If We Do Not Fight Back Today, It Will Be Too Late Tomorrow
The fascist duo of Modi and Shah are pushing the country towards a brutal naked fascist dictatorship with each passing day. CAA and NRC are the new machinations used to move towards their goal of a communal fascist ‘Hindu Rashtra’ as envisaged by the likes of Savarkar, Golwalkar and Hegdewar. CAA and NRC will undoubtedly make the Muslims a second-grade citizens, if and when they will be recognised as citizens. This is precisely the dream of Savarkar and Golwalkar, as one can gauge from their explicitly fascist writings. All this is being done within the garb of parliamentary bourgeois democracy, without amending the Constitution, without doing away with elections, or other forms and processes of bourgeois democracy. Bourgeois democracy has reached such a decadent and impotent stage in the Twenty-first century, that the new fascist and extreme right-wing reactionary and authoritarian regimes do not need to do away with them. Secondly, such a step reduces the hegemony of fascist regime, as shown by the early-Twentieth century examples of fascist rise in Europe. Even fascists learn from their historical experience and even reactionary ideologies perform a ‘redemptive activity’, as we have pointed out in ‘The Anvil’ time and again. We pointed out to these peculiarities of Twenty-first century fascism in one of the essays in the previous issue too. The recent experiences have only confirmed this diagnosis.
CAA and NRC are classical fascist laws. This leads to religious profiling of population, creation of concentration camps (detention centres), incarceration of a large number of not only Muslims, but also poor Hindu population, mostly dalits and tribals and women. There is little doubt that the detainees will soon be used as slave labour by the big capital (as was done in Nazi Germany) and the fascist state will immediately create justification for this. The enemy figure of the ‘other’ which includes only the Muslims and immigrants will soon be expanded to include not only dalits, tribals, women but also all kinds of political opposition, especially revolutionary communists. This is one of the usual methods used by the fascists to target their political foes. The German Nazis and Italian fascists did the same thing. The enemy figure of the Jew was soon expanded to include all political opposition and especially communists. It is noteworthy that Bolshevism was described in Nazi propaganda as a ‘Jewish conspiracy’.
This is not to say that the path of Hindutva fascists is a cakewalk. In the instance of CAA and NRC too, it is very challenging for Modi and Shah for a variety of reasons. One reason is historical. Due to the peculiarity of the Twenty-first century fascist rise in general and Hindutva fascist rise in particular. Rather than being cataclysmic, it is long and protracted and has a long incubation period and in the Twenty-first century it does not need to do away with the shell of bourgeois democracy. This had two consequences. One, it allowed the Hindutva fascists to effect, what Gramsci had called ‘molecular permeation’ into the state machinery, including army, police, judiciary, bureaucracy, etc., as well as the the civil society through their myriad institutions. Two, it creates a number of loopholes and gaps in the structure of fascist hegemony. This is the dialectics of the Twenty-first century fascist rise, especially, the Hindutva fascist rise: the fascists will be challenged by various sections and classes of the masses and they will not be as less challenged as the Nazis were due to the cataclysmic character of their rise, but at the same time, today’s fascists are much more well-equipped to deal with the scattered challenges posed by the spontaneous movements of different sections of society. Thus, the nationwide protests against CAA and NRC on the one hand prove that the Hindutva fascist hegemony has cracks and is far from being homogeneous and monolithic and here lies the opportunity for the progressive forces, given they are discerning enough. At the same time, the deep infiltration into the police, armed forces, bureaucracy and judiciary is allowing the fascists to deal with the challenge posed by the spontaneous and scattered eruptions against CAA and NRC across the country, at least till now. Here lies the challenging task confronting all the revolutionary forces today.
The need of the hour, therefore, is to link all the protests against CAA and NRC. If this happens it could prove to be Achilles’ Heel for Modi government, or as they are saying, indeed, a little over-optimistically, ‘this is the beginning of the end’. But again, it would be a suicidal mistake to assume that this would be the decisive defeat of Hindutva fascism. In 2004 too, when BJP was defeated in the parliamentary elections, the majority of Indian progressives celebrated far too early, terming it the ‘end of Hindutva fascism’. What Brecht said almost eight decades ago, was never so meaningful as today:
“Those who are against fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.”
Or, what Horkheimer had said, despite all the theoretical weaknesses of the Frankfurt School: “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism.”
We must understand that today, the decisive and final defeat of fascism coincides with the decisive defeat of capitalism. In the present phase of imperialism, that is, neoliberal globalisation, fascism will continue to exist in the society, whether in power or not and any regime (for example, right-wing, centre-right or centrist) will use it as a counter-weight to the revolutionary working class movement. Bourgeois democracy has exhausted whatever was still left of its progressive potential a century ago. Historically, it was bankrupt even a century ago. However, today, as the Indian experience shows, no bourgeois party has the will or strength to even join a united front against fascism.
Therefore, if the revolutionary forces succeed to strengthen the anti-CAA and anti-NRC mass movement by leading it beyond the limits of spontaneity and eventually succeed in compelling the Modi-Shah government to roll back this communal fascist law, it would not tantamount to the defeat of fascism as such. However, immediately, the Modi-Shah fascist government will indeed face a humiliation, if the spontaneous mass movement against CAA and NRC succeeds and obliges the government to roll back this law. However, this too, as we mentioned above, requires that this mass movement moves beyond the ambit of spontaneity and develops a conscious revolutionary leadership. This seems to be a huge challenge right now. Only time will tell whether we are able to overcome this challenge.
Another challenge before this movement is transcending all forms of bourgeois constitutionalism. Of course, the CAA and NRC do away with whatever was there in the Indian constitution that can be called truly democratic and truly secular, in the real sense of the term and we must fight against these fascist endeavours and defend our constitutional democratic rights, howsoever weak they are. However, we must also move beyond the constitutional democratic rights as far as formulating our political demands are concerned. Saving Indian constitution cannot be the ultimate demand of a revolutionary mass movement. To argue that the Indian Constitution is the ‘most democratic and most secular in the world, as it was drafted by Dr. Ambedkar’ is a travesty of history. Those who make such claims only reveal that either they have not read the Constitution as well as the history of contemporary India, or they are intentionally spreading a bourgeois democratic and constitutionalist illusion, for a variety of reasons. One of the reason is that since Ambedkar drafted the Constitution, these liberal and liberal progressives fear that if they criticise it, the dalit masses will drift away from them. Second, the liberals, especially, know that even though the Constitution is not truly democratic and secular in the modern sense of these terms, going beyond it would mean ‘going too far’. Thus, for different reasons, certain people are either harbouring a bourgeois democratic and constitutionalist illusions or spreading such illusions knowingly. It is very important for the progressive and revolutionary intellectuals and particularly the revolutionary and democratic youth to understand the limitations of Indian bourgeois democratic constitution and how heavily it borrows from the oppressive colonial Government of India Act of 1935 and other oppressive colonial laws. We cannot go into a detailed critique of Indian Constitution here. But this much can be said: read the entire Indian constitution and just compare it, on the one hand, with the revolutionary bourgeois constitutions or the so-called ‘declarations of rights’ of the late-Eighteenth or Nineteenth century and, on the other, with the oppressive colonial British ‘government of India acts’ and one will see the hollowness of such claims of Indian liberals.
In the end, we can say that the movement against CAA and NRC is an opportunity to fight back. If we miss this one, we will incur a heavy loss in the ongoing battle against fascism. We must make good of this opportunity and turn this spontaneous mass movement into a indomitable revolutionary mass movement against fascism. If we fail to fight back today, tomorrow might be too late.
