Complaints came fast on social media after the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or the CPI(M), publicised a document for internal discussion amongst its members. The main grouse was that the CPI(M) had not used the term ‘fascism’ to describe the current situation in Indian (although, for the first time, the term ‘neo-fascism’ has been used). The Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation entered the discussion as well. It is important to underline one fact in these complaints: they are rooted in the point that the CPI(M) does not use the word ‘fascism’ but there are no complaints that the CPI(M), a party of over one million people, has not been in the forefront of the fight against the rising waves of intolerance within India or that it has not courageously fought to defend those who have been the targets of this rising tide of neo-fascism. The point is precisely that the word ‘fascism’ has not been used, and not that the CPI(M) has been negligent in the fight against the emergence of majoritarianism and against the attrition of legal protections to minorities. This is a complaint about the use of concepts, not about the actions of the CPI(M) at a time when the Indian left is decidedly weak.
Political action requires an accurate assessment of the situation. If the facts of the conjuncture do not inform the understanding of it, then there is a great chance of failure to act correctly. That is the reason why the analysis of the conjuncture must be done relatively soberly and not based on the outrage we all feel at the actions of the wider Hindutva coalition (the Sangh Parivar, a term that had helped us understand the tentacular nature of the Hindutva approach to politics).
Sangh Parivar
For many years now, sections of this Sangh Parivar have been understood as being totally fascist, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which leads the Sangh Parivar, and others, such as the Bajrang Dal. There is no debate about the fascistic nature of these organisations, resembling as they do the extra-parliamentary hit squads, like the Braunhemden of the Nazis and the Camicie Nere of the Italian fascists. Those groups have deep roots through many decades of work in social and religious organisations.
The Political Resolution of the CPI(M) from the 23rd Party Congress (2022) describes the Bharatiya Janata Party government as ‘aggressively pursuing the Hindutva communal agenda of the fascistic RSS’. The CPI(M)’s Party Programme (2000) notes, ‘the threat to the secular foundations has become menacing with the rise of the communal and fascistic RSS-led combine and its assuming power at the Centre’. This assessment of the RSS-led combine and the BJP-led government ensured that the CPI(M) and its mass fronts took an active role in the campaign against the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and has been at the forefront of the campaigns against fascistic attacks on minorities (whether in a spectacular fashion, as in the Delhi pogrom of 2022 or in smaller attacks where the CPI(M) has played a role in defence and relief).
But within the Sangh Parivar, there are a range of organisations with different social bases and different political orientations, such as the worker and peasant fronts (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh or BMS and the Bhartiya Kisan Sangh or BKS). These are directed and led by the fascistic RSS, and – even when they are forced to concede to the demands, for example, of the workers against the privatisation of public sector units, they are nonetheless oriented to the fascistic agenda of the RSS. The BMS calls itself a ‘non-political union’ that is for the welfare of workers, and so it has refused to participate in the general strikes that began in 2015; however, the union federation opposes the BJP government’s attempt to change trade union laws. The BKS supported the demands of the farmers’ movement but criticised what they falsely considered were the ‘violent’ methods of the protests. These mass fronts, some of the largest worker and peasant organisations in India, are controlled by the fascistic RSS but are not by themselves fascistic organisations. That means that there are elements of the BJP combine that have contradictory politics when it comes to the class realities of the lives of their members.
Far Right of a Special Type
It has become apparent that a new kind of right wing has emerged not only through elections but by exerting dominance in the arenas of culture, society, ideology, and the economy, and that this new kind of right wing is not necessarily concerned with overthrowing the norms of liberal democracy. This is what Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research called ‘the intimate embrace between liberalism and the far right’, following the writings of Aijaz Ahmad. The formulation of this ‘intimate embrace’ allows us to understand that there is no necessary contradiction between liberalism and the far right and indeed that liberalism is not a shield against the far right, and certainly not its antidote. Four elements are key to understanding this ‘intimate embrace’ and the rise of this far right of a special type:
- Neoliberal austerity policies in countries with liberal electoral institutions vanquished the social welfare schemes that had allowed liberal sensibilities to exist. The state’s failure to take care of the poor turned into a harshness toward them.
- Without a serious commitment to social welfare and redistributionist schemes, liberalism itself drifted into the world of right-wing policies. These include increased spending on the internal repressive apparatus that polices working-class neighbourhoods alongside the increasingly stingy distribution of social goods, disbursed only if the recipients allow themselves to be stripped of basic human rights.
- In this terrain, the far right of a special type found that it became more and more accepted as a political force given the turn by the parties of liberalism to the policies which the far right had advocated. In other words, this tendency to draw from far-right policies allowed the far right to become mainstream.
- Finally, the political forces of liberalism and the far right unified across the board to diminish the left’s grasp on institutions. The far right and its liberal counterparts have no fundamental economic differences regarding the stance toward the working-class and peasantry.
In 1964, the Polish Marxist Michał Kalecki wrote the stimulating article ‘The Fascism of Our Times’. In that essay, Kalecki said that the new kinds of fascistic groups that were emerging at the time appealed ‘to the reactionary elements of the broad masses of the population’ and were ‘subsidised by the most reactionary groups of big business’. However, Kalecki wrote, ‘the ruling class as a whole, even though it does not cherish the idea of fascist groups seizing power, does not make any effort to suppress them and confines itself to reprimands for overzealousness’. This attitude persists today: the ruling class as a whole fears not the rise of these fascistic groups, but only their ‘excessive’ behaviour, while the most reactionary sections of big business support these groups financially (Ratan Tata’s endorsement of Narendra Modi at the Gujarat Investment Summit in 2014 is a good example of the lack of differentiation of the liberal bourgeoisie from the fascistic sections). The broad fronts of the far right of a special type are welcomed into social and political power by the bourgeoisie, which sees it as an antidote to the dangers of chaos that come from capitalism’s unfixable problems (social inequality, climate catastrophe, and so on).
This far-right of a special type includes not only the neo-fascists (Bolsonaristas of Brazil, for instance) but also their enablers (the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, which was quite happy to vote with the neo-fascist Alliance for Germany on migration). This concept – far-right of a special type – describes the terrain of the right-wing that sees both the general drift of liberal democracy that favours the politics of the right and the partisan alliances on the right that links both the neo-fascists and the old right into one complex ensemble (this set of alliances includes, very often, the old forces of social democracy, which have slipped so far rightward that they cannot be easily distinguished from the old conservatives, such as the Labour Party in the UK).
Collapse of Social Democracy
During the Emergency (1975-77), it became apparent that the currents of the Indian freedom movement had become weaker, exhausted by the death of the first generation of Indian national leaders and by the distance from that heroic era of the 1920s to the 1940s. Whatever Indian liberalism had been cultivated amongst the elites collapsed into a cosmopolitanism that broke with the social world of the Indian workers and peasants. This exhaustion of the Indian freedom movement, of Indian forms of socialism (Samajwaad), and of Indian liberalism came simultaneously with the end of the era of Congress hegemony and indeed was one of the reasons for that finality. India’s first non-Congress government (1977-1980) brought together a heterogenous group of political actors from the far right Bharatiya Jana Sangh to the Socialist Party of India to form the Janata Party, which then rapidly dissolved into its fragments.
The Indian Republic developed features of social democracy due to the active role of the Communist Party, both in parliament (the largest opposition group in the Lok Sabha from 1952 to 1967) and out in the fields and factories. The Communists and others (including the currents of Indian socialism that came out of Ram Manohar Lohia’s Praja Socialist Party of 1952 to 1972) built upon the demands of the Indian freedom movement, well-articulated in the Congress’ Karachi Resolution (1931), It would be remiss to avoid the currents of the Indian capitalist parties, such as the Swatantra Party of 1957 to 1974, that put a kind of elite cosmopolitanism on the table of Indian society in opposition to the fascistic RSS (the Swatantra Party reveals the overwhelming hegemony of social democracy even over the capitalist party, since its leadership included freedom struggle veterans of the peasant struggle such as N. G. Ranga, Akali leaders such as Darshan Singh Pheruman and Udham Singh Nagoke, and former communists such as Minoo Masani; one of their lot, K. M. Munshi was always sympathetic to the fascistic bloc and founded the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in 1964).
By the 1970s, these forms of social democracy – some more plebian than others – shrunk, with the Congress Party and the regional offshoots of the Indian socialist tradition adopting a neo-liberal paradigm.
The collapse of social democracy in India, particularly in northern India, had a very difficult impact for the formation of the Left. The consensus within the Indian bourgeoisie moved rightward rapidly, with the Congress Party as the champion of neoliberalism; the elite consensus around neoliberalism led to the abandonment of an independent foreign policy and the entry of India as the subordinate ally of the United States. The Congress’s desertion of the working-class and peasantry through the attrition of social welfare, the public sector, and unionisation meant that the workers and peasants increasingly became disorganised and demoralised. The emergence of the far right in India during the 1980s is partly due to this phenomenon of the demise of social democracy, not only within the Congress Party but equally inside the old traditions of Indian socialism (for example, the Samajwadi Party became the regional spear of neoliberalism and the party of regional capitalism). The emergence of the BJP and its Sangh Parivar was not entirely autochthonous or merely from its roots in the Jana Sangh or the RSS; it was able to fill the gap left by the collapse of the form of Indian nationalism that had been shaped in the freedom movement and in the Indian socialist currents.
It was because of the fatal weakness of the turn to the right by the Congress Party and the Lohiaite currents that they turned to each other bewildered, trying to form a non-BJP alliance. These were, sequentially, the National Front (1989-91) and the United Front (1996-98); in the latter, the CPI(M) played a key role in bringing the Front together and maintaining it despite its internal frictions. When no party could form a government after the 14th Lok Sabha elections in 2004, the CPI(M) engineered the creation of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and opened the door for a non-BJP government that lasted for a decade (despite the fact that the Congress broke the agreement with the CPI(M), which then withdrew support to the alliance in 2008). The absence of the Left Front in the alliance opened the door for the Congress-led government to tack rightward and to see a culture of corruption flourish and destroy the possibility of a refurbishment of a post-neoliberal agenda in India. The door was open for the BJP to win in 2014.
During the long rule of the BJP (2014 to the present), the CPI(M) has worked to build a secular front – including the INDIA coalition (created in 2023) that included adversaries of the CPI(M) (such as the Trinamul Congress Party) and close allies of the CPI(M) (such as the Forward Bloc, the Communist Party of India, and the Communist Party of India-Liberation). A precursor was the Mahagathbandhan in northern India in 2019 that brought the old fragments of Lohiaism together but then failed to make an impact. The CPI(M) has not been averse to tactical alliances to weaken and defeat the BJP, as this experience shows. But the INDIA coalition suffers from the fact that most of the constituents do not have a consistent agenda that would allow them to provide a genuine social democratic alternative to the BJP rule or that would allow them to provide a vision for the India of the future. Their politics is entirely anti-BJP, which can bring an alliance together but does not hold the alliance intact when they will be tasked to build something genuine for the people of India. It also does not provide confidence amongst the voters that this alliance – shaped by its antipathy to the BJP – has a coherent vision for governance.
Fascism as a Moral Slogan
Something similar is taking place in different parts of the world, from Brazil to the Philippines, from the United States to Rwanda. Capitalism’s capacity to atomise people and impoverish societies has brought a wave of demoralisation into our world. People feel abandoned and scared. Livelihoods are not easy to come by, nor are necessities. Hope is in short supply, unless it is the hope of an afterlife that is not as harsh as this one. This loneliness stems from the alienation of precarious working conditions and long hours, which corrode the possibility of building a vibrant community and social life. The neo-fascists provide a partial answer to the loneliness that is woven into the fabric of advanced capitalist society. The neo-fascists do not build an actual community, except when it comes to their parasitic relationship with religious communities. Instead, the neo-fascists develop the idea of community, community through the internet or community through mass mobilisations of individuals or community through shared symbols and gestures. The immense hunger for community is apparently solved by the neo-fascists, while the essence of loneliness melts into anger rather than love.
The far right of a special type – with the neo-fascists in the lead – offers a false solution to a real problem, but because it offers something of a solution it attracts a mass following. It is there that the Left must make its most active intervention. The Left’s task is intertwined: building its own independent political strength in a structural context where the reservoirs of that strength (unions, for instance) have weakened, and rescuing the collective life (with the building of community organisations, cooperatives, public libraries, red books day). The far right of a special type has a mass base, its cultural tentacles everywhere. The collapse of social democracy has meant that the weak forces of the Left have had to take up the tasks of social democracy (fighting for reforms such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act , which are lifesaving, but which should have been fought for by the social democrats) rather than in focusing on the building of the reservoir of the Left and the collective life (although, with superhuman strength, the Left continues to build the workers’ and peasants’ unions, the student movement, the library movement, and so on).
One of the problems with the debate on fascism is that it has reduced a serious social and political debate into a moral one. What does it mean to use the term ‘fascism’ as a moral rebuke? Does it merely chastise the fascistic elements themselves, or does it demonise those who follow along in search of answers to questions that are not always clarified? The political moment requires a sense of how to break the hegemony of the fascistic elements over society, how to create a wedge between the forces of neo-fascism and the far right and those who give them a mass base. To demonise that mass base is hardly helpful in this pursuit. It gives the rebuker a sense of superiority but little else to do. Condemnations, moral outrage: these are the ways of the bourgeoisie, not of the Left, which must build alternatives and build communities, which must go amongst those masses who have made their hasty choices and contest those choices in the towns and villages. Anti-fascism will always have a moral character, but it must not be defined by moral rhetoric. It needs political precision. Moral outrage is sentimental. It is not a Marxist gesture.
The Contest for State Power
Is the Indian state fascist? The CPI(M) makes it clear that the BJP and its coalition have fascistic elements within them, but that the BJP government is not a fascist government and nor is the Indian state a fascist state. In other words, there remains room to contest state power, not only through the elections and the courts – both of which have a long history of problems, the former because of the role of money in capitalist elections and the latter because it has adopted a colonial legal structure – but through other forms of contestation in the institutions of the state bureaucracy.
The term ‘neo-fascism’ is used to explore the global nature of these developments, the linkages – for instance – between the far right of a special type in Brazil (Bolsonarismo) and the far-right Vox of Spain (extrema derecha). Certainly, the collapse of liberalism and social democracy into neo-liberal austerity politics has denuded the political field in bourgeois democracies. A small Left is not able to build a working-class base to confront the utter destruction of society that resulted from neo-liberalism. It was the far right of a special type that benefitted, attacking parts of the neo-liberal consensus but upholding its economics. This is what links Modi to Bolsonaro and to Trump. That is why that concept has now appeared.
For the Left, there is no alternative but to build two things: the independent strength of the working-class and peasantry to fight for a people’s democracy over the democracy of capital, and alongside that to build principled alliances with forces that are dismayed by the destruction of society and are committed to strengthen democracy.
Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
