The objective of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is to establish a Hindu state (“Hindu Rashtra”) in India. But what exactly does a Hindu state mean? The obvious and immediate answer would be that instead of the present Constitutionally-guaranteed equality for all citizens irrespective of religion, there would be in such a state a superior status of the Hindus compared to those belonging to other religions, especially the Muslims who constitute the largest religious minority in the country. Such an inequality however cannot be sustained without a specifically repressive state; all states in a class-oppressive society are repressive but a state that institutionalises inequality in this manner would have to be even more specifically repressive. Would a Hindu state then mean a dictatorship of a collectivity called the Hindus exercised over those belonging to other religions?

The moment this question is posed, the answer is obviously “no”. A rickshaw puller would remain a rickshaw puller no matter what his religion in a Hindu state; a peon would remain a peon no matter what his religion in a Hindu state; a gig-worker would remain a gig-worker no matter what his religion in a Hindu state. The so-called Hindu state does not promise and would not achieve any change in the material condition of life for the majority of the Hindus; then in whose interests would the dictatorship, the form with which such a state would necessarily be associated, be exercised? The obvious answer is: in the interests of monopoly capital. A Hindu state, unlike what its name suggests, is nothing else but a dictatorship of monopoly capital.

There would of course be a veneer of Hindu rituals and Hindu religious practices before state functions, and there would no doubt be a preference for Hindus compared to others in selections for jobs; but new jobs themselves would not just be as non-existent as they are today, but there would even be a disappearance of existing jobs owing to the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the corporates. While the Muslims and other members of religious minorities would face severe and multiple oppressions, the Hindus would not experience any alleviation of their oppression. The class whose power would be greatly strengthened is monopoly bourgeoisie, and even within this class the new group of monopoly bourgeoisie; a Hindu state in other words would be a state lorded over by the Indian big corporates in general, and the Adanis and the Ambanis in particular.

This is reminiscent of the situation in Germany in the 1930s where the Nazis claimed to be giving effect to “Aryan superiority” by victimizing “non-Aryan” populations like the Jews (the Nazis considered it impossible for a person to be an “Aryan Jew”) and the Gypsies (an “Aryan Gypsy” was likewise considered impossible). The Nazi state however was not an “Aryan state”; the dictatorship it set up was, in the words of Georgi Dimitrov, President of the Communist International, at its Seventh Congress in 1935, the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.

The description of the state by those who lead it does not necessarily correspond to its reality; the question to ask is: which is the class that is using the state to further its own interests, and all states that claim in contemporary times to be furthering the interests of some ethnic or religious or linguistic group by scuttling democracy and reducing other groups to the status of second-class citizens, are in reality furthering the interests of monopoly capital by instituting its dictatorship and seeking to divide the working people along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines. The imposition of a  sectional state in a modern, multi-sectional society amounts in reality to a dictatorship of monopoly capital.

The question may be raised: since even the existing “secular” state is already dominated by monopoly capital, why should monopoly capital need, and hence aid the coming into being of, a new, and altogether different, Hindu-supremacist, state that embodies its dictatorship? The need for such a change obviously arises only when the earlier form of the state faces a serious threat; and that happens in a period when the economy runs into stagnation and greatly increased unemployment. The current move towards a dictatorship of monopoly capital, under the guise of a Hindu state, reflects the dead-end of the neo-liberal regime that has brought stagnation to the economy, and greater unemployment and acute distress to the vast mass of the working people.

Democracy provides greater scope for resistance and struggle to the working people, because of which in any period of crisis efforts are made to attenuate democracy, so that the threat to the hegemony of monopoly capital is kept in check; but when the crisis is protracted and the threat to its hegemony is persistent, monopoly capital adopts more extreme measures. It forms an alliance with whatever force is most capable of dividing the people, in order to generate an alternative distractive discourse, to prevent the working people from launching a united fight, and to justify the scuttling of democracy in the name of instituting a sectarian state, which in the Indian context is the promised Hindu state.

The distractive nature of the RSS-BJP discourse is absolutely obvious at present. When the country’s work-force, especially its youth, is weighed down by unemployment, when the incidence of educated unemployment is extremely high, the country’s rulers have not a word to say on this pressing problem; instead they are crying hoarse about infiltration from Bangladesh! Ironically, since by the BJP’s own reckoning a nation’s per capita gross domestic product is the index of its progress, Bangladesh, which according to the IMF has a higher per capita income at present than India, should be considered more advanced than India; how then can the BJP explain such massive infiltration as it claims from a more advanced to a less advanced country?

Liberal opinion has been trying to explain for some time why there has been such an upsurge of Hindutva in India of late. But it fails to notice that the rise of Hindutva in India is part of an upsurge of neo-fascism all over the world, because of which no India-specific explanation of this rise would be adequate. The rise of Hindutva in other words is not a sui generis phenomenon; to a significant extent it is orchestrated by monopoly capital through financial and media support, in India, as elsewhere in the capitalist world from Argentina, to the U.S., Italy, France, Germany, and the U.K., in the context of the dead-end that neoliberal capitalism has brought to the world economy.

The RSS recently celebrated its centenary; the fact that it suddenly finds itself ensconced in power while for a hundred years it had been nowhere near it, and can boast today to be the “richest political party” in the world, is to be attributed to the massive support it receives from monopoly capital at present.

But it is not only monopoly capital that has become well-disposed towards Hindutva. The Hindutva elements too have changed their attitude towards monopoly capital. The main support base of the RSS had originally been among shop-keepers, small capitalists and the urban middle class, and it had enjoyed the financial backing of certain feudal elements. It had never of course adopted an anti-monopoly rhetoric, unlike say in Germany where the Nazis had adopted an outwardly anti-monopoly stance before coming to power; but the RSS had not been exclusively pro-monopoly capital either. There had been alternative voices within the Hindutva camp regarding economic policy, though economic policy itself had not been explicitly an area of great concern to the Hindutva forces.

The contribution of Narendra Modi has been to change all this. His importance in the Hindutva hierarchy arises because he became an architect of the corporate-Hindutva alliance; and it is by forming this alliance that Hindutva came to power. Indeed, the very idea of promoting Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of the country was mooted at a gathering of capitalists at an “Investors’ Summit” in Gujarat when Modi was the chief minister of that state; and Modi became an unashamed, no-holds-barred, promoter of monopoly capital, especially of the newer elements within it. In the process he also became a promoter of international finance capital with which Indian monopoly capital had become integrated in the neo-liberal era. In the era of stagnation of neo-liberal capitalism, Modi with his neo-fascist agenda has become a particularly useful asset to Indian monopoly capital.