The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities

The Rise of Hindu

Authoritarianism

Achin Vanaik is a writer and social activist, a former professor at the University of Delhi and Delhi-based Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. He is the author of numerous books, including The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India, also from Verso.

The Rise of Hindu

Authoritarianism

Secular Claims,

Communal Realities

ACHIN VANAIK

For Anish and Samar

This updated and expanded edition is based on Achin Vanaik’s

The Furies of Indian Communalism, first published by Verso 1997

First published by Verso 2017

© Achin Vanaik 2017

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Content

s

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART I

1 The Communalization of the Indian Polity: From Independence to the 2014 Elections

PART II

2 Religion, Modernity, Secularization

3 Communalism, Hindutva, Anti-Secularists: The Conceptual Battleground

PART III

4 The Threat of Hindu Communalism: Problems with the Fascist Paradigm

5 The New Modi Regime

Notes

Index

Acknowledge

ments

First let me express my gratitude on two counts to Perry Anderson. When he last visited India and on seeing the changing political climate then, he had urged me to rework and update my 1997 study to make it a more contemporary reader for an audience at home, and especially abroad, to achieve a better understanding of this rising spectre of Hindu communalism. But it was the reception in progressive Indian circles of his 2013 book The Indian Ideology that stirred me sufficiently to get on with what I had earlier considered doing, but for one seemingly valid reason or the other, kept putting off. What surprised and even dismayed me was not that strong disagreements with his book had been voiced by prominent intellectuals belonging to a left and left-liberal milieu. But why was there no acknowledgement by these critics of the great political value of a text that so systematically, comprehensively and lucidly punctured the smugly false self-image that far too many Indian liberals (let alone right-wingers) carried of their country?

It brought home to me that progressive thought in and about India had now come to inhabit a basically post-Marxist space much more concerned to reveal the distinctiveness of an Indian ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ which ‘Western’-inspired conceptual frames (like Marxism) are presumably incapable of adequately appreciating. Among those holding such a view, many an exaggeration of the quality of Indian modernity and secularity has followed. Hence the implied riposte carried by the subtitle of this book. My own analytical spectacles remain those of a Marxist – which is not to deny the necessity of thinking through, across, beside and beyond the Marxist tradition as well, for Marxism is not and does not claim to be a theory of everything.

This book would not have the shape it does if I had not learned so much from my interactions with many people. These include the Sarkars, Tanika and Sumit, as well as my comrades from the Centre of Marxist Studies that we collectively set up a few years ago to promote an anti-bureaucratic and anti-Stalinist commitment to the project of bringing about a truly democratic socialism. My thanks to Anil Chaudhury, Wilfred D’Costa, Vivek Chibber, Kunal Chattopadhyay, Soma Marik, Mihir Desai, Archana Agarwal, Sushovan Dhar and Bodhisatwa Ray. A special debt is owed to my political-intellectual interlocutor of well-nigh three decades, as well as my close friend and inspiration in shared activism, Praful Bidwai, who passed away in June 2015. He is sadly missed. Thanks are also due to Barbara Harriss-White and Leo Panitch of Socialist Register. The annual issues for the years 2009 and 2015 carried my two articles on India. A few passages taken from them, but now duly reworked, updated and expanded, have been incorporated in Chapters 1 and 5. Nor can I forget Sebastien Budgen and Duncan Ranslem of Verso; the first for his encouragement and for keeping me to necessary timetables, the second for his painstakingly thorough and scrupulous copy-editing that has made an often dense text both more precise in the laying out of its arguments and freer of errors.

Last, but far from least, I am grateful for the encouragement and support I have always had from my partner Pamela, to whom I dedicated my first book, and my sons Anish and Samar, to whom I dedicate this one.

Introduct

ion

It was in 1997 that I first undertook a book-length study of what I then called the ‘communal phoenix’ that was rising to cast its ‘shadow over India’s body politic’.¹ This had been preceded in 1990 by a wider-ranging overview of India’s economy, polity and society, in which I had devoted a full chapter, titled ‘Communalism and Hindu Nationalism’, to this growing and disturbing problem.² If, between 1947 and 1990, the advance of political Hindutva (roughly ‘Hinduness’) had been relatively slow, although accelerating from the mid 1980s, it was in the 1990s – following the Ram Janmabhoomi, or Ram Temple movement (the single greatest mass mobilization since the era of the independence struggle), culminating in the destruction of the Babri Masjid in the town of Ayodhya in December 1992 – that the transformative power of Hindu communal forces in India really became apparent. This event focused the minds of many Indian intellectuals and activists committed to the preservation and promotion of secularism, and I noted with approval in The Furies of Indian Communalism (henceforward; Furies) that, as a result, the work of many Indian intellectuals had helped raise the quality of the general debate on secularism above existing theoretical and political levels, even worldwide.

Some two-and-a-half decades later, what do we find? Between 1998 to 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the electoral–political wing of the collective cohort of Hindu nationalist forces called the Sangh ‘Parivar’ (Family) – became the hub of the coalition governments that ruled in Delhi. The BJP had become a normalized and respectable political force governing either on its own or in alliances within several Indian states. While the trajectory of the Congress has moved from single-party dominance at the centre to requiring alliances to form the national government, finally reaching its nadir so far in the 2014 general elections, the trajectory of the BJP has been the reverse – from alliance partnerships to single-party majority rule – and it has replaced the Congress as the biggest national-level political force. This electoral rise both in the provinces and at the centre is part of a wider cultural–ideological advance, and of a deeper implantation in the country’s structures and institutions.

This political journey of the Sangh Parivar must cause a retrospective reassessment of the secular claims that have often been made for India, in relation to the nature of both the state and society. In Furies, I wrote that

even among those concerned to defend secularism, secularization and the secular, the focus of attention has been mostly on the character, practice and ideal of the secular state, on its laws and its affirming ideology. Much less has been written about the secularization of Indian civil society – its advances and retreats, its possibilities and obstacles, its desirability or undesirability. That there is a secularization process going on ‘in the background’ is generally conceded, but it is the secularity of the state and the ideology of secularism that have been foregrounded in most intellectual discussion. It is generally here that theoretical advances and new insights have been provided³.

Since I believed (and continue to believe) that the longer-term battle to defeat communalisms and fundamentalisms must be waged on the terrain of civil society, where the democratic process must be stabilized and secularization deepened, I hoped that the balance of theoretical and analytical attention would shift towards civil society, and towards increased talk of the need for the further secularization of Indian life, even as concern to preserve such secularity as the Indian state had already achieved would remain salient because of the then more immediate threat presented by the forces of Hindutva to ascend to state power. Surely, subsequent developments – the BJP coming to office for six years, then receding from control of central state power for a decade, but finally bouncing back with even greater electoral popularity and no longer constrained by the need for coalition partners – should have led to increased concern about the weakness of the secularization process in civil society, and indeed to a reassessment of the secular credentials of the state itself?

To a limited extent, this has indeed happened, and this book is part of that trend. But there remains a need – which lies outside my competence to address – for the development of serious historical narratives about the secularization process in this part of the world.⁴ Such narratives could serve as a more accurate diagnosis of the ‘Indian condition’, to which the search for ways to deepen secularism and secularization could be better directed. To talk of the Indian condition in this way – as if it is in need of serious medicines, or even surgery – is of course offensive to a significant portion of intellectuals at home and abroad, and even to some, like the anti-secularists, who are also hostile to Hindutva. But the latter would hold secularism and the secular state partly or fully responsible for the rise of communalism and religious fundamentalism. Having some overlap with their arguments (though its extent varies from thinker to thinker) is an intellectual current which, under the influence of postmodernist/post-Marxism/postcolonial theory, would argue that there are ‘multiple secularisms’ corresponding to ‘multiple modernities’. That is to say, an adequate understanding of the problems of specific societies requires much more specific understandings of those societies and their cultural and religious traditions, legacies and continuities. A very distinctly Indian form and understanding of secularism therefore exists, from which others can learn. Western-imposed notions of secularism are thus a problem, if not a danger.

There is therefore something of a division even between defenders of secularity. How should it be understood? How far should it go? What is its relation to democracy? How should it be pursued, or avoided? Hindutva’s rise today might easily inspire more hostile criticism of India’s colonial past, especially of the National Movement era, and also of the character of the cultural nationalism that preceded the emergence of political nationalism associated with it. This is certainly my view, though this study does not seriously investigate this colonial past. However, the other side, at its politest, would criticize this approach for being a disabling one-sidedness that refuses to understand the much more complex relationship between religion and secularity in the Indian context. The implications of these different approaches are discussed in the relevant chapters.

Like Furies, this book discusses Hinduism, Hindu nationalism and Hindu communalism, but makes only peripheral references to minority communalisms, or to Islamic India. Leaving aside an unnecessarily defensive attempt to establish appropriately liberal credentials by ‘balancing’ my preoccupation with majority communalism with a study (and condemnation) of minority communalisms, I believe that the text as it stands will prove to be of some value. My main obsessions are the secularity of the Indian state and the secularization of Indian civil society. India cannot become an Islamic state; it can certainly become a Hindu state. If secularization – understood as relative decline in religious influence and in the importance of religious identity – is to proceed apace, then it must above all address that religious system, Hinduism, which purports to describe the beliefs, rituals and practices of the overwhelming majority of the population.

The issue of minority communalism, its sources and directions, becomes more obviously relevant in studies whose focus lies elsewhere, such as on Kashmir and its impact on the rest of the Union; or in studies of the current turmoil within significant sections of the Muslim population in India. Quite clearly, however, no practical perspective for combating majority communalism can be complete without insisting simultaneously on combating minority communalisms, particularly Muslim communalism. Any perspective on how best to combat Muslim communalism would be greatly enhanced by an in-depth historical and sociological analysis of Muslim communalism and its complex relationship to lived and doctrinal Islam.

Such a major exercise is also important because of the new pressure exerted by powerful circles in the West and in India, even beyond the Hindutva crowd, to carry out a demonization of Islam. Islam-baiters both in India and the West push a set of common themes – Islam is basically intolerant; Islam shapes the Muslim mind more than anything else; an Islam in crisis is creating an increasingly monolithic ummah or worldwide community of believers. But the biggest spur towards demonization of Muslims and Islam is the shamefully dishonest and one-sided discourse on terrorism that has emerged since the 11 September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. The destabilizations caused by the initial backing of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan against the former Soviet Union, followed by the invasions of Iraq (1991, 2003) and of Afghanistan (2002) after the Soviet collapse, had primed the US for a higher level of military unilateralism, the Western air assaults in Libya and Syria, and support for Arab dictatorships and Israel, unleashing what has been aptly called a ‘clash of barbarisms’. The primary catalyst for this now well-established feedback relationship between state and non-state terrorisms has been the US-led West, though this does not excuse the terrorism or brutalities of Islamic groups and states.

The most common form and meaning of terrorism is that it is an act, a method, a technique, a tactic, and as such is adopted and deployed by the individual, the group and larger collectivities, including the apparatuses of the state. Terrorism by states, internally or externally, is far more devastating in terms of civilian casualties. But the label of ‘state terrorism’ is applied selectively and hypocritically to a few states outside the West. The ‘Global War on Terror’ (an absurdity in that one cannot wage a war on a tactic or technique) not only legitimizes the use of one kind of violence and terrorism in the name of fighting another; it is also one of the more effective ideological banners today for the pursuit of US and Western imperial interests. Moreover, given that Russia (in Chechnya), China (in Xinjiang) and India (in Kashmir) all face secessionist pressures from Muslim-populated regions, and are themselves aspiring if not already imperial powers, though of a lesser order, they all see some value in using the discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism.’ But in the case of Hindutva, unlike for the others, the identification of Islam and Muslims with terrorism serves to strongly reinforce its foundational ideology and purpose. This is why exposing the ‘Global War on Terror’ as a fraud and opposing the demonization of Islam and Muslims are even more important in the Indian context.⁵

This book is divided into three parts, besides the Introduction. Part I contains Chapter 1, which outlines the communalization of the Indian polity between independence and the 2014 general elections. The chapter stresses the fact that the Congress struggle for independence under the leadership of Gandhi had a Hindu nationalist dimension of considerable weight, even as it also had a secular dynamic. Both secularism – a normative ideal – and communalism – the name given to a form of religio-political conflict of great negativity and danger – are to be understood as modern phenomena. It is in this chapter that the importance of secularizing civil society in India is first broached, while it is pointed out that particular relationships of secularization–de-secularization are connected to particular patterns in the state–society relationship. The process of secularization is therefore a complex one that, by operating in a wider political economy of capitalist development, frequently, and in various contexts, suffers from interruptions, halts and even reverses. It is not unilinear.

Chapter I also provides a capsule survey of the Sangh Parivar’s parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), or RSS, and of some of its major affiliates. In keeping with my emphasis on the importance of the secularization of civil society, I draw attention to a valuable recent account of the process of production and dissemination in print of a homogeneous Brahminical version of Hinduism – a version that exists within ‘offical’ Indian nationalism. This process certainly prepared the ground, especially in north India, for mass receptivity to many of the basic themes underpinning the ideology of the Sangh. Following independence, the Sangh Parivar culturally implanted itself among sections of the Dalits (‘downtrodden’ – the self-appellation used in preference to ‘untouchables’) and Adivasis (tribals), despite its upper-caste doctrinal biases.

Insofar as the electoral rise of the BJP since the 1980s has been more a function of the decline of Congress than the reverse process holding, my survey of the sources and likely effects of this decline precedes my account of the BJP’s own rise. No such narrative, however, can refrain from highlighting the Ram Janmabhoomi Campaign, lasting from roughly 1989 to 1992, in the context of Mandal politics. The Mandal Commission Report proposing reservations for intermediate or ‘backward castes’ was presented in 1979 to the then post-Emergency Janata government but was only applied by the V. P. Singh government in 1990. The expansion of the reserved quota for central government jobs beyond those already available for Dalits and Adivasis (15 percent plus 7.5 percent respectively) by an additional 27 percent quota for the benefit of the intermediate or ‘backward castes’ (in officialese referred to as ‘Other Backward Classes’ or OBCs) and who otherwise at 52 percent of the total population make up the single-largest caste bloc in the country antagonized the upper castes, thereby weakening any project of constructing a cross-caste Hindu unity. This made the Ram Janmabhoomi Campaign all the more necessary. This chapter also discusses the quantitative and qualitative changes in the character of the ‘great Indian middle class’ (in fact, in relative terms more an elite of massive proportions than anything else) as a key social base for Hindutva and other right-wing forces and projects. This is presented along with an account of national coalition governments, wherein the BJP becomes not only a normalized political force but one whose fluctuating electoral fortunes can be mapped on an ascending trend-line up to the breakthrough of 2014.

If there is one strategic lesson to be drawn from this and later chapters, it is futility of placing any hope in the prospect that the Congress – in large part responsible for Hindutva’s rise – might effectively confront the BJP/Sangh.

Part II constitutes the theoretical heart of the book. It retains most of the theoretical material presented in Furies. Since much water has passed under the theoretical bridge since then, it includes not only an updating and revision of the previous text, but a great deal that is completely new. My intention is both to strengthen my previous argument and to question and criticize claims made since then from various directions of an Indian state and society whose remarkable secularity, supposedly, was formerly less understood and appreciated.

Chapter 2 is titled ‘Religion, Modernity, Secularization’ (note secularization, not secularism). Although communalism is made possible by the modernizing–secularizing process, there is an undeniable sense in which secularization and secularism are antidotes to the communal disease. But in understanding secularization, the key point of reference is not communalism but religion. However, amid contending notions of secularization, it is necessary to choose and account for one’s alignments. I have sought to defend the classical notion of secularization – relative decline in religious influence – as a fact in modernity everywhere. Its further deepening in societies like India is a definite possibility – but one that will have to be fought for. Finally, I endorse the desirability of such relative decline in religious influence and in the importance of religious identity. I did not start out with the idea of launching such a defence: it emerged out of my inquiries, rather than guiding them.

It gradually became clear to me that a defence of the classical view of secularization required an understanding not only of the nature and functions of religion, but also of how modernity has transformed the ways in which culture and society have interacted both with religion and with each other. Chapter 2 is the most abstract and explicitly theoretical chapter, but it is indispensable to the architecture of the book. In it I argue against the claim that, even in modernity, religion is necessarily central to culture and to society, or that, beyond some soon-to-be-reached or already-reached limit, secularization understood as the continuing decline of religious power and influence no longer holds good and indeed would not even be desirable. Religion and modernity, some say, must be strongly conjoined for the good of human society.

By theoretical rather than historical argument, Chapter 2 builds a plausible case for the validity of the secularization-as-decline thesis. It does so by distilling and then contesting the strong arguments of those who are its opponents. Of course, the most convincing way to establish that the substantial secularization of Indian society is already an indisputable fact, and that further secularization is a real possibility, is to provide an historical narrative of the secularization process in India. We have secular histories of India, but not specifically histories of the secularizing process in India. What I have written, therefore, is something like an abstract prolegomenon to this still unfulfilled project, which at least calls attention to its importance.

While a subsection in the chapter deals with the Marxist understanding of religion-as-ideology, I have not felt particularly beholden to that tradition in my effort to ‘understand religion’. Religion always has ideological functions, and it has thus become something of a Marxist convention to invoke Gramsci’s remarkable insights into ‘hegemony’ and ‘ideological domination’. His observations on religion emerged from his studies on Italian Catholicism and its place in the construction of an Italian national culture. But the strength of the Marxist approach is also its weakness. Religion has ideological functions, but it goes far beyond them. Of course, immortalizers or near-immortalizers of religion ignore, soft-pedal or deny the ideological dimension, and it is here that the Marxist approach remains a useful reminder of the ever-present link between religious discourses and practices and social and political power.

But there is much more to be said in areas where the contribution of the Marxist tradition is much more limited. So Gramsci features in my survey, but in a minor role. He had a core understanding of religion that was deep and broad, but his thoughts on the matter took a specific direction because of his preoccupation with the how and why of fascism and fascist ideology – and of course with what should be done about it. More important for me has been the influence of another Marxist intellectual and activist closer to our own times: Raymond Williams.

In the religion–culture–society relationship, the middle term is the pivot. Later in his career, Raymond Williams worked with a notion of culture – as a ‘realized signifying system’ – that contrasted with his earlier, more anthropologically inclined notion of a ‘whole way of life’; the former remains the best starting point for investigating complex modern societies, at least for my purposes. Williams also later dropped his treatment of ‘culture in common’ and ‘common culture’ as synonymous. Common culture was now contrasted with the essentialist notions of culture as would be suggested by the term ‘culture in common’. Cultural essentialism is a basic assumption of those who would contest the value of secularization and secularism for India, and must be opposed and refuted.⁶

In modernity, the production and diffusion of symbolic goods is much more institutionalized, and extends further over time and space, than ever before, because of the revolution in the technologies of mass communication. The result has been the creation, really for the first time, of something we now call a mass culture connected to the mass media. In short, it may be that the mediatization of culture has come to play a central role in the secularization of culture. To the extent that such mediatization strengthens public forms of religiosity, the overall direction taken by the secularization process across different societies therefore becomes more variable. So what basically happens to religion in modernity? What should we now be wanting and fighting? What is it feasible to want and fight for now?

One of the key questions in the historical discussion of modernity has always been whether it is industrialization which happens to be capitalist, or capitalist industrialization per se that constitutes the fundamental process of modernity as it has unfolded. Marxists such as Perry Anderson and Robert Brenner correctly insist on the latter view.⁷ Theorists of power, including Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann, hold to the former view – as indeed do theorists of rationality and of cognitive transformations as the driving force of modernity, such as Max Weber and Ernest Gellner.⁸ But all of these six figures would subscribe to what Gellner called the ‘Big Ditch’ view of a profound and decisive rupture created by the advent of modernity in the trajectory of specific societies, and in the processes of world history itself. They would share many understandings of the relationship of modernity to tradition, which is really the principal terrain of investigation in Chapter 2.⁹

This question of ‘rupture’ is fundamental for anyone wishing to situate herself within the modernity–tradition debate in India. There are three possible lines of argument. India, it can be claimed, is still basically a traditional society. A second view is that India is a society in transition between tradition and modernity. A third view, to which I subscribe, is that India has long been pursuing its own trajectory of modernity, different from that in the West but incomprehensible without reference to it. It is not that ‘traditional’ institutions, beliefs, values and practices do not exist, but rather that they can no longer do so in the ‘old’ way, and that this itself constitutes a decisive change. Even in the long history of pre-modernity, there is always change as well as continuity, but ordinary people’s ‘lived experience’ of both (of time and space) was very different then from what happened after the impact of modernity. Ordinary life now takes place in a whole new world, and entails being a very different kind of person.

Modernity destroys tradition, but it also reworks and ‘preserves’ it, thereby providing the objective basis for many intellectuals who reflect on modernity, to adopt a Nostalgia Paradigm. This paradigm is characterized by its sense of history as decline, and by a feeling that wholeness and autonomy have been lost. These are, in fact, new feelings created by new times. But the essential point is that traditions recently invented, and older ones reworked, continue to be important in modernity itself. Even so, as time passes the destructive and inventive processes in regard to these traditions reach qualitatively higher levels than ever before. Traditions in the pre-modern sense are always linked to localism and local communities, which is why, over any wide territorial expanse, such as pre-modern India, the existence of a traditional society is always the existence of traditional societies, in the plural. As the era of modernity proceeds, the crucial local contexts within which tradition thrives are undermined as never before by modernity’s principal characteristic: capitalist globalization.¹⁰

India has escaped none of the processes of modernity in its various phases. It simply experiences them in its own uneven and combined way. The idea that India fundamentally remains a traditional society is simply an absurdity; and that of its being in transition between tradition and modernity is not much better. India’s encounter with modernity came through colonialism. It is only in the earliest phase of this encounter that it is legitimate to talk of a truly indigenous resistance. During this initial contact, there is ‘primary’ resistance to protect recently affected ways of life. But once indigenous society is irrevocably changed, there can be only ‘secondary’ resistance – resistance within the terms of modernity, even when it seeks to refute it.

Those who rework tradition after this encounter with colonialism are themselves influenced by criteria brought to India by colonialism. The ‘internal’ criteria of Indian tradition never suffice for the necessary reworking. The reinterpretations and reworkings are carried out by members of the elite, but popularized in ways never available or attempted before, and therefore large masses of ordinary people begin to develop a new awareness of, and allegiance to, what are supposed to be their enduring traditions.¹¹ The first serious reworkings of tradition in response to modernity took place in a context (colonialism) marked by a sense of defeat. This meant that there was strong pressure on those carrying out this reworking both to rationalize the colonial victory and to find within its traditions distinctive and relatively untouched sources of ‘Indian superiority’.

It is one thing to assert that India and other societies outside the advanced industrialized world have long since been ‘condemned to modernity’, and therefore to insist on finding modernist solutions to contemporary problems. It is another thing, however, to ignore the inadequacies and ugliness that accompany this modernity. Here it is the capitalist character of modernity that becomes a crucial source-bed for generating these evils – and understanding this helps us to explore ways to overcome them. Neither pre-modernist indigenisms nor postmodernist meanderings offer much in this respect. They only serve to obscure and disarm. Since both the anti-modernist and the postmodernist see industrialism, scientific rationality and the rise of the nation-state as the principal characteristics of modernity, both let capitalism itself off the hook. Socialism and Marxism are dismissed as having no relevance to their respective projects. For the postmodernist, the issue is no longer even the evils of modernity. The way to counter the advocacy of these false trails cannot be a simple argument in favour of an unproblematic modernity. It has to be the defence of a critical and modest modernity, in which a critical and modest Marxism assuredly has a place.

Charles Taylor, in his remarkable book, gives capitalism a very minor role in explaining the advent of what he calls A Secular Age.¹² This huge tome is a work of great erudition that has many virtues. According to Taylor, the defining characteristic of the new secular age is that masses of people can now subscribe to what he calls an ‘exclusive humanism’ – in other words, to an ultimate vision or goal of human flourishing alone. There has been a religious decline compared to the past, but new forms of religiosity have also emerged, producing a religious re-composition rather than any simple, linear process of religious decline. So far, so good.

But he locates the primary source for the emergence of the secular age (or ‘secularity 3’, as he calls it) principally in the emergence of a religious individualism developed in the course of Christian moral teachings before, but especially after, the impact of the Reformation. This laid the basis for the rise of a less religious ‘secular subjectivity’, and a resulting shift towards an ‘immanent self’ that can now prioritize an exclusive humanism above all else. For all his emphasis on the changes in the ‘background conditions’ of Christian beliefs, this remains a strongly ideational explanation, and it has been strongly criticized. Another line of criticism is that even this story of the centrality of Christian teachings ignores how these were themselves shaped by historical encounters with the non-Western and non-Christian world.

Taylor’s text has been taken up here for two main reasons. It is perhaps the most important recent historically informed yet theoretical effort to insist on the conjoining of religion with modernity for the greater public good. It is not just that his method for understanding the emergence of a secular modernity can be criticized, but that what flows from his study – with regard to both the issue of secularization and the political project of the pursuit of greater human flourishing – must, in my view, be rejected. He sees further secularization as undesirable because of the ‘three maladies of immanence’. Since immanence means a narrowing of our world-view to exclude the possibility of transcendence, this leads to a) the loss of meaning in this world; b) the absence of ways to solemnize and highlight (as religion does) the rites of passage in one’s life-cycle; and c) a reduction in our capacity to cope with the emptiness of ordinary life.

Given that Taylor is known widely for his writings on multiculturalism, it is not surprising that he subscribes to the view that there are ‘multiple modernities’, and therefore ‘multiple secularities’. His work has no doubt pushed many thinkers towards predominantly cultural understandings of modernity – or, rather, of various modernities – in which Difference with a capital D becomes the single most important signpost in studying the past, and in proposing future courses of action to pursue the now ‘multiple emancipatory projects’ that are especially relevant in the societies of the non-Western world, including India. And if Western secularism is rooted in its religious past, as Taylor purports to have shown, could this not also be the case for India, especially in relation to its dominant religion, Hinduism? Despite the recognition that, insofar as all these societies are modern and therefore there is something common and new about them, the temporal distinction between past and present becomes less important than the spatial difference between cultural/civilizational entities. As a phenomenon characterized above all by the rate, depth and scope of change with which it is associated – sharply distinguishing it from pre-modernity – modernity itself becomes less significant than the cultural continuities with the past possessed by each of these entities, which together make up a modern plurality of societies. What better way is there, then, of trying to understand the hybridities of each of these social orders and of our pluralistic world?!

For those holding such a perspective it is not just that the modernity of Indian secularism is subject to challenge, or that undue praise may be heaped on its distinctive character and quality, but that the nature of today’s modernity on a global scale is itself misrecognized by them in harmful ways. All modernity is hybrid, and the process of hybridization not only does not stop within modernity, but becomes more dynamic. This raises the question of what is the main source of this dynamism, affecting even the cultural–ideational domain. It is, in fact, a capitalism that creates processes that unify and differentiate as never before.¹³ Today, for the first time ever, three historically unique horrors co-exist: 1) Mass immiseration and physical human suffering are produced by malnutrition, ill health and early mortality, as well as by the presence of mass illiteracy, whose remediation would be an important contributor to the securing of much greater personal dignity. What makes all of this so different from the past is that there is now no global scarcity of necessary resources available to eliminate these deprivations; 2) The very existence of the human species, in very large part or as a whole, is threatened by multiple ecological disasters; 3) The same threat is offered by potential nuclear or biological warfare.

The first two of these threats can be directly connected to the nature of contemporary capitalism; the third more indirectly to global capitalism and the system of multiple nation-states that currently sustains it, and also partly expresses its uneven and combined character of development. What the paradigm of multiple modernities (and its cousin ‘connected histories’) does is to downgrade the power and reality of a universalizing capitalism (never a totalized state of affairs) in shaping the era we are living in, as well as the responsibility it has for generating these unique yet universal dangers.¹⁴ Surely this means that we have to pursue a universal project of emancipation – a collective alternative modernity (not in the plural) based on the transcendence of capitalism? It is no surprise that Taylor, for one, has no such vision – indeed, that he pursues nothing more than a social-democratic welfarist humanization of capitalism as far as his concerns about political economy go. Instead, what must be pursued is a global multicultural order (a fitting goal for one who is among the most important theorists of multiculturalism) that brings together a plurality of cultural (and religious) visions consonant with the reality of multiple modernities (or even ‘alternative modernities’) in a framework of mutual respect and equality. It is this that is all-important, and it can come from an overlapping consensus on common ends, even as the reasons for arriving at those ends may differ. This for Taylor and his many admirers would be the desired precondition for successfully installing greater collective human flourishing.

Chapter 3 explores concepts that are the bread-and-butter terms of discourse on Hindutva and communalism. These include terms like ‘Indian civilization’, ‘Indian culture’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘caste’. Even those who line up on opposite sides in their attitude to Hindutva and secularism often share similar understandings of these key concepts and their interrelationships. Consequently, there are all too often unwarranted concessions to votaries of Hindutva and to anti-secularists (those who oppose both Hindutva and ‘Westernized’ secularists).

I dispute the idea of a centuries-long Indian civilization, and of some essentialist Indian culture beholden to Hinduism. I further dispute the view that Hinduism is a ‘single, religious fabric’ or ‘comprehensible whole’, even though it has undeniably been subject to a process of singularization in the last two hundred years that is currently gathering ever greater pace – making it much more amenable, however for the purposes of communal mobilization. Caste as a pan-Indian phenomenon is also relatively recent, so neither Hinduism nor caste can be said to constitute the essential elements of a putative Indian civilization and culture of long standing. Such essentialism is usually accompanied by an excessively benevolent rendering of Hinduism (its ‘mystique of tolerance’), and even of the caste system.

There is in this chapter a brief deconstruction of the ideological structure of Hindutva discourse. The way the forces of Hindu communalism manipulate cultural, political, social and economic themes of various kinds to construct practical and mobilizing ideologies at various moments, for different purposes and audiences, is always a highly flexible, mobile and complicated affair – indeed, sometimes erratic. I have confined myself to the much simpler task of portraying the relatively inflexible ‘chain of reasoning’ that makes up the more abstract intellectual construct of Hindutva that then informs and guides the more practical forms taken by the ideological arguments and claims of the different variants of Hindu nationalism. These versions have been softer and harder, milder and more virulent in their political thrust and orientations.

Recognition that there have been such Hindu nationalist variants becomes particularly important because the remarkable rise of the Sangh and its understanding of Hindutva raise an unavoidable question. Can we understand this advance in state and society, on the political, social and cultural fronts, without re-examining and reassessing the validity of earlier claims about the secularity of the National Movement, of the Congress and its leaders, of the nature of the Constitution that emerged from the predominantly upper-caste Hindu membership of the Constituent Assembly – in short, of the much-praised character of Indian secularism? If this Indian secularism has merits from which Western secular states and societies can learn, what about its comparative shortcomings? Since writing Furies, I have felt the need to present a new and much more critical take on the Constitution and on the secular claims made for the Indian state, emphasizing even more strongly the need for Indian society to be secularized, and therefore to reach a more modest evaluation of its comparative virtues.

When it comes to the views of key thinkers who are opposed to Hindutva yet critical of a ‘Westernized’ understanding of secularism as something unsuited to and even dangerous for India, the work of four such theorists was taken up in Furies. They were Bikhu Parekh, T. N. Madan, Ashis Nandy and Partha Chatterjee. While Parekh and Madan have sought in the intervening years to further develop their views and judgements on this issue, the theoretical concerns of the latter two have moved elsewhere, and they have added little of note to their earlier positions. The influence of all of them in elite public discourse, among NGO activists, and within academia at home and abroad, has endured if not grown. This is not a function of their organizational and political power, as it is in the case of the forces of political Hindutva. It is much more directly a function of the persuasiveness of their ideas in a milieu marked by the decline of Marxist intellectual influence, the dilemmas of liberal modernism, the rising popularity of postmodernist thinking and of forms of postcolonial theorizing that demand nothing less than an epistemic revolution to overthrow Western conceptual impositions (including much if not all of Marxism) that prevent a proper understanding of non-Western societies and cultures.

One of the earliest Indian thinkers who argued along these lines is the psychologist Ashis Nandy, who on the issue of secularism and India has been a self-declared ‘anti-secularist’ and ‘anti-modernist’. I have devoted considerable space to criticizing his views, in the most directly polemical passages in the book. Of course, the more recent reflections of Parekh and Madan are also addressed.

The anti-secularists are decidedly unhappy with even the liberal democracies, not because these systems are capitalist or insufficiently democratic but because their ‘liberalism’ enshrines a conscious separation of private meaning from public legitimacy. A primarily political language of legitimation has emerged in contrast to the pre-modern, supposedly more wholesome inseparability of the private and public orders of meaning. For the Indian anti-modernist taking his cue from Gandhi, the sources of evil in modern life rest not on social factors but on a particular view of the ultimate purpose and meaning of man. Modern civilization is said to be based on a false theory of man.¹⁵ Ancient civilizations, in which a religious culture was allowed proper sway, were soul-centred. They had a spiritualism at their core, anchored by a notion of the transcendent, and thus did not suffer from the debilitating dichotomies of mind/body, or soul/body, characteristic of modern man.

Gandhi’s judgement of modernity was not historical or sociological, but psychological, moral and philosophical – though he made no serious attempt to understand philosophy or psychology. This is where Nandy, a relatively uncritical defender of Gandhi’s thought (whose uncritical approach in fact reduces the complexity and stature of a figure like Gandhi), can step into the breach. Furthermore, the growth of communalism (not so much in the first fifteen years after Indian independence, but certainly later) is seen by the anti-secularists as evidence of the increasing divorce of the Indian political and social elite from the masses. This Westernized and secular elite speaks a different language from that of the authentic Indian, found for the most part in the villages.

This is a truly surprising claim. Indian democracy in action has in fact produced a form of democratic culture more imbued with an indigenism that can be appropriated by communal forces. Sudipta Kaviraj has perceptively observed that, since the 1960s, Indian politics have undergone a massive alteration in style, language and modes of behaviour, far more effectively reflecting the cultural understandings of rural Indian society, rather than the Westernist cultivation of the elite that inherited power in the Nehru years.¹⁶

One can attribute the origins of communal politics not simply to tradition, nor simply to modernity, but to changing patterns within modernity. The arguments of the anti-secularists and anti-modernists are both false and dangerous, not least because they legitimize the proposition that a ‘religious community’, which is insufficiently differentiated internally, is a vital, operative, bottom-line ‘political unit’.¹⁷ Support for this view also came from another important source – some leading lights of the Subaltern Studies group, notably Partha Chatterjee, its most important theorist after the founding figure and original inspirer of the group, Ranajit Guha. Guha provided the original theoretical rationale for seeing Subaltern Studies as a distinct school within the wider field of Indian historiography, and for defining its purposes and ambitions. His Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India was the first book-length study representing this new historiography.¹⁸

Partha Chatteree’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? and The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories were the major book-length studies that emerged from the later Subaltern Studies group, and in particular expressed its theoretical trajectory. Chatterjee’s 1994 article in the Economic and Political Weekly, ‘Secularism and Tolerance’, continued in the direction set by the second of these books, confirming how close he had come to the indigenism of Nandy and his programme for organizing religious tolerance, though without quite accepting Nandy’s anti-modernism.¹⁹ Since then, Chatterjee has been extremely prolific, bringing out several books on varied topics, and has declared that it is time to move beyond the concerns of the Subaltern Studies group – without, of course, repudiating the theoretical insights derived within it. Indeed, from being a key representative of that school of historiography, he has become a key figure in postcolonial theory, whose continued assault on the Enlightenment values of universalism and reason remains very influential for students of India, even as his 1994 article remains his most direct engagement with the issue of Indian secularism.

In Furies, I included a section on Subaltern Studies, as a necessary prelude to evaluating Chatterjee’s essay on ‘Secularism as Tolerance’. This has now been removed. So much has since been written on it and, if the best initial critique of the theoretical turn taken by Subaltern Studies was by Sumit Sarkar, Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) constitutes the most powerful and scrupulously argued critique of those key theorists of the Subaltern Studies group whose writings have been perceived as being among the most coherent and illustrious contributions to postcolonial theorizing more generally. Chibber’s book-length critique of these theorists and their writings has been so effective that it has rendered further criticism otiose.²⁰

The last part of Chapter 3 takes up the task of clarifying the distinctions between religious fundamentalism, religious nationalism and communalism. Although the most dangerous forces within Hindu communalism (the right-wing reactionary formations of the RSS and its front organizations, and the BJP) explicitly espouse Hindu nationalism, there are a range of Hindu nationalisms. Theirs is the most pernicious kind, posited as it is on hostility to the Muslim ‘other’. Moreover, the danger represented by this Hindu Right is not just cultural, or directed only against Muslims or other religious minorities, but is mobilized politically against the majority of ordinary Hindus themselves.

By identifying themselves as Hindu nationalists, these forces of the Hindu communal Right clearly wish to disguise the wider and deeper danger they represent. A major part of their overall project is (a variant of) Hindu nationalism, and there is no real problem in referring to it as such – provided this larger danger of the Hindu communal Right is clearly recognized, and the multiple sources of its resurgence properly analysed.

In Part III, Chapter 4 addresses how not to perceive the forces of Hindu communalism, while Chapter 5 discusses how to situate it within the overall context of economic, political and social changes in India. Chapter 4 is probably the most iconoclastic from the perspective of the Indian Left. Easily the dominant view within the Indian Left and among Indian Marxists is that, in the Hindu communal Right, we have been witnessing the rise and growing danger of an Indian fascism. It can hardly be denied that the Hindu Right has certain fascist characteristics, but otherwise I have long dissented from this general view. Apart from two new and extended subsections, one taking up the more recent studies of fascism and another on the Left debate on fascism in India, the rest of this chapter contains only minor amendments since the publication of Furies. The fact that the BJP-led coalition government ruled from 1998 to 2004 at the centre without establishing anything remotely like a fascist dictatorship stands as a vindication of my prognosis and, I would argue, of my general analysis of why it was not correct to characterize the forces of Hindutva as fascist, despite its undeniable fascist aspects. However, the failure of a fascist dictatorship to emerge has not led those who insisted that an Indian fascism was indeed on the march to embark on any reappraisal of their earlier position. Rather, it has led only to further rationalizations and justifications of their original stance concerning the reality of Indian fascism. Readers will have to judge for themselves the merits of the respective positions of these thinkers and myself.

The way in which the enemy is characterized and understood can affect the conduct of the long-term struggle against it. Much depends, obviously, on what one understands by ‘fascism’, and this is by no means a straightforward question. Most sensible Marxist and bourgeois attempts to understand fascism involve serious investigation and reconstruction of the histories of ‘actually existing fascism’. To be thorough, this enterprise would have to be comparative; and it would have to start with what is universally accepted as the primary raw material – the histories of fascist movements and regimes in inter-war Europe, the proper study of which would include delving into the pre-war and late-nineteenth-century histories of the countries and the continent in question. This approach is not the special insight of Marxists, but simple common sense.

Thereafter, however, differences emerge. There is no simple positivism that can be deployed in such historical investigation and reconstruction. There is already a framework of assumptions and biases that guides this research, decisively shaping any final assessment – and which, at least for those more self-consciously aware of this and wanting to be internally consistent, constitutes a coherent operating paradigm. It matters a great deal whether it is a Marxist or non-Marxist who is doing the historical reconstructing, and if a Marxist, what kind of Marxist she is. Such prior alignments shape the scope and method of historical research, the directions of investigation, the weights assigned to different causal factors, and the generalizations that emerge from such a study. Either one is keenly aware not only about the various methodologies concerning the historical study of fascism between Marxists and non-Marxists, but also about the differences between those calling themselves Marxist, or one is not.

Greater self-consciousness on this score encourages sensitivity to the value of another, secondary level of discussion about fascism, addressing a broader field of enquiry. It seeks to grasp the guiding frameworks behind different approaches, and to understand why there are different theories of fascism, why different thinkers theorize as they do (and why they think they are right), and, finally, whether or not it is possible amid these contending understandings to establish accepted standards of adjudication. Discussion of this sort leads to a greater awareness of the difficulties in developing a completely convincing theory of fascism, to a better understanding of one’s own basic orientation on the issue, and to a greater capacity for self-criticism and intellectual humility in presenting one’s own argument. These are some of the reasons why I have engaged in such a discussion in this chapter. But the most valuable purpose of such an exercise is that one becomes much more aware of the problem of competing ‘fascist understandings’ or ‘fascist minimums’ or ‘fascist essences’ or ‘generalizations about the nature of fascism’, and that one must have good reasons for choosing one’s own alignments.²¹

Of course, most good studies of the actually-existing fascisms of the inter-war period, whether of bourgeois or Marxist provenance, provide generalizations about the essential nature of the fascist beast. This can he understood as establishing the basic dynamic of fascism, or the proper dialectic between the international and the national, or defining its key characteristics, or whatever. The point is that it is regularly done, and in turn becomes a crucial guiding frame for investigating other possible fascisms in different times and places. But how do we adjudicate between different Marxist understandings of contemporary ‘fascist threats’? The crucial reference point remains historical fascism and the subtlety and power with which it was analysed by outstanding Marxist thinkers and activists of the time – the classical Marxist tradition.

If there is no methodological escape from the ‘imperative of definition’, there are nonetheless different ways of going about this. One advantage that Marxists should have over non-Marxists is a greater inclination towards recognizing that a phenomenon like fascism must be understood as something in motion. Their definition of fascism must not be static, but dynamic. Weberians, neo-Weberians and Marxists correctly recognize the need for definition, and can therefore engage in shared talk of the ‘fascist essence’ or the ‘fascist minimum’. But Marxists must not, in pursuit of this intellectual–political responsibility, make the Weberian-influenced mistake of postulating ‘ideal types’. Precisely because fascism must be understood dynamically, I have insisted in this chapter that fascism must be seen as a unity of three moments – namely, when out of power, when in power, and in its transition from one to the other. This is why the historical key to grasping its ‘essence’ or ‘minimum’ is provided above all by Germany and Italy, while other historical examples of fascist-like movements provide important but partial insights. Both structure and agency must be incorporated – both the putative fascist actor and the context in which it operates, as well as the interrelationship between the two where the context was and is, both domestic and international.

The best classical Marxist understandings respected this methodological necessity, and tried to integrate all of these three dimensions. Fascism was not only linked closely to the contradictory workings of capitalism in the imperialist era, thus remaining a recurring tendency or possibility as long as capitalism and imperialism exist, but was a highly distinctive, indeed extreme, form of resolution of not just any or many kinds of capitalist crisis, but of the most exceptionally acute form. The fascist state was not just a very authoritarian form of right-wing, reactionary nationalism in power, but a very special kind of authoritarian state representing the most extreme form of political centralization (the ‘political expropriation of the ruling bourgeoisie’) necessitated by the exceptional severity of the crisis faced by capitalism in the country concerned. Hence, though fascist victory i.e., the capture of a state was rare, it had a profound qualitative impact both domestically and internationally.

In assessing the possibilities of fascist emergence in more recent times, the question of bourgeois democracy inserts itself. During the inter-war years there was nothing like the mass appeal (as an ideal to be striven for) that bourgeois liberal democracy acquired after World War II. This was in great part because liberal-democratic forms of political rule endured in capitalist countries – and not only there. Where these forms of rule sustained themselves, it was because of a deep mass commitment to their preservation and strengthening. In most of South America, a continent in which independent nations emerged almost everywhere after the 1830s, authoritarian rule was common till the 1970s. Thereafter, bourgeois democracy has become the norm. While, after the collapse of the communist bloc, the mass appeal of a socialism that would seek to overturn class rule even in its more ruthless neoliberal guise has greatly diminished, even as the mass aspiration to establish liberal-democratic forms of political rule (albeit capitalist) against existing authoritarianisms has greatly spread and grown. The banner of socialism has been largely replaced by that of democracy. One has to come to terms with this new reality globally and nationally: the mass emotional and political appeal of achieving and sustaining a national-political system of liberal democracy is itself a crucial new barrier to the resuscitation of the kind of exceptionally intense emotional identification of masses with a supreme leader so characteristic of fascism (both as a movement and as a state form), which was so often able to pass as the expression (and institutionalization) of a ‘truer and deeper kind of democracy’.

Furthermore, fascism is not just the strongest form of national reaction, but the strongest form of international reaction. That is what historical fascism was, and it is astonishing that Third World Marxists subscribing to the notion of fascism in the Global South can so flippantly and casually ignore this. Fascism’s victory and years in power represented the consolidation of a most dramatic right-wing shift in the relationship of class forces not only nationally, but also internationally. This could only be the case because the terrain on which that victory took place – the national territories of Europe – included advanced imperialist countries. Hungary and Romania, where strong fascist movements existed in the inter-war period, might not qualify as imperialist countries, but their movements were part of the penumbra of European fascism, whose central zone (Italy and Germany) was imperialist, and thus gave the fascist threat its distinctive character. Victory for these movements in Hungary or Romania would have resulted in regimes better characterized as something like semi-fascist, registering their different and lower order in relation to Italian and German fascism.

In this text, I have sought to emphasize the qualitatively different global impact in this respect of, say, a fascism victorious in the United States and the supposed clerical fascism of Iran. The impact of ‘fascism’ in a backward country is so enormously different from, and weaker in depth, scale and consequences for human history than, fascism in an advanced country that it makes no sense to see them both as species of the same genus. But this has not stopped some leftists and Marxists in South Asia from perceiving fascist dangers even in the small island country of Sri Lanka, as represented by the now defunct Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (‘Tamil Tigers’). The classical Marxist tradition had a powerful sense of the great importance of this point – hence its recognition that fascism proper was a phenomenon of imperialist countries only.

The dominance of the Stalinist and Maoist traditions in India has been so strong that one should not be surprised that respect for the classical Marxist tradition generally is much weaker. If the theory of Socialism in One Country (even a backward country) has not been repudiated, then why not also a Fascism in a Backward Country? At least some Indian and Third World Marxists have had sufficient respect for the power of the classical Marxist analysis of historical fascism to talk not of Indian fascism, but of a danger that is semi-fascist, quasi-fascist, and so on. In Chapter 4, I have queried even these usages. They are certainly preferable to talking of the danger of an ‘Indian fascism’, but, if used, should be understood only as a rough descriptive label. India today, however, is clearly not in the same league as most backward developing countries, but is widely recognized as an ‘emerging capitalist power’. This is sensible enough. But is it now to be understood as an imperialist power to which the application of the label of fascism, could be considered appropriate? Certainly, its foreign policy behaviour over decades in South Asia and its near environs has been expansionist and aggressive. But perhaps it