessed rural poor (largely the lower-caste ‘other backward classes’ or OBCs) who have been joining the new army of Modi fans.
An editorial in the 2011 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly spoke of “development with brutality”,14 noting especially the Indian state’s adoption of brutal methods to repress those who resist the implementation of neoliberal policies. What Modi has done in Gujarat from 2001 to the present has been to convert it into a brutal business firm. Congress could not realise on the national level what Modi was able to achieve as chief minister of Gujarat: ie, a ‘national firm’. Gujarat thus became the state for investment, aided by a monopoly cartel called Reliance Industries (referred to as a “state within the state”). Reliance has become the Indian Krupp company, whilst Modi plays the role of Hitler. ‘Development’ is where neoliberalism and classical fascism meet.
Modi will now try to convert India into a business state. Thus, while he has Savarkar and Golwalkar as his ideologues of ethnic cleansing, he also has Shinjo Abe, Lee Kwan Yew and Deng Xiaoping as his economic role models. And it is with this business mindset that the BJP was able to win over the voters, especially the 100 million new voters. It was also because of this ideology of ‘politics as business’ that India saw such a high voter turnout: 66.38%.
What is going on in this new stage of capitalism and politics in India is what Habermas calls the “exhaustion of utopian energies”.15 This exhaustion of the utopian model indicates, on the one hand, the failure of the left in India. It is, however, not a “transitory mood of cultural pessimism” (as Habermas has indicated).16 Instead there is a mood of making politics, through cultural manipulation, phantasmagorical and magical. What Walter Benjamin said of fascism - it makes politics aesthetical17 (or should one say ‘makes politics a spectacle’?) - is the new setting for the political management of neoliberal capital accumulation in India.
It is essential to fully understand this new stage. First, it is a departure from the stage that began in the early 1990s with the Ayodhya temple issue and reached its peak with the organisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, where mass hysteria was the chief tool for the BJP’s political mobilisation. Now (probably beginning in early 2014 with the idea of grabbing power in New Delhi), media-managed spectacle has been the leitmotif of political mobilisation. But behind this spectacle lie mass hysteria and bloody riots that are perpetually present. The Muzaffarnagar riots in late 2013 are one instance enabling one to understand how from the margins (the BJP had only 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh before the 2014 national election) the BJP has managed to capture the centre. This riot, initiated by the RSS, enabled the BJP to enter the political space of the most populous state in India. Just as the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat transformed the BJP into a major permanent player there, the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots are said to have played a similar role in Uttar Pradesh. Development BJP-style rides on the wild stallion of riots.
Mass hysteria has been sublated into the spectacle: the spectacle of the new authoritarian leader of the new managerial capitalist state. Supposedly India will no longer be a client state, nor a welfare state. Its ideological model includes the destruction of any notion of workers’ control, of every sort of leftwing idea.
What one also gets in this new, neoliberal stage is the claim that:
The utopian idea of a society based on social labour has lost its persuasive power - and not simply because the forces of production have lost their innocence or because the abolition of private ownership of the means of production clearly has not led in and of itself to workers’ self-management. Rather, it is above all because that utopia has lost its point of reference in reality: the power of abstract labour to create structure and give form to society … But why should the diminishing power of utopia of social labour be of significance to the broader public, and why should it help to explain a general exhaustion of utopian energies?18
In India, ‘utopian energies’ were decapitated firstly in the early 1990s, with the programme of neoliberalism entering Indian public policy through (1) the depoliticisation of politics by the culture industry and (2) the communalisation of the polity by the BJP. But they are also lost because of the Stalinist left’s betrayal of revolutionary Marxism, combined with the neoliberalism of the Congress Party making all reason instrumental - and this instrumental reason in turn being converted by the BJP into totalitarian state power.
The consequences are terrible. Those that liken Modi to Shinjo Abe, Lee Kwan Yew and Deng Xiaoping are wrong. Those who draw parallels between Margret Thatcher and Modi are also wrong. For all of the above, instrumental reason, as the logic of rational capital accumulation, drove them to power and success. For Modi, instrumental reason and totalitarian state power are based on a fascist myth: that of ‘Hindu supremacy’. And fascist myth mixed with a capitalism in crisis leads not merely to riots, but war. That is why we are saying that a new stage has been reached in India: the stage of total counterrevolution against democracy. What is happening in west Asia could now also happen in south Asia.
The seeds sown by Congress have borne the Modi fruit. The sins of the Congress parent are now visited upon its children.
Notes
1. The Times of India May 17, 2014.
3. See S Gatade Godse’s children: Hindutva terror in India New Delhi 2011.
4. W Benjamin The origin of German tragic drama London 2009.
5. The classical handbook of Indian fascism, We, or our nation defined, had a 1939 forward by a Congress leader, MS Aney. See S Islam Golwalkar’s We, or our nation defined: a critique with the full text of the book New Delhi 2006, p14.
9. VD Savarkar Hindutva New Delhi 1989, p113.
10. S Islam Golwalkar’s We, or our nation defined: a critique with the full text of the book New Delhi 2006, p21.
11. MS Aney, Foreword to S Islam Golwalkar’s We, or our nation defined: a critique with the full text of the book New Delhi 2006, pXX.
12. D Upadhyaya, presidential address, Calicut session of Jan Sangh, December 1967.
13. S Sarkar, ‘The fascism of the Sangh Parivar’ in J Banaji (ed) Fascism: essays on Europe and India Gurgaon 2013, p136.
14. ‘Development with brutality’ in Economic and Political Weekly Vol XLVI, No42, October 15 2013.
15. J Habermas The new conservatism: cultural criticism and the historian’s debate Oxford 1989, p51.
17. W Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ in H Zohn (translator) Illuminations Glasgow 1979, p226.
18. J Habermas The new conservatism: cultural criticism and the historian’s debate Oxford 1989, pp53-54.