QUITE predictably, the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Nitin Nabin, has characterized the agitation launched on October 10, by Left student and youth groups and the Cockroach Janata Party, against the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, as being driven by “foreign forces”. Following his lead sundry BJP leaders have accused the protesters of spreading “anarchy” in society: an agitation in defence of democracy and of universal adult franchise, an agitation which itself constitutes an exercise of the peoples’ democratic right, is sought to be vilified by the BJP as a spread of “anarchy” and hence as weakening the “nation”. Those involved in this agitation therefore become, in effect, “anti-national”.

These remarks are not just name-calling or resorting to hyperbole to discredit the movement for the preservation of democracy in the country. They are not just the usual “small change” of contemporary politics that relies on exaggeration; on the contrary, they actually represent the essence of BJP thinking. They conform to the core of its fascist ideology; and it is this which makes fascist ideology so dangerous.

Fascism, apart from its other characteristics, like openly championing the interests of monopoly capital, especially of a segment within it that constitutes “new” monopoly capital; like “othering” a hapless ethnic or religious minority and seeking to create hatred within the majority against it; like using a combination of state repression and hooliganism by fascist thugs to suppress democracy and create terror among the populace; also invariably inverts the relationship between the “leader” and the “nation”. The “nation” is identified not with its people but with the “leader”. Hence anyone who protests against the “leader” is ipso facto necessarily being a “traitor to the nation”; she or he is acting in effect as an anti-national character whose actions must be at the behest of some “foreign forces” that are hostile to the “nation”.  

This perception is immanently anti-democratic. In the wake of the government crackdown on the peaceful protesters in Delhi on October 10, many opposition leaders expressed the view that we were living under a “dictatorship”. This accusation does not do full justice to reality. Fascism, or one should rather say neofascism in the contemporary context, is not just dictatorial; it is much more than the advocacy as one occasionally hears from some middle-class segments, of a dictatorship as an efficient means of governance. It may of course advance such arguments too, but only as supplementary arguments at best. The point is that its world-view, its weltanschauung, as expressed for instance in the inversion of the relationship between the “nation” and the “leader” is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

Amartya K Sen quotes Walter Bagehot, the nineteenth century English essayist, to the effect that democracy means “government by discussion”. It is certainly one way of looking at democracy, and a correct one at that. But fascism or neofascism abhors discussion; it sees the government as expressing the will of the “leader”. The “leader” of course may consult others if he likes (it is usually a “he” under fascism); but it most emphatically rejects the idea of a “government by discussion”. Fascism represents a return within a modern setting to the old feudal idea expressed by King Louis XIV of France when he had said: “L’etat c’est moi” (the state, that is I) or when Tsar Alexander the First had written to Emperor Napoleon of France: “What is Europe? It is you and I”.

This identification of the nation with the person of the ruler characterized late feudalism. By that time the concept of the “nation” had already emerged alongside the emergence of the bourgeoisie; it had replaced the old idea of the king having a “divine right to rule” and imbued kingship instead with the task of promoting the interests of the “nation”. The pre-modern idea of identifying the ruler with the “nation” is revived under fascism, though with one obvious modification: the ruler who earlier ruled because of being born into the royal family is now replaced by a “leader” who may be a commoner, even a self-proclaimed “chaiwala” or tea-seller, as Narendra Modi claims to have been, but who nonetheless is supposed to constitute the authentic and original source of power.

This inversion of relations where the “leader” is identified with the “nation” and the legitimacy of the “nation” comes from its serving the “leader” rather than the other way around, is located within a more general phenomenon, namely a destruction of reason. Fascism obviously involves a contempt for evidence, and since reason entails the application of thought to evidence, the contempt for evidence amounts to a destruction of reason. Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs had argued in his 1952 book The Destruction of Reason that fascism represented the ultimate denouement of a fairly prolonged process of destruction of reason. This destruction of reason is evident inter alia in the inversion of the relationship between the “leader” and the “nation” that we see occurring in India today before our very eyes.

The inversion of the relationship between the “leader” and the “nation”, the total disregard for evidence, and the  promotion of unreason to sustain these traits have, taken together, a disastrous impact on the life of a nation. Beyond well-attested facts, such as the gruesome repression of a minority, the silencing of the voice of the people in general, the destruction of democratic institutions, the inculcation of a pervasive atmosphere of fear among the people, and the brazen promotion of the interests of big capital, it also pushes the nation backwards by centuries in terms of its thought and knowledge.

This retrogression is most evident in the discipline of history, though by no means confined to it. For instance the neofascists hold that the “Aryans” originated in India from where they spread to the rest of the world; India in short is the source according to them of much of the “civilization” that we find in the rest of the world. Now, no amount of evidence to the contrary would ever persuade them that this was not the case. Even the Indus Valley civilization which has a very different and urban character altogether, and which predates the migration to the subcontinent, that could be associated, if at all, with the emergence of “Aryans”, would not only be denied its distinct character, but would be taught to students compulsorily as being a part of the “Aryan” civilization. The students in short would be forcibly fed unreason. They would be asked to disregard evidence, not just to question evidence which of course is part of the scientific method, but to disregard it altogether, which represents the acme of unreason. They would be asked in short to conform to the narratives propagated by the neofascists and in the process abandon the exercise of reason. The damage this would cause is incalculable.

The neofascists in other words are different from all other political groups including bourgeois political groups. The neofascists’ being in power brings in its train not just social and economic retrogression but a retrogression in thought.

The espousal of reason and of scientific temper, the institution of democratic rights for all, the formation of governments on the basis of universal adult suffrage, and the building of an egalitarian social and economic order in the country, were the goals around which the anti-colonial struggle had been fought; these goals constitute one integrated set and this integrated set was enshrined in the Constitution adopted after independence. No matter what specific criticisms one may have of the Constitution on this or that issue, this vision of the Constitution remains a central fact of outstanding importance.

The adoption of a neo-liberal economic regime, with its inherent inequalizing tendency that undermines the country’s striving for equality, represented the first betrayal of these Constitutional goals. The dialectics of neo-liberalism exacerbated inequality and aggravated unemployment; it has brought the country, as indeed it has brought many countries across the world, to a conjuncture where it has passed on to a neofascist political regime. Such a regime in India is helmed by Hindutva proponents who had nothing to do with the anti-colonial struggle and who openly advocate a counter-revolution against the long revolution of the Indian people.

The current struggle of students and youth, though organized around specific and apparently limited objectives, like getting Gyanesh Kumar to resign as Chief Election Commissioner, is in reality against this entire social, political and economic counter-revolution that seeks to push the country back by centuries.