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Scarce Democracy: India’s Elections and the Legitimation of Neo-Fascism Printer friendly page Print This
By John Maerhofer
Submitted by Author
Wednesday, Jul 23, 2014

Recently, India held general elections, taking place in nine phases from April to May of 2014. One of the most inhabited countries in the world and an emerging player in global capital, the elections attracted the attention of mainstream media outlets across the world, especially in the U.S. With little exception, the corporate media have heralded India as “the largest democracy in the world,” calling the recent elections historic in the attempts to encompass a wide-range of ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and economic divisions.


Furthermore, India has a multi-party system, including some “communist” parties that have had major victories in Kerala and West Bengal in India’s post-independence era and made a noble effort in the most recent electoral run to oppose the pre-dominance of the ruling parties. In reality, like the U.S., the elections were fought between the two mainstream parties, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the liberal Indian National Congress, both of which represent the Indian ruling class and have significant links to global capitalist interests. In a landslide victory, the BJP won 282 out of 543 Parliament seats, giving the right-wing a significant majority over the political direction of the Indian State, to the delight of global ruling class which desires to wield a stronger hand against resistance movements during this period of intensified capitalist crisis.


The landslide victory also brings to the forefront Narendra Modi, the head of the BJP who has a dark past, yet one that seems to fit into the turn to the fascist right that has been going on across the globe. Modi’s rise to power comes at the heels of his tenure as the head of the BJP coalition in the state of Gujarat, where he ruled as chief minister until his recent victory. In 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire and sparked violent riots directed at the Muslim inhabitants in the surrounding areas of the Godhra, leading to the brutal massacre of over 2,500. The police in the areas reportedly stood by and even facilitated the rampage, and strong evidence suggests that Modi allowed the massacres to go on unabated, a report that he emphatically denies. It is for this reason that Modi was denied an entry visa to the U.S. in 2005. Modi’s role in the massacres, however, did not prevent him from being elected repeatedly, nor did it stop investors from funneling billions into Gujarat, which is the most significant reason Modi has risen in power since 2002.


To clarify, despite its claims to being the “largest democratic country in the world,” a report issued by OXFAM in 2010 details that eight Indian states, including Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal, account for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African nations combined, a grim picture that dismantles the myth of prosperity that has accompanied the “miraculous” economic boom of the Indian State. Because India is often seen as the beacon of democracy, internal resistance to neoliberal privatization and dispossession is automatically labelled fanatical and extremist, unless it fittingly coincides with ruling-class policy or if the extremism has an ultra-nationalist tint. The BJP is intimately linked to the extreme right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which was founded in 1925 and modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party (PNF). The RSS openly boasts about its fascist roots and its members regularly participate in violence against Muslims and Sikhs, including and most notably in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat under Modi’s reign as chief minister in 2002.


As we have seen over and over again, capitalist power depends upon crisis and violence in order to further profit. Modi, it seems, will provide the capitalist class with the means to wield a heavier hand in order to create the appropriate environment for the profit-making machine to thrive for the handful of millionaires, while millions of people in India live in absolute poverty. Fascism is a constituent part of capitalism, a mechanism has been utilized at “appropriate” moments of crisis throughout its history. As the 1930’s demonstrated, the rise of fascist regimes in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Japan were conditioned by the devastating global crisis, usually referred to as The Great Depression by mainstream outlets, yet in reality can be characterized as the political manifestation of the period of “capitalism-in-crisis.” The RSS in India and its political counterpart in the BJP reflect a world-wide turn to fascist politics, as the recent elections in Europe reveal.


Though many (not all) of these movements have shed the Nazi insignias, the rhetoric of ultra-nationalism, anti-immigration, and (particularly) anti-Muslim racism are all consistent with a swerve to parties of the political Right who have been trying to hijack the anger of alienated working class, just as the fascist parties were able to do in the 1930’s. In Japan, for example, working-class movements, which gained some impetus in the 1920’s in both the rural and urban sectors of the country, were slowly co-opted by right-wing elements, culminating in the fascist takeover by 1931, the year Japan imperialism expanded fully into Manchuria. As the crisis in global capital spirals out of control, the ruling class will gladly align itself with fascism in order to erode working-class resistance that attempts to rethink the hegemony of neoliberal capital and the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Under the guise of creating “a good investment climate,” the capitalist class need to wrench power out of the hands of workers through a combination of propagandistic mechanisms like nationalism and religion, and when all else fails, the use of fascist violence to dissolve the remnants of leftist sympathy. This is clearly the case in India in which there has been a steadily widening resistance movement against neoliberal privatization and the massive wealth disparities. Accordingly, one of the reasons Modi is favored by both ruling-class forces is that he will not flinch in wielding a stronger hand against such movements, as he demonstrated so clearly in Gujarat in 2002.

One of the biggest difficulties the Indian ruling class has faced in recent years is the Maoist insurrection in the Central and Eastern parts of the Indian subcontinent. Since 2004 and with a legacy that goes back to 1968, the Maoist insurrection has built a substantial base among the tribal populations and the historically dispossessed “untouchable” castes in the forests of Central/Eastern India. The Maoist insurrection continues to be part of the overall resistance to systemic inequality while also signaling a radical departure from the reformist discourse which argues for working within the system to enable change, a facet of their political outlook that sharply differs particularly with the mainstream Indian Left. Since its inception as a rebellion in Naxalbari in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, a revolt which was brutally crushed by the State in conjunction with the mainstream Communist Party of India (CPI), the Maoists have focused on armed struggle in the countryside while also organizing in predominantly tribal communities of Eastern and Central India.

Additionally, there has been a move to build solidarity with super-exploited workers in the urban centers, many of whom are tribals themselves who have been forced off their lands in search of work in the metropoles, only to become part of the slums in the inner cities.

The success of the Maoists in the rural areas has forced the hand of the state, which in 2009 initiated “Operation Green Hunt” in a frustrated attempt to crush the insurgency. The para-military violence of the state has only deepened the insurgency, which not only wages war against the Indian state, but also against the multinational corporations that have played a significant role in the neoliberal model adapted in India since the 1990’s. Here it is important to point out that what preceded the most recent military campaign to root out the Maoists, what the former Prime Minister labeled “the greatest threat to India’s security,” was the signing of hundreds of Memorandums of Understanding (MOU’s) with multinational mining corporations in 2005. Hence, this was an economic decision rather than one based on a security threat, which was initiated after a terror campaign conducted by the ultra-nationalist group Salwa Judum (purification hunt in the Gondi language) against resilient Tribals who refused to give up their lands for multinational development. The vicious campaign conducted by the fascist Salwa Judum only deepened the internal resistance to the state and resulted in the subsequent formation of grassroots organizations backed by the Maoists insurgency.

The ruling class is backing Modi because he seems the most willing to use an even stronger hand against such insurgent movements, a development that no doubt pleases the corporations that hope to continue to reap the profits off of land resources in the areas currently under Maoist control. With the crisis in capital spiraling out of control, it is clear that the ruling class needs to turn to fascism as well as to figures like Modi to wield a stronger hand in the struggle between the capital and the globally dispossessed.


Although both the political Right and the institutional Left in India criticize the Maoists for the overt use of militant violence, the insurgency brings up many questions for those of us working for revolutionary change across the globe. The mainstream “communist” parties in India, who ran numerous candidates in the recent elections, channel most of their hope in creating alliances among varying leftists tendencies as well as with the dominant parties themselves, a move that can only result in reformist politics, thus leaving the system of capital in place. How can the Maoist insurrection, which focuses its efforts on improving the conditions of the super-exploited subaltern classes and the dispossessed tribal populations in the struggle against capitalist globalization, be situated in the context of the massive uprisings that have taken place across the globe in response to the neoliberal privatization of “the commons?” Mostly, the Maoists have been left out of the discourse of the global insurgency as a result of their being relegated to the margins of sectarian violence and the refusal to participate in the electoral process, a stigma which automatically deems such forms of resistance as fanatical and extremist.


Added to this is the character of insurgency to which the Maoists have dedicated themselves as a revolutionary organization, with the focus on armed resistance rather than occupation of public domain. Would the latter work in the forests of central India against a massive para-military force backed by the state and the multinationals? The answer is clearly one related to strategy rather than morality. With the overwhelming regression of Occupy and other movements that are based on solely on the concept of collective seizure and re-absorption of “the commons,” and the slow but steady rise of “neo” fascist regimes backed by strong allies of the capitalist ruling class, the Maoist insurgency forces those of us dedicated to the end of neoliberal hegemony to rethink radical strategizing in the continuing struggle for social and economic justice. Thus, the Maoists’ struggle should be taken as a symbol of continuing resistance as we build stronger ties both internally and to the international working class in the building of a revolutionary future, the beginning of which is now.


 

John Maerhofer is an educator and activist, currently living in Rhode Island. His book, Rethinking the Vanguard, was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2009.


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