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
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
