How fascism works in India
India’s fascist turn under Narendra Modi’s
Hindu nationalist rule has multiple parallels with global fascist tactics and
history, including in Nazi Germany and Trump’s United States
Jason
Stanley
Published on:
01 Jul 2025, 10:17 am
This
text is adapted from the 2025 Raosaheb Kasabe Distinguished
Lecture on History organised by the Paine Phule Foundation.
INDIA
HAS BEEN central to my work on fascism.
Both my books on fascism, How Fascism Works and Erasing History,
use India as a primary example.
India,
the structure of India, is somewhat different. No two fascist situations are
the same. In India, you have a long-time structure of a caste system.
Fascism
in Western societies is based on race. There is of course now a lengthy
20th-century and 21st-century literature on the relationship between caste and
race. But in a classic example of scapegoating, India has used its Muslim
minority as a way to bind together the different castes in support of what
looks to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is either starting now or at
least threatened. The theorist René Girard argued that a political community is
created by a scapegoat, that you need to make an innocent scapegoat to bind
together otherwise different groups. So, this is a different structure than in
European fascism.
We
would have to ask, in other non-Western countries too, what the structure of
fascism would look like. For example, in Kenya, with over 40 tribes, you just do
not have the background structure that would allow for something that looked
like fascism. We could ask whether a dictator like Idi Amin was a fascist, but
again, Uganda has such a different structure, such a different base, that it
may be too complex to apply a European concept, a concept like fascism.
So
why is India so central when there are these differences, when you have caste,
and when you have religion, and when you have a Muslim minority? India is
different because the theorists of Hindu fascism, V D Savarkar and M S
Golwalkar, explicitly took the Nazis’ treatment of Jews as a justificatory
model for targeting India’s Muslim population.
And the tactics that were used in Hindu nationalism, in the fascist parts of
Hindu nationalism, of Hindutva, mirror quite
precisely the tenets of fascism, the strategies and tenets of fascism, as I lay
out in How Fascism Works.
Chapter
one of that book, of my analysis, is called ‘The Mythic Past’. You draw on a
mythic past to create this illusion of past purity. So obviously, Hindutva, by
its claims of a pure Hindu past in India, is a core example of the mythic past,
first saying we were pure and then we were invaded and made impure. And the
language of purity invites comparison of immigrants to termites, vermin and
disease, something also familiar in contemporary politics in India.
The
mythic past also connects to another tactic of fascism, which I call sexual
anxiety. And one of the primary examples I use is the “love jihad” discourse in India. Charu Gupta works
as a theorist of both fascism, Nazism and Hindutva, so she can really see these
parallels, and has done work on both structures within National Socialism and
contemporary India.
So,
what is the idea of the love jihad? Well, if you have an underlying structure
of purity, if you have an underlying structure of a mythic past of purity, then
you can create panic that a minority group is disturbing that purity not just
by entering the country but by threatening women, the pure women. And this is
classic.
The political
erasure of Indian Muslims
National
Socialism said, according to the stab-in-the-back myth of the Nazis, that Jews
were bringing in black Senegalese soldiers who would then rape Aryan women or
just sleep with Aryan women to create non-white babies in Germany. So, this
structure of creating fear about your women is central to fascism. So, it is
also, as the journalist Ida B Wells laid out in 1892, an attack on the women of
the dominant group.
So,
love jihad is a straightforward attack, an even more straightforward attack
than the ideology and propaganda behind the mass lynching of black American
men. Why? Because it grants that Hindu women might fall in love with Muslims.
And then it says, “Oh no, they’re actually being tricked.” They have no agency.
They are the property of Hindu men. And when they marry Muslims, they have been
tricked because they cannot make their own decisions. It targets 50 percent of
the Hindu population, and it says women are the property of men. They cannot
marry Muslims.
Whenever
they marry Muslims, it is not under their own agency, and they must be saved
from that. It is harsher than the ideology behind lynching, because the thought
behind lynching was that black men were raping white women. So here it is
saying that even when Hindu women marry Muslim men, they are not agents,
because they are like objects. They are owned by Hindu men.
These
parallels, the idea that immigrants are a kind of infestation, a violation of
purity, these are all characteristic marks of fascism. So, it is a global
fight. Trump and Modi, Netanyahu, Putin, Orbán, these are linked figures using
similar strategies. But in India, we have a more explicit case.
In
India, Hitler is not represented as the worst man in history. Hitler is, in the
popular culture in India, a conqueror. So, fascism does not have, as it were,
the bad reputation that it has in the West. And that is something that makes it
an even more concerning situation.
We
can see the attack on Muslims, on non-Hindus, partly as a method of
scapegoating to bring different Hindu castes together. And this is exactly, as
it were, out of the playbook.
We
can also see in India another tactic of fascism that I call
anti-intellectualism. Attacks on universities, representing universities as
anti-national, as seditious, representing student protests as anti-national,
sedition. The idea is you take critical intellectual enquiry and you represent
it as an attack on the nation.
Because,
in fact, the history of India is much more complex. It is not a history of a
pure Hindu past. And Hinduism is itself a complex religion that does not easily
fit into notions of Aryan supremacy.
So
how does this form of anti-intellectualism take shape? What I do in my work and
my activism is draw parallels between what is happening in other democratically
back-sliding countries, in other regimes, and I say, look at the similarities.
And India is something of a pioneer in these techniques.
There
are very clear borrowings in the United States from Viktor Orbán’s
authoritarianism in Hungary. For example, Orbán targeted Central European
University and used his country’s accreditation system to make it impossible to
accredit students. Central European University had to move to Vienna. We can
see very similar tactics in the United States: Columbia University being
targeted, and they are going after Harvard University. Orbán now very clearly
appears in the United States as a hero, and is inspiring the Trump
administration, the Make America Great Again movement. And in India, Modi is
doing something similar.
It’s
inarguable that the tactics we saw in India, for example, and the reaction to
the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019,
are being followed almost point by point by the Trump administration. Anyone
familiar with 2019 in India, with what they did to Jawaharlal Nehru University,
for example – the police coming onto campus, going after protesters, the
representations in the media – will see the parallels.
We
see the New York Times attacking US universities again and again for
being anti-national, for having protests against Israel, even when there are
Jewish students deeply involved in these protests. And the media in the United
States, like the New York Times op-ed page, has attacked universities
relentlessly for ten years – essentially for not being patriotic, for centring
Black history, for criticising scientific racism. I think you see something
similar in the press in India, and you saw something similar in the press in
2019, these justifications of the representations of the universities as
anti-national.
But
in India at the time, you had those media outlets where, essentially, there’s
good reason to believe there was government pressure, that the negative
coverage was part of a campaign. Whereas in the United States, you have
universities being attacked by the media for a decade with no government
involvement. The media has willingly played the role of laying the path for
attacking universities.
Let
us go back to 2019 and the Citizenship Amendment Act. We have the media in
India attacking universities, we have the disparaging representation of
students protesting laws that create tiers of citizenship – the hallmark of
fascism discriminating between Hindus and Muslims – and we have students as the
source of resistance to authoritarianism. You have professors targeted, like
when Pratap Bhanu Mehta was cast out of Ashoka University in 2021. Mehta is no
radical, he is a liberal – he is a liberal political theorist.
So,
you have this sort of targeting of prominent academics. Columbia University did
this with Katherine Franke. They forced her into retirement for comments she
made on the news programme Democracy Now! which supposedly made Jewish students
feel unsafe at Columbia. And she, like Mehta, is a professor that any
university should be proud to employ.
Of
course, Mehta was immediately hired at Princeton University as a distinguished
visiting professor. And yet you know he cannot go back to an Indian university.
This targeting of prominent intellectuals – the targeting, the revision of
history and perspectives – we now see in the United States too. Surely one of
the greatest writers of the last century, certainly of the last 50 years, is
the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Instead of expressing pride about her
being American, about such a great thinker and writer, her works have been
banned because they represent a perspective on the United States that does not
extol the white majority.
We
find similar revisions of history in the textbooks that are now promulgated
throughout India. We find an attack on India’s secular democracy. We find
subtle revisions of history to represent M K Gandhi as a traitor. One textbook I talk
about in Erasing History says that one of Gandhi’s central goals was to
get India to pay reparations to Pakistan. If you think about that, what they
are saying there is that Gandhi was a traitor.
This
revision of history, the minimisation of Muslim leaders
in India and Muslim periods in India’s history, is central to a fascist
movement, as is the erasure of the pasts of minority groups and the elevation
of the identity of the dominant group as the identity of the nation.
India’s
attacks on universities went further in 2019 than what we are seeing in
America, but we are quickly catching up. Some participants of the 2019 anti-CAA
protests, like Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal of the women students’ group
Pinjra Tod, were accused of sedition. We see already in the United States that
students are being hauled off the street for co-authoring op-eds in student
newspapers and dragged to brutal prisons in Louisiana.
Let
us turn to the topic of resistance. I want to turn here to Bangladesh, where the students led the resistance. We can see
the centrality of students and the centrality of universities – and those who
seek to dismantle democracy, they too can see the centrality of students and of
universities.
It
is essential that universities hold their ground because these hallowed
democratic institutions have within them young students who cherish freedom and
are willing to act on that. So, we have to look to India for the kind of
resistance that Bangladesh provided, and we have to respond to the tactic of
scapegoating.
We
must recognise that there are many oppressed groups in India, and there must be
solidarity between the oppressed. In the United States, the great scholar and
civil-rights activist W E B Du Bois described how poor whites and poor blacks
were unifying in a labour movement because they collectively recognised the
similarity of their oppression. The northern industrialists and the southern
planter class used race as a divide between people who should otherwise have
been united. Essentially, they told poor whites, “We are all white. You might
not have any money, we might be treating you like trash, but at least you are
white.” That is how race works. That is how the fascist regime of the Jim Crow
era in the US South worked. It drew poor whites into that fascist regime by
telling them, “We’re going to keep on having you do the manual labour for
wealthy whites, but at least you are white.”
When
challenging scapegoating as a tactic, it is essential to emphasise the
similarity in material conditions. The targets of fascism are minority groups,
intellectuals, the media, the universities – and women, because the idea is to
say that the dominant group must reproduce, because the only people in the
nation should be the dominant group. And members of the non-dominant
communities are always invaders.
The
concern that many of us have about what is happening in India today is that the
basis is being laid for anything from ethnic cleansing to genocide. I have been
worried about India. My book How Fascism Works was published in 2018,
and India is a principal example there because we see the rhetoric laying the
basis for this, we see what is happening with the legal system, we see what
looks to be something like the Nuremberg Laws, which took citizenship from my
father as a Jew in Berlin in the 1930s. We see a structure, between the
National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, that threatens
to remove the citizenship of many, many Indians.
And
then, when you criticise that, you are told, “Oh, we are helping immigrants. We
are allowing non-Muslim immigrants to come in.” Like with Jim Crow, there is
the use of these superficially neutral methods to remove the citizenship of a
large population of Indians.
We
already see that non-Hindu citizens of India are being treated like
second-class citizens, being arrested and prepared for mass deportation.
Somehow, the structure of Indian democracy has held in certain places, probably
because of the federalist structure of India. The country’s various states have
some power and the capacity for resistance. So far, though there are regular
lynchings of non-Hindus, India has not crossed the line – even after the
experiment in Assam – of having grand
concentration camps to collect people whose citizenship and heritage in India
has been removed because they lack the proper documentation. Unlike in the
United States, there are not yet vast deportation centres packed full.
But
as you see in the United States, the language that we had in the first Trump
administration is now being transformed into policy. My concern with India is
that we’re seeing that process slowed somewhat, for numerous reasons, but you
have the rhetoric – and, like in the United States, it could soon turn into
policy.
When
we look at other non-Western countries, there is an old debate – in African
philosophy, for instance, as with Léopold Sédar Senghor on African socialism –
where you ask whether the material conditions in a non-Western country are
similar enough to those in a Western country to apply the same concepts. I
think in India, despite its bewildering variety of groups and languages, the
scapegoating mechanisms of Hindu nationalism have allowed India to create
something like a European fascist structure. Narendra Modi himself is a kind of
cultish leader; he doesn’t
exactly look like Mussolini, he doesn’t exactly look like Hitler, but he does
have a kind of, almost religious, cult around him. He is the Leader in the
European fascist sense. And then, finally, we have an explicit history of Hindu
nationalists acknowledging the influence of and drawing justification from Nazi
Germany.
Courtesy:
Himal
https://www.himalmag.com/politics/india-modi-fascism-hindu-nationalism-muslims?utm_source=NewsletterSubscribers&utm_campaign=ccd040f6aa-virtual+cover+june+2025_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_949b3d6c7a-ccd040f6aa-280059413
