Is Hindutva Fascist?
Responses to Some Popular Net Arguments

The progressive call that Hindutva is fascist has produced a clear response from the Hindutva sympathizers on the Nets. They, the Hindutvawadis, have grouped together to produce a medley of arguments, that all seem to suggest that they progressive cry of alarm is misplaced. Let me outline some of these popular arguments on the Net and respond to each one of them systematically.

THE HINDUTVA ARGUMENT: Hindutva is not fascist because the BJP is not. The BJP like any other political party has a diversity of positions in it: for instance, moderates like Vajpayee. In every place it has ruled the BJP it has respected parliamentary norms. The progressives who call BJP fascist must look carefully at their own favorites - USSR being a prime example - for fascism.

Now this argument is a clever one, not so much because of its contents, but because of how it is arranged and therefore what it obfuscates and what it chooses to reveal. It systematically goes through multiple levels of obfuscation.

First, is the quick switch from Hindutva to BJP - i.e, positioning BJP as the object of progressive critiques and not Hindutva - forgetting all else of what makes up Hindutva as a material and institutional force in Indian politics. Hindutva is not BJP. On the contrary Hindutva is the ideology that is the combined work of the entire Sangh Parivar (the RSS - the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association) which is the ideological fountainhead of the movement; the BJP - Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian Peoples party), its parliamentary front which constantly makes efforts to breach the secular formation through parliamentary actions; the VHP - Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) which is its activist front that undertakes extra-parliamentary actions along with other components such as the BD - the Bajrang Dal, the ABVP - the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the Hindu Student Councils (HSC's in USA and Europe tied to VHP of America/Europe) and finally formations that are not fully integrated with the above but are closely tied together at the level of ideology and strategy such as the Shiv Sena (Shiv's Army)). There is absolutely no point trying to evaluate if the BJP by itself is fascist, for as is said above the BJP is indeed the parliamentary front of the larger ideological formation. This attempt to bring a focus on the BJP alone thus is the first effort to obfuscate.

Next, the portrayal of some as moderates, the most important instance of this being the case of Atal Behari Vajpayee (ABV). ABV, as a moderate is a creation of his position in the BJP parliamentary party, wherein he constantly speaks of the parliamentary mode when asked about the BJP and the mainstream press (India Today is the chief villain here) accepting this as his only face. However, ABV, we must note has his antecedents in the RSS, as a matter of fact remains a firm member of the RSS even today, and when questioned on the RSS is often unambiguous about his belief in the RSS ideology. These aspects of ABV are consistently left out when attempting to portray him as a moderate - almost a liberal! Forgotten are the facts that he was an handpicked leader promoted by the RSS in the post-70's phase till the early 1980's (when his career took a minor set back after the fall of the Janata Party government), that he has in numerous interviews (pick any interview of his over the last five years in India Today, Frontline, Sunday etc.) if asked a question about the RSS he has always claimed full allegiance to the mother body and the fact that he was one of the first to be at the bedside of the ailing ex-chief of the RSS, Deoras, before his death. Nothing about his career (for details of his career see Praveen Swami's article "Life in the Parivar" in Frontline, May 31, 1996.)

Having produced a liberal politician for public consumption in the person of ABV, the Hindutvawadis next argument tries to take the case to a more general level - that BJP has always respected parliamentary norms. Of course it has! It is the parliamentary front of a larger fascist force and it is its role to play out the parliamentary process. Further, rarely has a fascist force seized power through simply repressive mechanisms. Let me quote from "Fascism and Dictatorship" by Poulantzas, one of the foremost scholars on European fascism of our times:

"Fascism comes to power, formally at least, in a perfectly constitutional manner... `respecting' the forms of the `parliamentary democratic' State, and within the juridical norms which every [liberal] state has in store for critical situations of class struggle." (p. 333)