After Modi’s government decided to revoke Article 370 in Kashmir, the Prime Minister of Pakistan likened the government to a fascist regime. In a joint Pakistan Parliamentary session held to discuss India’s decision to scrap Article 370, he stated, “The BJP’s mindset is like the mindset of white supremacists who go on mass shootings in the US. They are racists. If you look at their elections, you will see that they did everything Hitler did during elections in Germany. They have backed the opposition into a corner.”
This is not, however, the first time Modi’s government and political party has been likened to the Nazi party. The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, is a Hindu Nationalist Party currently under the leadership of Narendra Modi. A purely Hindu party, with no Muslim candidate in any of the 303 seats, the party won a landslide victory in 2014 and 2019 on account of the ‘Modi Wave’ becoming the first party to achieve the feat in three decades.
Over the years of Modi’s tenure, the political landscape of India has taken a turn for the worse, delving into the deep trenches of both, radical right-winged Indian Nationalism and Hindu Extremism. To sum up, BJP’s ideology posits Hindu supremacy as the primary policy. The deadly combination poses a threat to the values of liberalism and secularism advocated by Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in the aftermath of independence in 1947. By extension, it threatens the democratic liberties of the people of India and perhaps, the survival of Muslim minorities in India.
What is a Fascist Regime?
To put it simply, a fascist regime refers to, “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” Many of these behaviours are being exemplified in India by virtue of the BJP rule. Throughout Modi’s tenure, several parallels emerged between Modi’s rigorous implementation of his agenda and a fascist regime. Much like Hitler disregarded the parliament and trampled the voices of the oppressed via censorship and violence, Modi has continuously overstepped democratic processes, his party has engaged in violently silencing the critics and together, they have advocated policies of nationalism and racism.
Saffronisation, Suppression, Oppression
Modi’s first steps as the Prime Minister involved the saffronisation of the country. Saffronisation refers to “the politics of right-wing Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) that seek to make the Indian state adopt social policies that recall and glorify the ancient Hindu cultural history and heritage of India while de-emphasizing the more recent Islamic or Christian heritage”. The Hindutva agenda parallels Hitler’s fixation with the Aryan race. BJP firmly believes that India should be a purely Hindu state, thereby undermining the values of secularism ingrained in India’s constitution.
MS Golwalkar, a leader of the RSS sums up the agenda in his book: “To keep up the purity of nation and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of Semitic races-The Jews. National pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how neigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” In doing so, BJP established a hierarchy within society postulating the Hindus at the top of the ranks by effectively erasing the minorities from the narrative. By appealing to the raw passions of Hindu extremists, Modi effectively furthered his agenda, which set up the platform for what was to follow.
Coupled with saffronisation was the forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society. In 2014, groups affiliated with the RSS were charged with forcibly ‘reconverting’ scores of Muslims to Hinduism due to the prevailing values of Hindutva and Hindu extremism. Following this, Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah had to propose a national anti-conversion law be introduced to criminalise any religious conversion that took place without state consent. Such an act suppresses the civil liberties issued to members of a democratic state. At face value, the law is meant to put an end to forced conversions but it is used as an excuse for anti-minority harassment. Anyone suspected of wanting to convert inevitably faces mob violence.
In 2015, a Muslim man Mohammed Aklaq was ambushed, dragged from his house during the night and beaten to death as it was suspected that he had slaughtered a cow. The Local BJP activists were involved in his murder. The case of Mohammed Akhlaq was amongst the earliest and most famous of the many beef-centred lynchings that followed.
Over the years of Modi’s tenure, killings of Muslims and Dalits followed in frequent succession. Simultaneously, Haryana and Maharashtra criminalised cow slaughter with the latter making possession of beef punishable by 5 years in jail and the former dictated a 10-year sentence for slaughtering a cow. In 2017, Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh vowed to install sculptures of Hindu deities in all mosques. He also promised to kill a 100 Muslims for every Hindu killed by a Muslim and proposed reconversion, voluntary or forced of Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. The crackdown against minorities darkly parallels the suppression of Jews during the Nazi regime in Germany. BJP, much like Nazi Germany is stripping away identities and civil liberties in a rampage to assert themselves as the supreme rank. It only stops short of sending Muslims and minorities to concentration camps.
Censorship and Genocide
At the same time, BJP has taken to censorship by silencing the critics. In the summer of 2017, Anand Teltumdbe, a reputed professor wrote: “If you speak anything except for singing praises for the government, you risk your life. You could be easily charged under sedition or any of the many draconian laws and sent for life imprisonment, if not hanged. The state has raised jingoist nationalism above people and unleashed the Hindutva gangs to carry out its writ reminiscent of the black shirts of Mussolini and brown shirts of Hitler … For the last three years, we have seen a working prototype of what a fascist regime is like.”
The harsh truth of Teltumbde’s caution was demonstrated in the barbaric assassination of Gauri Lankesh, a journalist famous for her candid censure of the RSS and BJP. The investigation that followed singled out an RSS activist as the culprit demonstrating the BJP’s determination to silence all opposing views that challenged the status quo and the extent they would go to to do so.
In a recent, shocking parallel, the BJP has gone so far as to display genocidal tendencies by revoking Article 370 in Kashmir, a move that suspends the special rights afforded to the citizens of Indian Occupied Kashmir and strips it of its autonomy. Before this, there was a deployment of nearly 10,000 extra Hindu troops and a lockdown with pockets of violence including shelling and firing being meted out to the people of Kashmir.
The scrapping of Article 370 comes as a blow to the aspirations of the inhabitants of Kashmir who have longed for their right to self-determination for over 70 years. It has been argued by Michael Kugelman, an India expert at a think tank in Washington that the motive behind doing so is altering the demographics of Kashmir by allowing an influx of Hindus to buy up land there, a move reflective of the principle of Hindutva and Hindu supremacy. He stated: “The repeal of Article 370 is a big manifestation of Hindu nationalism, as it represents an effort to bring India’s only Muslim-majority region into the union of India so that the nation’s Hindu majority can invest, acquire land there, and so on.”
Moreover, the move to scrap the article has been deemed by experts as illegal. AG Noorani, a constitutional expert states “(it was) an illegal decision, akin to committing fraud” and the Opposition could challenge it in the Supreme Court. While M.L Sharma has launched a challenge regarding the issue in the Supreme Court, it awaits a decision and as of now, the Supreme Court has refused to listen to any urgent plea regarding the subject.
Yet another parallel between the Nazi party and the BJP exists in terms of its approach to education. Hitler targeted the youth through education. The indoctrination involved placing his cronies in the upper ranks of educational institutes and even altering German history in school texts to make his government appear in a favourable light. Moreover, the curriculum took on a Nazi flavour with subjects like Biology being altered to contain “race science” and physical education involving an emphasis on “racial superiority”.
In a similar vein, the BJP has hired their people as heads of institutions. BJP also launched a series of policies in an attempt to indoctrinate its youth. This has been done rewriting textbooks to fortify the Hindu majoritarian worldview by erasing the minorities. Subjects like Science and Maths take on a distinctly Indian flavour with roots in mythology. All books have a consistent theme of glorifying and instilling unquestioning respect for their military forces.
As the timeline demonstrates, BJP has left no stone unturned in ensuring that criticism and dissent were suppressed and the only narrative that existed was BJP’s agenda of supremacy to garner the support of extremist Hindu population and their mindset. The groundwork for the parallels has been found in the brewing ingredients of a fascist regime as found in India. The overt polarization of the society, cruelty against the Dalits, crackdowns against the minorities by lynching, monitoring and criminalising certain dietary choices all of which has been underscored by a Hindutva nationalistic discourse, which casts criticism in an unfavourable light by deeming it anti-national form part of the fabric of fascism. The parallels effectively implicate the BJP rule as a fascist regime, likening modern-day India to Nazi Germany.
The World and BJP’S India
The impact of the BJP has been daunting. Armed with its regressive policies, under its rule India is spiralling into a vortex of fascism. The Hindu Nationalist sentiments of its agenda have created fractures in the relationship between Pakistan and India. Following the Pulwama incident, India-Pakistan border skirmishes have been frequent. More recently, Pakistan closed its airspace once more for India following the scrapping of Article 370. The looming threat of war hangs in the balance. Similarly, the residents of Indian Occupied Kashmir resent the loss of autonomy but are shackled by their subjugation. The scrapping of Article 370 generated outrage from China as well.
The Kashmir dispute was already a contentious thorn in the side of Sino-Indian relations. The move to split the state of Jammu and Kashmir generated concert. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated that the notion of creating a distinct territory for Ladakh was “unacceptable and undermined China’s territorial sovereignty.” India’s move has the world fraught with tension as world peace hangs in the balance as the two nuclear powers of Pakistan and India threaten to clash.
As the threat of a war between Pakistan and India looms ahead, the United Nations need to wade in. The United Nations has been tasked with maintaining international peace and security following the horrors of WW2. While no comprehensive action has been taken, the UN has issued a statement: “We are deeply concerned that the latest restrictions in Indian-Administered Kashmir will exacerbate the human rights situation in the region.” Much like the silence that followed Hitler’s decision to expand into different territories despite the Treaty of Versailles, silence following India’s illegal Kashmir grab will only inculcate further confidence in the BJP and Modi. The failure of the UN to do its part might mean that the world would descend into chaos and embark in an era of needless wars and endless bloodshed.
