In the Era of the Neo-Fascist, Neo-liberal Coalition: Narendra Modi’s Intellectual Brigade (Sumanta Banerjee)

The Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - L No. 3, January 17, 2015


by Sumanta Banerjee


In a peculiar re-enactment of the fascist past, sections of the Indian intellectual community are displaying a horrifying moral ambiguity in their slow drift into a system that typifi es a dangerous and opportunist liaison between the forces of unrestrained market economy (thriving under the global order of neo-liberalism) and unabated religious nationalist authoritarianism (consolidating itself under the neo-fascist canopy of the Sangh Parivar).


The betrayal of intellectuals…is a dangerous symptom of our age.

– Rabindranath Tagore to Yone Noguchi, 1938.1

Fascism needs – and seduces – both lumpens and intellectuals. While it recruits its foot soldiers from the former to suppress protest and dissent in domestic society, it allures members from the latter to sashay down the catwalk of world culture and academia to help it gain legitimacy abroad. The best model of this dual role of fascism was set by Germany, Italy and Japan (which came together as the Axis Power during the second world war). All through the 1920-30 period, the fascists consolidated power in their respective states through a multipronged strategy of cajoling voters by populist promises of prosperity, creating paranoia against minority communities and foreigners, and inspiring atavistic national chauvinist ambitions among their populace.

Yet, at a time when his Brownshirts were killing Jews in Germany, Hitler not only won over the talented film-maker Leni Riefenstahl to make a film on the World Olympics in Berlin in 1936 to boost his image in global politics, but also persuaded the world-known philosopher Martin Heidegger to join the Nazi party and become the rector of Frieburg University. In Italy, after Mussolini captured power in 1922, among many intellectuals, the eminent playwright Luigi Pirandello publicly extended his support to him. The other was the famous poet Gabriele D’Annunzio whom Mussolini made the president of the prestigious Academia d’Italia. During the same period of the rise of fascism, in Japan, the famous poet Yone Noguchi, driven by extreme nationalist sentiments, was seen vociferously supporting his government’s murderous aggression on the Chinese people in 1937 – an act that drew the ire of Tagore.2

Shades from those dark days keep haunting the present – in India today in particular. In a peculiar re-enactment of that past, we find sections of the Indian intellectual community displaying a horrifying moral ambiguity in their slow drift into a system that typifies a dangerous and opportunist liaison between forces of unrestrained market economy (thriving under the global order of neo-liberalism) and unabated religious nationalist authoritarianism (consolidating itself under the neo-fascist canopy of the Sangh Parivar). Narendra Modi is perfecting the art of welding the two forces.

Modi’s Intellectual Squad

Modi has put together a winning political strategy. After walking away with 282 seats even though winning only 31% of the vote, he is now trying to repeat the same public relations and media-hyped campaign that helped him to come to power. The present campaign is marked by populist announcements (e g, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan) and patriotic bombast (e g, repetitive threats of a “fitting reply” to Pakistan’s continuous acts of violation of our borders), accompanied by plans for development (implemented through ordinances like appropriation of land for the corporate sector). This concoction of a brew of populist and patriotic slogans with promises of economic growth has endeared him to large sections of middle class professionals aspiring for a better future – both as individuals and as a nation. The euphoria generated by the campaign has had an impact on the academia and opinion-makers. Modi, therefore, does not have to woo academics. They themselves are all too willing to woo Modi to get coveted posts in universities and research institutions.

Modi’s intellectual brigade consists of a heterogeneous group – ranging from dyed-in-the-wool Sangh Parivar ideologues and half-baked academics on the one hand, to economists, journalists and a few scholars of repute, some wedded to the motto of neo-liberalism, on the other. Among the first bunch, we find characters like Dinanath Batra, a retired schoolteacher who was the general secretary of Vidya Bharati, the school network run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). As the founder of Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti – another wing of the Sangh Parivar – he has been campaigning against any historical research that challenges the Parivar’s monopoly over the interpretation of Hindu religion. He wields enough clout to compel Penguin India to withdraw all copies of the well-known scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, and to impose his own books as part of the education curriculum in schools in BJP-ruled Gujarat. These books of his show a redrawn map of India that includes Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and Bhutan!

To the same bunch of Modi-acolytes belongs the newly appointed chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Yellapragada Sudershan Rao. He was formerly the head of the department of history and tourism management in Kakatiya University in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. He later became a member of the RSS-sponsored Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana, a project aimed at fixing the date of the Mahabharata. Quite predictably, soon after assuming the position of chairperson of ICHR, he announced his decision to sponsor research projects to rewrite ancient history based on the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata.3

But while we may dismiss these intellectual representatives of the Sangh Parivar as having little credibility among serious academic circles, how do we explain the genuflection to Modi by the newly appointed chairman of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), Lokesh Chandra, who is an eminent scholar in his own right? Utterly smitten by the prime minister, he describes Modi as “virtually an incarnation of God (who has made) ...a much more meaningful impact on the lives of the poor than Karl Marx ...(and) supersedes Gandhi when it comes to practical approach.”4 Chandra is not someone to be dismissed as a charlatan – like the many other mountebanks who are joining the Modi brigade. This 87-year old scholar, once close to Soviet academics, has had a formidable reputation of expertise in several languages, and obtained a doctorate in literature and philosophy from the State University of Utrecht in recognition of his contribution to the translation and editing of ancient Vedic texts. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2006. It would be interesting to analyse the psyche of this gentleman and find out why at this age, he has decided to throw in his lot with Modi.

The other intellectuals who have joined the Modi brigade are well-known cheerleaders of neo-liberalism, like the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya (the latter has been made the vice-chairman of the Modi-headed NITI Aayog that is replacing the Planning Commission), retired corporate sector executives-turned-newspaper commentators like Gurcharan Das and Surjit Bhalla; and sections of the corporate-owned national media and provincial vernacular press. Beyond this circle of Modi’s intellectual brigade, there is indeed a wide spectrum of upper and middle class people, including urban liberal-minded intellectuals, who nurse the hope that Modi will provide stability in a country that they find distraught by economic decline, political disorder and moral confusion. Yet, at times they feel disturbed and embarrassed, given their liberal humanist upbringing and education, by the acts of Modi’s patrons in the Sangh Parivar. They suffer from a schizophrenic state of mind – torn between faith in Modi’s promise of efficient governance and economic revival on the one hand, and misgivings about a Hindutva-dominated civil order that creates social disharmony on the other.

Historical Roots of Intellectual Schizophrenia

The schizophrenia stems from the basic tensions between capitalism and fascism, both of which are, ironically enough, bound by an umbilical cord. Fascism was incubated during the 1920-30 period in the troubled underbelly of Germany and Italy, and the western capitalist powers fostered it in their bid to defeat a rising rival political and alternative social force – the Soviet Union. The Munich agreement and Chamberlain’s capitulation to appease the Nazis, leading the Soviet Union to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, are a shameful record of the twists and turns in the relationship among fascism, the Western powers and socialist forces which ended up in a devastating world war. Again in the 1980s, the US capitalist military complex spawned the monster of Islamic fascism (by training the Taliban and patronising Osama bin-Laden to defeatthe Soviet Union in Afghanistan) – a Frankenstein monster that is not only spreading its fangs all over west Asia and the Indian subcontinent, engulfing a large part of the world in a war-like situation today, but is also threatening its parent on the soil of the US.

Thus, the father and son duo – often feuding but more often collaborating – are reappearing today in the modern apparitions of neo-liberalism and neo-fascism. India under Narendra Modi is an interesting example of the tensions between the two in the domestic sphere that are taking place within a global capitalist economic order. Modi is walking a tightrope, trying to balance the domestic atavistic socio-religious dictates of his parental family of the Sangh Parivar, which lent its organisational apparatus to help him capture power on the one hand, and the extraneous dictates of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF)-multinational corporate sector axis which wants to adopt him as a son to reform laws in its favour (supported by Modi’s yuppie followers and the neo-liberal economists) on the other.

Some such measures (like appropriation of land by corporate houses, and liberalisation of rules to allow them to hire and fire workers in their industries at their will) are likely to erode Modi’s base among certain sections of agricultural and industrial workers who had been a part of his vote bank in some parts of India during the last Lok Sabha poll. They may also alienate him from his followers in the Sangh Parivar, like its trade union wing, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (which has already joined Congress and Left trade union organisations in a national protest movement against the Modi government’s labour policies in the coal mining sector) and its other wing known as the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (which is campaigning against Modi’s plan to introduce genetically-modified crops in agriculture, and foreign direct investment in the defence sector). It is yet to be seen whether Modi, while skating on thin ice, manages a smooth sail, or collapses under the melting ice.

Reminding Sen of Tagore

It is this sense of uncertainty that keeps some of our intellectuals on tenterhooks when assessing India’s new prime minister. In this connection, let me end by raising a few questions on certain observations made by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen (in a gathering of VIPs in Delhi), where he paid a (left-handed?) compliment to Narendra Modi for giving “a sense of faith to people that things can happen”, describing it as an “achievement”. Being an honest liberal humanist, he however hastened to qualify it with a one-line rider saying that his “differences over secularism and other things don’t go away”.5 But what did Sen have in mind when he talked about “things can happen”? A lot of things are indeed happening under Modi’s rule – campaigns to convert members of religious minorities to Hinduism, denunciation of inter-religious marriages as Muslim “love jihad”, plans to install Nathuram Godse’s statues in temples, brainwashing of young children into believing that Hindu gods are superior to modern scientists, among many such “achievements”. I expected Sen to denounce openly these happenings, to express his “differences (with Modi) over secularism”.

Among the other things that are happening under the Modi regime are enactment of laws in the name of development, which according to many economists and civil society activists will lead to large-scale displacement of people from their homes and occupations. Are these happenings likely to give the “sense of faith to people”, that Sen talks about? He has however picked upon one particular campaign of Modi’s – Swachh Bharat Abhiyan – as an example of the “achievement”. In his talk, mentioned above, he said: “I was delighted that for several years I was writing about open defecation and how the toilet is needed. This is the second thing I am praising about Modi now …that on top of the Red Fort, he shared many good things.”6 But then, Sen must be knowing that mere announcements from the Red Fort cannot ensure clean public and domestic toilets, without the provision of functional sewers and adequate water supply (which are the responsibilities of the state), and the equally important need to transform public sanitation habits. Beyond the cosmetic demonstrations of litter-cleaning on urban streets, Modi has not yet come out with any concrete programme to address the requirements mentioned above.

Further, the term “faith” itself, which Sen uses in the current discourse, has been reduced, in the present Indian political context, to a personality-centred “faith” in a single leader, Narendra Modi. To remind Sen, Rabindranath Tagore at one time was momentarily persuaded by such a personality-based faith in Mussolini. But he was soon to disabuse his mind of that idea. His final assessment of the Italian dictator is worth recalling, and may be a chastening message to the Modi-acolytes among the present generation of intellectuals and academics:

There have been times when history has played tricks with man and through a combination of accidents has magnified the features of essentially small persons into a parody of greatness.7

Notes

1 Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Vol IV, Part 3.

2 But, even a liberal-humanist personality like Rabindranath Tagore was swayed for a moment by Mussolini, when he visited Italy at his invitation in 1926, where at press interviews he praised the Duce for offering him a library of Italian literature for his Visva-Bharati University. But the poet was soon to make amends, once he came to know about the repression carried out by the fascist dictator. In a letter to C F Andrews (which was published in full by the Manchester Guardian on 5 August 1926), he made his position clear against “the methods and the principles of fascism”, adding that “…it is absurd to imagine that I could ever support a movement which ruthlessly suppresses freedom of expression, enforces observances that are against individual conscience and walks through a bloodstained path of violence and stealthy crime.” Similarly, in 1938 when his friend, the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi came out in support of his government’s aggression on China, Rabindranath sent him a letter saying: “It is sad to think that the passion of collective militarism may on occasion helplessly overwhelm even the creative artist, that genuine intellectual power should be led to offer its dignity and truth to be sacrificed at the shrine of the dark gods of war” (Visva-Bharati Quarterly, ibid).

3 The Telegraph, Calcutta, 3 July 2014.

4 Indian Express, 4 November 2014.

5 Indian Express Adda on 20 December 2014 in New Delhi. Incidentally, a few months ago, on 1 May 2014, according to a PTI news release, Amartya Sen during an interview in Bolpur in West Bengal was reported to have said that Narendra Modi was not a good prime ministerial candidate, and that he would like someone who was more secular as prime minister.

6 Ibid.

7 Op cit, Letter to C F Andrews in Manchester Guardian, 5 August 1926.

[Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban[at]yahoo.com) is a long-time contributor to EPW and is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980).]