India: The rise of fascism in democracy's midst?
India: the rise of fascism in democracy's midst?
WRITTEN BY INDRAJIT ROY
27 June 2020
As Prime Minister Modi completes one year of his second term in office, India appears well on its way towards innovating a fascist democracy.
Modi’s supporters can already point to achievements for his brand of Hindu nationalism. In the past 12 months, India’s parliament, the Lok Sabha, has adopted a number of key laws delivering on the electoral promises made by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But their approach to governing has blended key elements of fascism – such as a controlled form of ultra-nationalism, authoritarian suppression of dissent, and an intertwining of religion and government – within a democratic framework. India’s responses to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis in the country threaten to consolidate this worrying tendency.
Modi has pronounced himself at the service of Indians rather than declaring himself their supreme leader. The BJP has largely respected the popular mandate in key states, such as Jharkhand and Maharashtra, where it lost elections since regaining its national majority in May 2019. And yet India under Modi is proving that some elements of fascism can exist inside the shell of democracy – something also happening elsewhere in the world during the pandemic.
Modi’s commitment to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which strives to organise society and ensure the protection of the Hindu Dharma, or way of life, is an important illustration of this entanglement of fascism and democracy. The RSS has not shied away from criticising the BJP’s Hindutva claims. Nor have the RSS’ affiliates restrained from challenging the government. Nevertheless, nationalism is searing into public discourse, human rights are disdained, liberals are scorned, the mass media is largely pliant, labour laws are diluted, and religious filters have been introduced to determining citizenship.
However, India’s political elites under Modi’s second term as Prime Minister have innovated a heady cocktail of fascism and democracy. Rather than demonstrating democratic recession and backsliding, India today compels observers to confront the fascist underbelly of democracy.
Rather than demonstrating democratic recession and backsliding, India today compels observers to confront the fascist underbelly of democracy. While Modi’s commitment would likely prevent him from seizing absolute power in India and becoming a totalitarian dictator, he does not shy away from styling himself as a Hindu nationalist and is pursuing blatantly Hindu nationalist politics.
Kashmir
In August, barely three months after returning to power on the back of a landslide electoral win, Modi’s government abolished Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which guaranteed a semi-autonomous status for the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. Politicians across the state, including supporters of its accession to India, were placed under house arrest, the internet was suspended and people were placed under a lockdown that continues today.
Even as critics challenged the new law as unconstitutional, the nationalist overtones of the move promised to unite the country behind a single idea of India where there is no special dispensation for different areas. This found support not only from the BJP’s allies but also political parties that had bitterly opposed the BJP during the 2019 elections.
Triple Talaq
The Modi government burnished its credentials of uniformist nationalism further in September when it successfully spearheaded the abolition of the triple talaq, which had hitherto permitted Muslim men to divorce their wives through mere verbal instruction. Long a subject of contention, not least by Muslim women themselves, the practice was retained under successive postcolonial governments wary of being seen as interfering in Islamic religious customs. The bill was debated in Parliament and passed without much opposition. While critics pointed to the Hindu nationalist undertones that accompanied official narratives, supporters (again, not all of whom may have been BJP voters) hailed the move as a step towards the attainment of uniform civil code across India.
Ayodhya
In November, the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda received a major fillip when India’s Supreme Court proclaimed in their favour while announcing a verdict on the 150 year-old dispute in the northern town of Ayodhya. The dispute was over a tract of land claimed as the birth-place of Rama, hero and deity to many Hindus, but on which a mosque had been built by a Mughal general back in 1528: Hindu nationalist mobs exhorted by BJP leaders had pulled the mosque down in 1992. The Hindus claimed the tract of land as theirs on which they proposed to build a grand temple to honour Rama, the Muslims claimed it as theirs so they could rebuild the demolished mosque. By ruling in favour of the Hindus, the Court effectively legalised mob vandalism against the mosque, while handing over a carte blanche to the Hindus. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court responsible for the verdict was subsequently rewarded by being nominated as a BJP nominee to India’s upper house of Parliament. The BJP clearly lost no time in pursuing its Hindu nationalist agenda since its election just over six months prior.
Violence and protest
Riding on a wave of successful legislation with little resistance in parliament, the Modi government then appeared taken aback when faced with widespread protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) it rammed through parliament in December 2019. As the result of the CAA, and an accompanying National Register of Citizens, many of India’s 200 million Muslims could find themselves disenfranchised and stateless if they are not able to prove their citizenship. This religious filter goes against the principles of secularism in India, enshrined in its constitution.
While several state governments protested against the imposition of the draconian law without broader public consultation, a poll in December found many Indians were sympathetic to it.
Yet, recognising the threat posed by the CAA to the basic structure of the Indian constitution, millions of people across class, caste, religious and gender divides took to the streets in protest. At least 50 people were killed in violence in Delhi in February, several hundreds injured and many thousands displaced.
Coronavirus clampdown
By March, the COVID-19 crisis exploded in India. On March 25, Prime Minister Modi announced the world’s largest lockdown, giving Indians a warning of exactly four hours. While middle class and elite supporters praised his announcement for its boldness, the country’s poor found themselves completely unprepared to face the fall-out of such recklessness.
The worst hit were the country’s estimated 140 million migrant workers, many of who lost their jobs and were evicted. Jobless and without incomes, evicted from their tenements because of their inability to pay rents, several million of them began journeying back to the villages they call home, often on foot since public transport remains suspended. Their journeys have extended over several thousand kilometres, longer than journeys say between London and Budapest or Berlin to Moscow. Conservative estimates suggest 40 million migrant workers thus affected, thereby outstripping the massive exchange of populations during the 1947 Partition. While of course the violence faced by the migrants of 1947 was direct and gory, the violence inflicted upon the migrants criss-crossing India today is much more structural though no less brutal: fears that hunger and famine will kill more people than the COVID-19 loom large. India’s opposition parties have demonstrated their utter ineptitude by failing to mobilise the millions of migrant labourers to demand a modicum of dignity and justice.
Even such a catastrophe as faced by the migrant labourers struggles to make it to the headlines. India’s pliant media quickly discovered a scapegoat among a section of a Muslim sect to blame for the explosion of COVID-19 cases in the country towards the end of March. Media houses sympathetic to the government even “unearthed” a corona-jihad allegedly waged by members of the Tablighi Jamat when they ill-advisedly congregated in Delhi on the eve of the lockdown measures announced by the PM. Subsequent reports suggested that their contribution to the spread of the virus had been exaggerated. But the damage had been done, since Muslims in general began to be identified as the reason for the rapid increase in the number of cases across the country. The Uttar Pradesh State government even named COVID-19 hotspots in the State capital on the basis of mosques in their respective localities, thereby attempting to vilify and stigmatise the entire community. The stringent lockdown has provided convenient cover for the BJP to muzzle dissent. As protestors wound up their campaigns in keeping with social distancing regulations, police in Delhi erased protest graffiti, presumably to remove any trace of the protests.
Dissidents are being rounded up and imprisoned under draconian colonial-era laws. The respected scholar-activist Anand Teltumbde being one case in point. Student-protestor Safoora Zargar another. Although India’s thriving civil society protested vociferously, it has been effectively curtailed to online forums, thanks to social distancing regulations.
The fascistic democracy brewing in India today poses extraordinary challenges for political activists committed to defending and deepening democratic freedom. After all, the Indian government justifies its actions in the interests of the nation and its people, and continues to enjoy widespread support both at home and among liberal expats abroad.
What’s happening under Modi should raise questions about the limitations of democracy as a political system. Sometimes it can facilitate rather than protect against violations of human rights and the tyranny of the majority, as the fascist democracy being consolidated in India illustrates. India today appears to exemplify the global backsliding of democracy. However, India’s political elites under Modi’s second term as Prime Minister have innovated a heady cocktail of fascism and democracy. Rather than demonstrating democratic recession and backsliding, India today compels observers to confront the fascist underbelly of democracy.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Indrajit Roy is a Lecturer-Global Development Politics at the Department of Politics of the University of York. Image credit: Wikipedia Commons.