COMMUNISTS in India often mobilised public donations and public effort to establish schools and colleges in their areas of work. This was of course totally different from the activity of establishing schools for children by fascistic outfits like the RSS; it differed from the latter in two obvious ways. One, the Communists did not start educational institutions in order to control them and disseminate through them merely their own particular world-view; their aim was to improve the general level of education of the people, in the confident belief that if people became educated then they would automatically see the worth of the Communist world-view. The Communist-built institutions therefore were authentic educational institutions, not mere means of carrying out specific propaganda. Two, for this very reason the Communists built not just schools for children, as the fascists do to catch them at an impressionable age, but also colleges for mature students who could freely discuss ideas and form opinions.

These two endeavours expressed in other words two completely contrary attitudes to education. When Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Hungry man; reach for the book” he was articulating the Left attitude to education, as something that broadens perceptions and hence is essentially emancipatory. The fascist attitude to education is diametrically opposite to this; according to it any broadening of perceptions on the part of the people is essentially subversive and hence must be suppressed. All authentic education must therefore be suppressed and replaced by fascist propaganda. While the Left exhorts the “hungry man” to “reach for the book”, the fascists encourage the burning of books, as they had done in Nazi Germany.

Today’s neo-fascists emulate their predecessors in this regard. They are implacably hostile to intellectual activity in general and to intellectuals as a social group. The destruction of all educational institutions of excellence that is occurring not only in India, and in other countries with similar regimes, but even in the United States, is an expression of this tendency. Terrorising intellectuals in India who dare to express their thoughts freely with raids from the Enforcement Directorate, invoking public animosity towards them by labelling them “the Khan market gang” (whatever that may mean), the “tukde tukde gang” (people out to break up the country), the “urban Naxals” (i.e. ultra-Left elements), are all part of this tendency. It is no accident that Donald Trump in the US sees American universities as teeming with Communists who need to be weeded out; such paranoia is immanent in the neo-fascist attitude to education.

The Modi government has systematically attempted to destroy Jawaharlal Nehru University, to make Viswa Bharati University non-functional, to subvert Hyderabad Central University, to terrorise Jamia Millia Islamia, to destabilise Delhi University, to take over the Pune Film Institute (against which the students had a long agitation), and to control the Fine Arts Department of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. All of them are institutions built mainly after independence, of which the country could be genuinely proud, and the attack on them represents the most grotesque effort to snuff out original and creative thinking in the country. This assault on thought is eerily similar to the assault by the Trump administration on Columbia University, on Harvard University, and on other institutions of repute in the United States.

While the neo-fascist attempt to stultify thought and suppress intellectual activity is not difficult to understand, what does appear puzzling is something quite different: why in a country that always held its intellectuals in high esteem (which no doubt was a pre-capitalist legacy), has such an attempt met with a certain degree of success? Anyone in the academia can vouch for the fact that not long ago, common people in India held intellectuals, especially the academics, in high esteem. Then why has not the Modi government’s assault on intellectuals aroused the revulsion one would normally have expected? The case in the US is somewhat different in this respect, since, not having had a feudal past, it never accorded to intellectuals the exalted status that older societies like India typically did. But what exactly has happened in India to change this?

The most decisive factor underlying such a change has undoubtedly been the introduction of the neoliberal regime in the country. Neoliberalism has contributed to this change in at least three distinct ways. First, it has widened income inequalities greatly, and even though intellectuals and academics have not been among the higher income earners, significant segments of them have certainly been much better off under neoliberalism compared to the mass of the working people. An illustration will make this point clear. In 1974 while the official minimum support price of a quintal of wheat in India was Rs 85, the starting basic salary of an Associate Professor in a central university was Rs 1,200 per month; today the MSP for wheat is Rs 2,275 per quintal while the starting basic monthly salary of an Associate Professor in a central university is Rs 131,400. Taking these as very rough approximations to the movement in income levels of the two categories of persons, it appears that while an academic’s income has gone up by over 100 times, that of a farmer has increased by 27 times; that is, their income ratio has become more than three times as large over this period, which largely coincides with the neoliberal era. The greater alienation of the working people from academics and other intellectuals is hardly surprising in such a situation.

Second, capitalism has a dissolving effect on the pre-existing communities. The respect for the intelligentsia in India was an inheritance from the sense of community from pre-capitalist times; the neoliberal regime that has unleashed full-blooded, no-holds-barred, capitalism in the country, has played the role of dissolving this sense of community existing from pre-capitalist times, and has contributed to a widening chasm between the intelligentsia and the working people.

Third, together with this tendency towards individualisation, there has been a simultaneous phenomenon of globalisation which has meant a dissociation of large segments of the intelligentsia from an anchorage in the domestic society and a tendency among them towards global networking; this again has taken them away from the working people of the country.

For all these reasons, neoliberalism has contributed to a widening of the chasm between the working people and the intelligentsia, which in turn has made it easier for neo-fascism to attack the intelligentsia that tends generally to act as a defender of democracy, secularism and tolerance. This is yet another way in which neoliberalism has prepared the ground for neo-fascism.

It may be thought that the loss of respect among the working people for the intelligentsia should be a welcome development, for it obliterates social distinctions and social inequalities. This however is erroneous. While an egalitarian society entails the absence of a special class of people called the intelligentsia, since everybody becomes both a working person and an intellectual (which after all is why Communists were establishing educational institutions), the mere debunking and vilification of the intelligentsia in the name of egalitarianism, simply makes society rudderless and exposes it to the sway of neo-fascists and charlatans. There is, in other words, a fundamental difference between a dispersal of ideas among the people instead of ideas being concentrated within a small group that has monopoly control over them, and a destruction of ideas.

In fact even perceptive liberal writers, like the economist J. M. Keynes, were acutely aware of the importance of having socially sensitive intellectuals in a capitalist society, what he called the “educated bourgeoisie”, who can command sufficient influence in society in order to rectify the system and overcome its defects. The creation of solely self-absorbed and socially insensitive intellectuals under the neoliberal regime, who do not command influence in society, even in advanced capitalist countries, is one of the major contradictions of late capitalism. In countries like India it has certainly been conducive to the growth of neo-fascism.

Overcoming the chasm between the working people and the intelligentsia so that conditions are created for the defeat of neo-fascism, becomes possible however because of the very crisis of neoliberalism. The intelligentsia becomes a victim of this crisis and progressively loses the privileged position it had acquired earlier under neoliberalism. Mention was made above about the faster rise in the salaries of academics in India than of farmers’ incomes in the neoliberal era; under the crisis of neoliberalism however these supposedly higher salaries are not even paid on time. The sheer economic difficulties faced by academics in India in the last few years testifies to the fact that the fates of the intelligentsia and of the working people get linked together during the crisis of neo-fascism, which itself moves centre-stage in a situation of such crisis.    

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