Shadow of fascism
The Modi years have witnessed an authoritarian imposition upon society
by an increasingly centralised state, the setting up of one segment of
society against another and the promotion of a cult of hatred, behind
which the state acts directly in corporate interests.
In its attack on civil liberties, its restructuring
of the state to effect an acute centralisation of power, and its
pervasive purveyance of fear, the Narendra Modi years resemble Indira
Gandhi’s Emergency. But the resemblance stops there. In fact, the two
differ fundamentally in several ways.
First,
there were no lynch mobs or street thugs terrorising people and giving
them lessons in “nationalism” during the Emergency. It was only the
state that repressed people then; now we have gangs of Hindutva
hoodlums, who force critics of the government to apologise for their
“misdemeanours”, with the additional threat of arrests still hanging
over these intimidated critics. One cannot easily forget the sickening
sight of a professor being to made to ask for forgiveness on bended
knees for a Facebook post that was critical of the government.
A new nationalism
Second,
unlike the Emergency, the current repression invokes an ideology, that
of “nationalism”, interpreted as being synonymous with Hindutva but
cashing in opportunistically on the prestige of India’s anti-colonial
nationalism despite having nothing in common with it. As a result, while
Indira Gandhi’s repression had the effect (no doubt unwanted by her) of
making her critics appear honourable, the current repression
deliberately portrays them as dishonourable, as “enemies of the people”.
This vilification is further magnified when state agencies are used to
accuse these opponents of “corruption” and “wrongdoings” of various
kinds; the idea is to destroy their moral standing before the people.
The
third difference is the government’s capturing of the media. During the
Emergency, the print media was subject to pre-censorship; papers would
appear with vast spaces inked out, because of which they actually gained
people’s respect. Now the media, barring a few honourable exceptions
which, too, may not remain so for long, are totally in the Hindutva
camp, and the task of destroying the moral stature of the opponents is
facilitated because of the media’s complicity in it.
The
media’s changed role, in turn, is linked to the fourth difference
between then and now: the Modi government is entirely in cahoots with
corporate interests, while the Indira Gandhi regime maintained its
difference with the corporates and even presented a “progressive”
anti-corporate image. Indeed, no government in post-independence India
has been as close to the corporates as the Modi government, a point
exemplified by his travelling in Adani’s aircraft to New Delhi to be
sworn in as Prime Minister. (It is worth recalling, by way of contrast,
that Jawaharlal Nehru, the Hindutva bete noire,
did not have enough funds to visit his wife, Kamala, when she was dying
of tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium and had refused G.D. Birla’s
offer of financial assistance; eventually Nehru himself managed to raise
the money.)
Anti-minorities
The
fifth difference is the Modi government’s thrust against minorities,
especially the hapless Muslim minority. Indira Gandhi’s repression did
not have any specific ethnic or communal or caste target. It was
repression, pure and simple, directed at her opponents and those of her
son Sanjay, who was notorious for his shenanigans. Correspondingly, it
did not have any grandiose projects of rewriting history, of presenting a
narrative vilifying a particular religious community, and of using
state power to thrust this narrative down the throats of even
schoolchildren, inculcating in them a sense of hatred towards fellow
countrymen belonging to a different religion.
The
sixth difference, associated necessarily with this project, is a
promotion of unreason, a prioritisation of faith over rational
discourse, a cultivation of disdain for evidence and even for the
internal consistency of argumentation. This phenomenon has for long
characterised the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, but it has now invaded
official public discourse, with even the Indian Science Congress not in a
position to free itself of this discourse.
The
seventh difference is the destruction of institutions that the Modi
government has initiated, and this is especially true of public
universities and other publicly funded centres of learning. All these
institutions are faced with a “heads I lose, tails you win” situation.
If they cave in to the demands of the government to change their
ambience and curricula, they become intellectually dead anyway since
intellectual survival requires independent critical thinking. But if
they persist with independent critical thinking, then they are starved
of funds and charged with harbouring “anti-national” seditious elements,
as has happened to Jawaharlal Nehru University. The fact that some of
the finest institutions in the country, from JNU to the University of
Hyderabad to the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, to the
Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research, have been struggling for breath is symptomatic of our times.
Nothing like this has happened before; no government in the past has
ever shown such disdain for thought.
Repression
These
differences between the Emergency years and the Modi years can be
summed up as follows. The Emergency was an authoritarian imposition by
the state, that had got extremely centralised by then, upon society or
upon the people at large; it was no doubt a fallout of the contradiction
between the logic of capitalist development and a democratic polity,
but it did not represent direct corporate rule. The Modi years have
witnessed not just an authoritarian imposition upon society by the
state, that has also got extremely centralised; they have witnessed in
addition a setting up of one segment of society against another and the
promotion of a cult of hatred, behind which the state acts directly in
corporate interests. The difference in a word is between
authoritarianism and fascism. The statistics of repression, such as the
number of persons jailed, were worse during the Emergency. But the
potential for repression being built up now is much greater, more
far-reaching.
Every single one of the
characteristics mentioned above as being specific to the Modi years is
in fact a characteristic of fascism: the rampaging mobs, the “fusion of
corporate and state power” (supposed to have been Benito Mussolini’s
definition of fascism), the targeting of a hapless minority, the
promotion of unreason, the destruction of universities, and so on. To
say this does not mean that we shall have a re-enactment of the 1930s.
We have fascist elements in power but not yet a fascist state, and
today’s context being different from the 1930s, we are unlikely to even
have one.
To be sure, as in the 1930s, the
current tendency towards fascism, which is not just an Indian
phenomenon but a global one, arises from the crisis afflicting
capitalism. Such a crisis brings with it a threat to the hegemony of the
corporate-financial oligarchy, which therefore looks for an additional
prop to retain its hegemony, one that can shift the popular discourse
away from the flaws of the system to the danger supposedly posed by the
“other”, some hapless minority that can be made the focus of anger.
Corporate capital in such situations picks up some “supremacist” fringe
group (such groups spewing hatred against a minority exist in most
modern societies) and pushes it centre stage through massive financial
backing: what the renowned Polish economist Michal Kalecki had called a
“partnership of big business with fascist upstarts” comes into being.
This
is what has happened in India, too, with the promise of neoliberal
capitalism waning because of the prolonged stagnation that the world
economy has entered into after 2008; Modi has been instrumental in
effecting this “partnership” between big business and the Hindutva
crowd, whence his current political importance.
There
is, however, a basic difference between the 1930s and now, which
consists in the fact that the corporate-financial oligarchy in the
capitalist countries then was nation-based and engaged in acute rivalry
with similar oligarchies of other nations; the apotheosis of militarism
which is necessarily associated with fascism inevitably led to war in
that situation.
This had two implications:
one was that military spending in preparation for war, financed mainly
by government borrowing, got the fascist countries quickly out of the
Great Depression and its associated mass unemployment (Japan was the
first to recover, in 1931, followed by Germany, in 1933); there was even
a brief interregnum, therefore, between the recovery from the
Depression and the devastation unleashed by war when the fascist
governments actually became quite popular for having overcome
unemployment. The second implication was that fascism also burned itself
in the process, through the war. The cost extracted for this extinction
was, no doubt, terrible, but it did mean the extinction of fascism.
Today,
by contrast, we do not find rival corporate-financial oligarchies
engaged in intense rivalry. All of them are integrated into a structure
of globalised capital, which does not want the world broken up into
separate “economic territories” through war; it would rather have a
world that remains open for capital, especially financial, flows. This
does not rule out wars, but wars today are directed by leading powers
against those states that are either not under the hegemony of
globalised finance capital or are challenging it.
Likewise,
since finance capital dislikes fiscal deficits, and since the writ of
globalised finance capital must run against any nation state (otherwise
it would quit that country’s shores, causing an acute financial crisis),
increased government spending, even military spending, cannot be
financed by a fiscal deficit. Nor can it be financed by taxes on
capitalists, which finance capital would obviously oppose. But these are
the only means of financing government expenditure that can lead to an
increase in employment (for government spending financed by taxes on
workers who consume most of their incomes anyway does not add to
aggregate demand). Contemporary fascism, therefore, is incapable of
making any difference to the state of unemployment under neoliberal
capitalism. And being corporate-financed, it cannot challenge neoliberal
capitalism either.
This means both that
it cannot acquire political legitimacy by improving the material
conditions of life of the working people, and at the same time, it is
not going to extinguish itself through war as fascism in the earlier era
had done. It cannot also do away altogether with the institution of
parliamentary elections because of the precious legitimacy that such
elections provide to the hegemony of globalised finance. (It is
significant that the coups we are witnessing these days against
progressive regimes in Latin America that have dared to break away from
neoliberal policies are parliamentary coups, which are undertaken in the
name of preserving democracy, unlike the Central Intelligence
Agency-sponsored coups of an earlier era, such those that toppled Iran’s
Mossadegh or Guatemala’s Arbenz or Chile’s Allende).
It
is in this context that the following denouement becomes a distinct
possibility. Notwithstanding unwarranted interference with the electoral
process, notwithstanding the discourse shift away from issues of
material life to jingoistic nationalism which occasional terrorist
actions make possible (there is a dialectic here between terrorism and
the fascist elements in state power, each, objectively, serving to
strengthen the other), the Modi government could lose the forthcoming
Lok Sabha election. But the government that follows, if it does not
break away from the neoliberal paradigm to provide succour to the
peasantry and other segments of the working people, will also lose its
popular support after sometime, which will once again enable the fascist
elements to come back to power in a subsequent election.
Fascification of society
We
may thus have oscillations with regard to government formation, with
the fascist elements never getting extinguished, but on the contrary
enforcing a gradual fascification of the society and the polity through
such oscillations. The way, for instance, that the Congress government
that has succeeded the Bharatiya Janata Party in Madhya Pradesh is
emulating the latter in cashing in on the appeal of Hindutva is a
pointer to this phenomenon of a gradual fascification of society through
oscillations with regard to government formation.
We
could, in short, witness a fascification of society over time, under
pressure from the fascist elements who continue to remain strong whether
or not they are actually in power. This would be a case of
fascification, without a fascist state actually being imposed on society
in the classical fashion of the 1930s, a case of “permanent fascism”
unless the conjuncture that gives rise to fascism is itself eliminated.
This
conjuncture is one of neoliberalism in crisis. To counter fascification
effectively in India, it is necessary to go beyond the current regime
of neoliberal capitalism that has reached a dead end and has enveloped
the world in a crisis, from which even Donald Trump sees no way out for
the United States except by imposing trade protection (which amounts to a
certain negation of neoliberalism). A step towards such a transcendence
of the current neoliberal capitalism would be the formulation of a
programme of action that brings about an immediate improvement in the
material conditions of life of the working people.
To
say all this is not to underestimate the importance of ensuring the
defeat of the Hindutva forces in the coming election and the importance
of unity among all the secular forces to achieve this. But while that is
a first step, rolling back the fascification of our society and polity
would require a lot more than that; it would require above all a
programme that provides relief to the people from the depredations of
neoliberal capitalism. Only if such relief is provided (and appropriate
measures to sustain it are made to follow) can we succeed in overcoming
the fascistic legacy of the Modi years.
