The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar
by Sumit Sarkar
(This article was written in early 1993, in the aftermath of the Demolition
of Babri Masjid at ayodhya on December 6, 1992)
Fascism in contemporary Indian as distinct from the European historical context had
appeared till the other day a mere epithet, worn out by overmuch, indiscriminate
use, signifying little more than particular blatant acts of authoritarian repression
or reactionary violence. With the 6th of December and its aftermath, elements frighteningly
evocative of its totality of horror stalk our streets, obtain connivance and implicit
sustenance from within the highest corridors of power, emerge from everyday conversations
with relatives, colleagues, friends of yesterday. Not that exact parallels can be
found, in most part India 1992-93 remains very different from the Germany of 60 years
back. Yet a closer look at the pattern of affinities and differences may help to
highlight certain crucial features - most notably, the ways in which the implications
of the current all-out offensive of the Sangh Parivar go far beyond even the obvious
and terrifying fact that the subcontinent has just witnessed the most widespread
round of communal violence since the Partition years. The drive for Hindu Rashtra
has put in jeopardy the entire secular and democratic foundations of our republic.
An old warning of Nehru sounds particularly appropriate today. Muslim communalism
is in its nature as bad as Hindu communalism, and may even be stronger among Muslims
than its counterpart within the majority community. "But Muslim communalism
cannot dominate Indian society and introduce fascism. That only Hindu communalism
can" (quoted in Frontline, January 1, 1993). Probing the fascist analogy, then,
many contribute towards a greater understanding of the dangers that confront us today.
Just occasionally, it may provide us also with what is most needed, and is in woefully
short supply: resources of hope.
Fascism had come to power in Italy and Germany through a combination of street violence
(carefully orchestrated from above but still undeniable with great mass support),
deep infiltration into the police, bureaucracy and army, and the connivance of 'centrist'
political leaders. Crude violations of laws and constitutional norms and consequently
had alternated in Fascist and Nazi behaviours with loud protestations of respect
for legality. It is not always remembered, for instance, that Hitler had become chancellor
on January 30, 1933 in an entirely constitutional manner, as leader of the largest
party in the Reichstag, at the invitation of President Hindenburg. He repeatedly
asserted his party's respect for legality throughout the next month - but meanwhile
Goering Nazified the Berlin police, organised street encounters in which more than
50 anti-fascists were murdered, and set the scene for the notorious Reichstag fire,
after which first the communists, and then all opposition political panics and trade
unions were quickly destroyed.
There is much, surely that is ominously reminiscent here. A mosque is systematically
reduced to rubble over five long hours, in total violation of a direct Supreme Court
order and repeated assurances given by the leading opposition party and its allies,
and the central government does not lift its little finger. Countrywide riots follow;
marked by blatant police partiality, with the guardians of the law not unoften turning
rioters themselves. And then come strange political and judicial manoeuvres that
in effect have allowed the land-grabbing vandals to build a temporary 'temple' complete
with darshan, where curfew exists for Muslim and not for Hindus, and which suddenly
is not a 'disputed structure' unlike the 462-year-old monument it has displaced,
but something worthy of protection. Meanwhile the BJP alternates between an occasional
apology and much more frequent aggressive justification, and VHP leaders add the
Delhi Jumma Masjid to Varanasi and Mathura, and openly denounce the Indian Constitution
as anti-Hindu.
Expanding Target Area
It is this wider dimension, in which the obvious, classically communal Muslim target
area steadily expands, and efforts intensify to terrorise wider and wider circles
of potential dissent that perhaps requires a little additional emphasis. The Hitler
analogy is once again, appropriate: Jew and communist had quickly expanded to cover
social-democrats, liberals, Catholics, everyone who dared to think with any independence
- even, by June 1934, a number of Nazis, massacred in the 'night of the long knives'.
The BJP turn towards open terror had begun with two incidents in Madhya Pradesh unconnected
with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement -the murder of Shankar Guha Niyogi, labour leader
of unusual initiative and originality, in autumn 1991, and the public humiliation
recently of B D Sharma, distinguished progressive retired civil servant. (The Shiv
Sena of Maharashtra had shown the way even earlier, of course, smashing through street
terror the once formidable Red Flat Unions of Bombay in the 1970s). The beating-up
of journalists on December 6 is thus not an aberration, but part of a broader emerging
pattern. The forces of Hindutva have assiduously cultivated the press, with great
success till recently, but fascists always like to combine persuasion with the occasional
big stick.
Certain like-reported developments in Delhi acquire relevance here, indicating once
again the typical combination of street violence with administrative collusion even
in a city where the December riots were relatively localised and minor(1), right
next to a central government which is said to have banned the RSS, the VHP, and the
Bajrang Dal. Peace activists trying to do things as innocuous as singing songs, distributing
leaflets calling for harmony: and staging street plays have been repeatedly attacked:
the police come a little later, ignore the RSS-Bajrang Dal elements supposedly under
a ban, but arrest and harass anti-communal groups. Even a peace march led by men
as distinguished as P N Haksar and Habib Tanvir was obstructed by the police, while
a Delhi University student in an anti-communal group whose name begins with Ram was
slapped by a Policeman who had arrested him: a man with such a name, he was told,
should not be doing such things.
The Bajrang Dal thugs often openly declare that anyone who criticises the destruction
of Babri Masjid will have to go to Pakistan, while in the selectively curfew-bound
Muslim Pockets of Seelampur in east Delhi, the police had rounded up all Muslim men
in some areas, beaten them up unless they agreed to say Jai Shri Ram, and even pulled
out the beard of a Muslim gentleman.
Myths As Common Sense
What is making all this possible is evidently a wide, though very far from universal,
degree of consent, where large numbers may keep away from communal riots, maybe,
even sincerely condemn them, and yet be participants in a kind of communal consensus
in which a whole series of assumptions and myths have turned into common sense. Far
from being a spontaneous or ' natural' product of popular will expressing a legitimate
'Hindu hurt', however, as the organised forces of Hindutva sedulously propagate,
this consent is something constructed and carefully nurtured, a product of more than
60 years of strenuous and patient effort. The RSS, founded way back in 1925, and
spawning from 1950s a whole series of affiliates manned at crucial levels by its
cadres (among which the Jan Sangh/BJP and the VHP have been the most important),
concentrated for many years on unostentatious, slow, 'cultural' work. Shakhas combined
physical training of young men with indoctrination through bauddhik sessions, a chain
of schools was built up, ideas were disseminated through personal contact and conversation,
and even a very popular Hindu comic series was brought out (the Amar Chitra Katha
extolling Hindu mythical or historical figures). It was for long, almost, a Gramscian
process of building up hegemony through molecular permeation. Then, in the early
and middle 1980s, came the efforts of Indira and Rajiv to play the ' Hindu card',
communalising the state apparatus on an unprecedented scale through the anti-Sikh
pogrom of 1984 and the subsequent cover-up of the guilty, and further eroding the
rule of law through rampant corruption. All this directly prepared the ground for
the Ram Janmabhoomi blitzkrieg of the Sangh Parivar, now spearheaded by the VHP.
It must not be forgotten that it was the Congress government that updated the Ramayana
epic into a pseudo-nationalist TV serial, and allowed access in 1986 to the idols
installed inside the Babri Masjid by stealth and administrative collusion in December
1949, under an earlier Congress regime. The Sangh Parivar's war of position now gave
place to a spectacular war of movement, pressing into service the latest in advertising
and audio-visual techniques on a scale and with resources never before seen on the
subcontinent. Hitler, by the way, had also been a bit of a pioneer in these matters,
fully realising the importance of spoken propaganda through the then relatively new
techniques of the loudspeaker and the radio.(2)
Unlike Fascism, then, which came to power in Italy and Germany within a decade or
less of its emergence as a political movement, Hindutva has had a long gestation
period. This, no doubt, has given it added strength and stability, time to get internalised
into common sense. But there is an element of hope here, too, for despite the tremendous
effort spread across decades the conquest of hearts and minds remains far from complete.
It needs to be recalled that around four out of five Indians voted against the BJP
even in 1991 (its all-India percentage was 21.9) - and if that had been a vote about
Ram, the UP victory was at best some kind of a mandate for a Ram temple, not for
the destruction of the Masjid. The real base of the Sangh Parivar remains the predominantly
upper-caste trader-professional petite bourgeoisie of the cities and small towns
in the Hindi heartland, with developing connections perhaps with upwardly-mobile
landholding groups in the countryside. Extensions beyond this remain unstable, as
the panic evoked by Mandal and the Bihar example seem to indicate - and the whole
bloated structure of today's Hindutva requires for sustenance constant excitement,
a high pitch of hysteria, the stimulus of communal violence. Hence perhaps the gamble
of sacrificing the BJP ministries, which could have got discredited and shown up
as little different, if not worse, from Congress regimes by any long period of normal
governance.
An early perceptive analysis of Fascism had defined it as "not only an instrument
at the service of big business, but at the same time a mystical upheaval of the ...petite
bourgeoisie"(3). That a 'mystical upheaval' has happened around the slogan of
Ram is undeniable, and its lavish orchestration indicates an evident abundance of
funds. But the specific linkages of Fascism with capitalist interests have remained
a controversial issue even for Europe, and most historians have found it necessary
to make distinctions between various kinds of capital as well as across countries.
Relatively underdeveloped Italy, for instance, differed quite fundamentally from
highly industrialised Germany. Controversies exist also as to whether capitalist
interests were linked to Fascism by positive intention, as the term 'instrument'
suggests, or more through accommodation to circumstances."(4) The Indian situation
is significantly different above all because of the absence of any major threat to
propertied interests from organised labour or apparently impending socialist revolution.
The scale and nature of the economic crisis is also not quite comparable. In post-Depression
Germany, Nazism arguably could have appeared to many business groups "as the
last available means of preserving the capitalist system" (5), while Fascism
in Italy had had a developmental, if anti-popular, 'passive revolution' aspect that
Gramsci realistically recognised even from within a Fascist prison. Neither feature
is particularly noticeable so far in India, where Narasimha Rao has been carrying
through wide-ranging changes in economic policy with a degree of determination and
skill conspicuously absent in his handling of Ayodhya. The Jan Sangh and the BJP
have been advocating such a repudiation of the Nehruvian legacy of self-reliance
and planning for many years, but the forces of Hindutva, in whose propaganda and
activity matters economic so far have occupied only a minor place, can claim little
'credit' for actually bringing about the shift. The Indian business groups that support
Manmohan Singh's New Economic Policy (not necessarily the entire class) might still
prefer a tougher anti-labour line under a Hindu Right regime no longer dependent
even marginally on Left votes in parliament. Conversely, however, if the fascistic
thrust of Hindutva, even now, encounters determined resistance, the traditional centrist
option might appear more reliable and attractive for bourgeoisie groups, precisely
because there is much less 'need' for Fascism in the interests of capitalist survival
and profit than in inter-War Italy and Germany.
Suicidal Wobbling
It is in this context that the wobbling - and worse - of the Congress, and particularly
of the Prime Minister, before and after December 6 appears so disastrous, indeed
suicidal, even from the point of view of narrow party interests. There did exist
a possibility of retrieval just after the sixth. The much-quoted Vajpayee interview
was an indication that the BJP for a few days had been forced into the defensive.
But Narasimha Rao, to quote a rather apt comment by a journalist, then proceeded
"to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory". Sporadic, largely unimplemented,
obviously halfhearted measurers of repression, not backed up by any political campaign
by the Congress, have by now been succeeded by what appears to be yet another attempt
to compete with the BJP for the 'Hindu card'. Principles apart, elementary real politick
suggests that the more determined and consistent always win that kind of game. The
shift in the attitude of the major Delhi-based dailies from virtually total condemnation
of the BJP just after December 6 to much more ambiguous alignments in recent days
might in this context be a straw in the wind of a most dangerous kind.
That leaders who subjectively no doubt demarcate themselves from the BJP, their principle
political rival, can still stoop to such levels of opportunism indicates the degree
of spread of what I have tried to argue lies at the heart of our present tragedy:
a communalised common sense produced through sustained effort. Analysis-cum-critique
of the varied components of this common sense is clearly vital for any effective
resistance to what, with many qualifications, may still be called the Indian variety
of fascism.
Fascist ideology in Europe had combined already quite widespread crudely nationalist,
racist, and in Germany anti-Semitic, prejudices with fragments from much more sophisticated
philosophies. That it had owed something to a general tun-of-the century move away
from what were to be the sterile rigidities of Enlightenment rationalism is not a
fact without some relevance today, for not similar ideas have become current intellectual
coin in the west, and by extension they have started to influence Indian academic
life. The ideologists of the Sangh Parivar (a Girilal Jain or a Swapan Dasgupta apart)
may themselves be still largely unaware of the varied possibilities of post-modernism:
that certain current academic fashions can reduce the resistance of intellectuals
to the ideas of Hindutva has already become evident. The "critique of colonial
discourse" inspired by Said's Orientalism, for instance, has stimulated forms
of indigenism not too easy to distinguish from the standard Sangh Parivar argument,
going back to Savarkar, that Hindutva is superior to Islam and Christianity (and,
by extension, to creations of the modern west like science, democracy or Marxism)
because of its allegedly unique indigenous roots. An uncritical cult of the 'popular'
or 'subaltern', particularly when combined with the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism
as irremediably tainted in all its forms by colonial power-knowledge, can lead even
radical historians down strange paths (6). It is not unimportant, therefore, to recall
that Giovanni Gentile had defined Fascism as a "revolt against positivism",
or that Mussolini in 1933 had condemned the "movement of the 18th century visionaries
and Encyclopaedists" along with "technological" conceptions of progress.
Ominously relevant, too, is another peroration of the Italian dictator, in July 1934,
where he called for an end to "intellectualising and of those sterile intellectuals
who are a threat to the nation". Hitler at the Nuremberg Nazi Congress next
year similarly exalted the "heart", the "faith" the "inner
voice" of the German volk over "hair-splitting intelligence." (7)
'Enemy' Image
This, however, has been a bit of an aside: far more central to Hindutva as a mass
phenomenon (or for that matter to Fascism) is the development of a powerful and extendable
enemy image through appropriating stray elements from past prejudices, combining
them with new ones skillfully dressed up as old verities, and broadcasting the resultant
compound through the most up-to-date media techniques. The Muslim here becomes the
near-exact equivalent of the Jew - or the Black (more generally, immigrants felt
to be inferior for one or another reason) in contemporary White racism. The Muslim
in India, like the Jew in Nazi propaganda, is unduly privileged - a charge even more
absurd here than it was in Germany, where the Jews had been fairly prominent in intellectual,
professional and business circles. In post-Independence India, Muslims in contrast
are grossly underrepresented at elite levels, however defined. The alleged privileges,
in the second place, are the product of ' appeasement' of Muslims by 'pseudo-secularist',
and so very quickly the communal target starts broadening itself, and Mulayam Singh
Yadav, to take one example among many, becomes a ' mulla'. The stock examples of
' appeasement' in recent days have been the destruction of temples in Kashmir, allegedly
never condemned by the 'pseudo-secularists', and Muslim personal law permitting polygamy.
Desecration must be condemned, whether by Muslims or by Hindus, but it is a strange
condemnation that sues it to justify or condone the wanton desecration of December
6. The destruction of numerous Muslim religious places in riots (at Bhagalpur, for
instance) is of course never mentioned. The Kashmir temples issue, incidentally,
became very prominent in conversation just after the destruction of the Babri Masjid,
indicating a concerted whisper campaign as well as, possibly, an element of guilt
suppressed through verbal excess. The oft-repeated argument that Muslims must repent
or atone for their acts of past or present aggression has meanwhile acquired a strange
flavour in the context of some current reports from Bombay. Muslims offering to rebuild
destroyed temples have been spurned by Shiv Sena, and in Dharavi a group of them
who were actually rebuilding one have just been stabbed (Pioneer, January 9).
On the Muslim Personal Law issue, the Sangh Parivar once again takes full advantage
of Rajiv Gandhi's misdeeds, when he tried to counterbalance the opening of the locks
of Ayodhya by the Muslim Women's Bill. The Muslim fundamentalist side of the appeasement
(from which the only real and direct sufferers were Muslim women) is always mentioned,
never the simultaneous appeasement of Hindu communalism. The real importance of the
question, however, is in the light it can throw on the presuppositions, reminiscent
of racism, of the Hindutva ideology. The continuation of the legal right of polygamy
among Muslims is constantly linked up to assertions that Muslims consequently breed
faster: "hum panch hamare pachis", as the Delhi VHP leader (currently BJP
MP) B L Sharma elegantly described it in an interview he gave to a group of us in
April 1991. The Report on the Status of Women in India (1975), however, had found
the rate of polygamy actually higher among Hindus than Muslims (5.06 per cent as
against 4.31 per cent). The Muslims, then, become dangerous simply by going through
the basic biological processes of birth, procreation - and even death, for we were
told during an investigation of the 1991 Nizamuddin riots in New Delhi that a dead
Muslim always grabs a bit of land by burial, unlike the self-effacing cremated Hindu.
Racist attitudes, finally, are neatly encapsulated in the very recent coinage of
the formula ' Babar Ki Auladí. Alleged descent from Babar is sufficient to damn,
no overt misdeed is really required...just as once in fanatical Christian circles
all Jews stood condemned because of what their ancestors had supposedly done at the
time of the crucification of Christ.
Such is Hindutva ideology at its crudest, engaged in the direct justification of
communal violence. The slightly 'softer' or more insidious levels should also be
considered, for these can indicate almost as clearly the fascistic implications of
Hindu Rashtra. Fascism has often tried to appropriate elements, or at least terms,
from ideals considered laudable and progressive in the society it sought to conquer:
thus the Nazis claimed to be not only nationalist- in post-Versailles Germany, but
also, keeping in mind the very strong working class political presence in the Weimar
Republic, ësocialist' and representative of 'labour'. The Sangh Parivar, similarly,
tries to establish its claim to be truly and uniquely 'national' by a ëdemocratic'
argument: Hindu interests should prevail always in India, and maybe, it should at
some stage be declared a Hindu Rashtra, for Hindus after all are the majority, by
Census reckoning 85 per cent of the population. But democracy logically must connote
two other features in addition to rule of majority: protection of rights of minority
ways of life and opinions, and, even more crucially, the legal possibility that the
political minority of today can win electoral majority in the future and thus peacefully
change the government. Otherwise it becomes difficult to deny the status of democracy
to the one-party regimes of Hitler, Mussolini (or Stalin), for all of them did go
in for occasional elections of a single-list, plebiscitary type, and won majorities
which may not have been entirely rigged. Democratic theory, in other words, stands
in total contradiction of any notion of permanent majorities-but such, by Sangh Parivar
definition, would be the position of the party that claims to speak uniquely for
all Hindus; the BJP. Inherent in that claim is a second assertion, equally reminiscent
of Fascism: only s/he is a true Hindu who accepts the leadership of RSS-BJP-VHP combine.
Any dissent runs the risk of being branded as pseudo-secular appeasement. So had
Hitler and the Nazis arrogated to themselves the right to speak for all ' pure' Germans,
along with the power to decide who are racially pure.
What the triumph of Hindutva, 'hard' or 'soft', implies for Muslims and other minority
groups is already obvious enough: a second-class citizenship at best, constant fear
of riots amounting to genocide, a consequent strengthening of the most conservative
and fundamentalist groups within such communities. The near-coincidence in time between
the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the barbarous assault of Professor Mushirul
Hasan does not appear accidental-and the police, interestingly, were strangely absent
or inactive in both cases. The fallout of December 6 has already strengthened Muslim
fundamentalist forces in Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Muslims in India, it needs
to be added, are not an insignificant minority, but 120 million-the biggest in the
world next to Indonesia. The sheer size and diversity of the Indian people make secularism,
democracy and the preservation of national unity more closely inter-dependent than
perhaps anywhere else in the world. The permanent and total alienation the BJP seems
working for can lead to a Lebanon or Yugoslavia on vastly enhanced scale. The Sangh
Parivar certainly has peculiar ways of living up to its much-touted claim to be more
' national;' than anyone else.
Scope For Common Action
One major distinction between the Hindutva of today and European Fascism, particularly
the Nazi variety lies in a very different relationship with established religious
traditions. Nazis sought to ground identity on race, not religion, and called on
youth to build a new civilisation, which could at times sound openly anti-Christian.
The Sangh Parivar, by very definition, has to preach total adherence and deference
towards Hindu traditions even while fundamentally transforming them. That this has
been a source of tremendous strength hardly needs to be stated; just possibly, it
could also be transformed into a weakness given effective counter-strategies. For
Hindutva is really homogenising and changing Hindu beliefs and practices on a truly
colossal scale. The statement of a VHP leader, exulting over the destruction of Muslim
houses near what had been the Babri Masjid, epitomises this transformation: this
was necessary, he said, to make of that area a Vatican. But the vast and enormously
variegated Hindu world has never had what the VHP is trying to make out of Ram and
Ayodhya - a single supreme deity and pilgrimage centre, steam-rolling out of existence
differences of region, sect, caste, gender, class. Even more basic is the effort
to transform what millions of Hindus sincerely believe - with what degree of historical
accuracy does not matter very much in this context - to be a supremely tolerant and
Catholic religion into a terrifying instrument of vandalism, murder, and usurpation
of political power. The traditions of catholicity in our country are deep and themselves
extremely diverse. They range from syncretic, at time radically iconoclastic Bhakti-Sufi
'sants' and 'pirs', for some of whom, in the words of a Baul song, the path seemed
blocked by mandir and masjid, purohit and mulla - to the conservative, yet profoundly
Catholic, Ramakrishna, in whose vision Hindu, Muslim and Christian differed as little
as jal from pani and water. And our thoughts today inevitably go back, time and again,
to another dark January 45 years ago, when a man died, a devout Hindu whose last
words had also evoked Ram, murdered by a youth reared in the culture of the Sangh
Parivar. An ocean separates the Ram of Mahatma Gandhi, conceived of as both Iswara
and Allah, from the Ram in whose name the Babri Masjid has been destroyed.
Secularism Has Many Meanings
What is necessary today is the recognition that secularism can and indeed does have
many meanings, that its wide and varied spectrum can extend from the devoutly religious
to the freethinker-atheist, on a common minimum ground of total rejection of communal
hatred and a theocratic state. This does not mean that non-religious secularists
should engage in a breast-beating exercise for having been ' alienatedí from the
ë mainstream' and suddenly claim to be more 'truly' Hindu or Muslim than the VHP
or the Muslim fundamentalist (8). It involves, rather, an awareness that even profound
differences need not rule out common action in defense of basic human values, that,
as Trotsky had once said while pleading for a united front against Fascism, it is
possible to "march separately, but strike together". (9)
That the Hindutva forces are afraid of such unity is indicated by their persistent
efforts to brand secularism and indeed all anti-communal attitudes as necessarily
somehow anti-Hindu. Simultaneously they try to conflate secularism uniquely with
the policies of the 'Nehruvian' state, thus making it bear the burden of the many
sins of opportunism, excessive and bureaucratic centralisation and repression of
which that state has been often guilty. Here, once again, current intellectual tendencies
have provided respectability to such critiques, for it is often assumed nowadays
that secularism was a creation of the now much-abused Enlightenment rationalism and
scepticism, brought into India in the baggage of colonial discourse, and subsequently
embodied in the repressive nation-states that have emerged on the western pattern.
Actually, even in Europe, the roots of secularism go back at least another 200 years,
to the times of the religious wars ('communal riots', we might legitimately call
them) sparked off by the Reformation. The first advocates of toleration based on
separation of church from state were not rationalist freethinkers, but Anabaptists
passionately devoted to their own brand of Christianity, who still believed that
coercion, persecution and any kind of compulsory state religion was contrary to true
faith.
In India, as in other countries with multiple religious traditions, the need and
therefore the bases of co-existence are broader and deeper than the teachings of
the vast majority of holy men of all creeds or the policies of many kings, among
whom Akbar is only the best remembered. They have been grounded in the necessities
of daily existence itself, which might occasionally produce conflict, but also tend
towards the restoration of interdependence - if allowed to do so by organised communal
forces, which means less and less often nowadays (10). And if communalism shatters
everyday existence, it simultaneously halts and turns back all efforts to improve
the condition of living through striving to reduce exploitation and want. It does
so in two fundamental ways: by shattering the unity and struggle of toilers and all
the subordinate groups, and fostering, within the rigid community boundaries it erects,
tendencies towards ruthless homogenisation. Such homogenisation invariably helps
the groups and interests occupying positions of power - in the context of Hindu communalism,
most obviously, the high caste elite. It is noteworthy how every move towards implementing
even the fairly limited measures towards social justice promised by the Mandal recommendations
are being, met by a Hindutva offensive. The noticeable silences so far about specific
socio-economic issues in the programmes and activities of Hindutva (no effort has
been made to spell out the ' roti' concomitant of Ram, and that slogan itself seems
forgotten) can be made into a space for effective secular intervention - provided,
however, the habit of segregating the 'economic' and 'political' from the 'cultural'
or 'ideological', fairly deep-rooted in Indian Left traditions, is abandoned. Anti-communal
campaigns cannot be left to seminars or middle-class cultural programmes alone, important
though these are, nor can everyday economic struggles afford to skirt questions of
religion, communalism and ideology in the facile hope that material issues and 'real'
class identities will automatically assert themselves.
Thinking back about the Fascist era in Europe may seem a grim and depressing exercise,
now that chauvinist forces are rearing their heads virtually everywhere. But the
memories of the 1930s and early 40s are not just of Storm Troopers, Holocaust, concentration
camps, and the nor unrelated deformations that have culminated today in the shattering
of the world's first socialist experiment. They include the experiences of united,
and in their time victorious, anti-fascist struggle, popular fronts, a Barcelona
very different from the one seen on TV last year, the heroism of Stalingrad and not
just Stalinist terror. The time may have come to draw sustenance once again from
the slogan of the defenders of Republican Spain: Fascism shall not pass.
Notes
1. In terms, of course, of the high standards set in Kanpur, Bhopal, Surat, Bombay
and a host of other towns in a country where 213 places were under curfew at one
point after December 6, affecting 97 million people. Cry The Beloved Country
(People's Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi, December 1992).
2. For a more detailed account of the evolution of the Sangh Parivar, see
Tapan Basu, Pradip Dutta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen, Khaki
Shorts and Saffron Flags: The Politics of the Hindu Right (Orient Longman, Delhi
1993).
3. Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (1936; New York, 1974), p. 10.
4. Guerin, op cit.; Alan S Milward, 'Fascism and the Economy' in Walter Laqueur (ed.
Fascism: A Reader's Guide (1976: Penguin, 1979).
5. Milward, op.cit, p.414.
6. Thus Gautam Bhadra, in an interview given to a Bengali journal in early 1991,
managed to find elements of laudable subaltern assertion of identity in the first
kar seva movement and even in the speeches of Sadhvi Rithambara. Dipesh Chakrabarti,
another member of the Subaltern Studies editorial team, in a more recent article
has argued that we need to search for creative elements in everything condemned by
the "His Master's Voice" of the post-Enlightenment West. This, for him,
explicitly includes Marx just as much as Macaulay (Naiya, February 1991:Baromas,
October 1992.
7. Zeev Sternhell, 'Fascist Ideology' in Laqueur, op cit., p 334 (the quotation
from Gentile); Guerin, op cit., pp 65, 168-69, 171.
8. They are less alienated, surely, from Indian culture or elementary human values
than those young men of Surat who, in the name of Hindutva, videotaped their gang-rape
of Muslim women. The tape, I have been told, is being avidly watched at evening parties
in some affluent Bombay homes.
9. Leon Trotsky, 'For a Workers' United Front against Fascism' (December 1931) in
The Struggle against Fascism in Germany (Penguin, 1975, p. 106)
10. The Frontline of January 15, 1993, pp 60-81, carries some moving reports
of the striving of ordinary people to restore the torn fabrics of inter-community
mutual dependence even after the post-December 6 riots.
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