Women on the March: Right-Wing Mobilization in Contemporary India

Abstract

The rise of fascism in contemporary India has been noted in the Western press primarily as Ccommunalism' as yet another riot [as pogroms are called in India] has devastated the Muslim community. However, as I hope to illustrate in this essay, what we are confronting bears a chilling resemblance to Italian and German fascism.l I am using the term Cfascism' consciously to define an ideology and social movement which has ideological links and parallels to Italian and German fascism, including anti-Semitism (Semite in the sense of both Muslim and Jew), a politics which posits an organic unity of race, religion, culture and nation, a movement which has the style and methods of European fascism: Cthe unshackling of primitive instincts; the denial of reason, the spellbinding of the senses by pageantry and parades' (Nolte, 1965: 39); and is above all an anti-communist, anti-Matsist movement supported by the middle classes and the petit bourgeois. The Indian movement is deliberately modelled after the European fascist movements and although much that is deemed sVVestern' is rejected by the Indian movement, the Nazis remain figures of admiration in the writings ofthe main ideologues. The goal of Hindu fascism is to seize political power and redefine India, not as a secular state, but as a IIindu Rashtra or Hindu Nation. In this formulation of the nation-state no identity other than the Hindu identity can be allowed to exist. Annihilation of Muslims (12 per cent of

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