Unlearning the Nation: Anti-Fascist Futures in India by Rahee

When the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed power in India more than a decade ago, people from various quarters of India and the world named this shift in Indian politics as the beginning of fascism in its full form. The BJP is a product of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist organisation Italian Fascism and German Nazism in its working. However, there has also been some debate about naming this dispensation as ‘fascist.’ In an article written upon the completion of 100 days of the second term of the Modi government, Yogendra Yadav rejects the term ‘fascist’ to name the ruling dispensation since he doesn’t feel comfortable about adopting Western terminology to name something uniquely South Asian (Yadav 2019). He also points out that since democracy in India hasn’t been officially replaced by a single-party-led authority in the way it did in Italy and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, it would be hasty to call the situation here ‘fascist’. He instead names the situation as one of “mobocracy,” wherein the ‘public’ in the democracy has been turned into a mob that gathers and acts on the call of a pied piper (Yadav 2019).

A fundamental difference between Italy and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s and India of today, which Yadav points out, is that once Hitler and Mussolini gained power in Germany and Italy, they did not rely on people for legitimacy. They formally replaced their governments with single-party governments. However, the dispensation in India today doesn’t seem likely to announce a single-party government formally, and they rely heavily on people lending legitimacy to their government. The majority of the people aren’t coerced into being subjected to this dispensation, but lend degrees of consent to the ideology and working of the dispensation. It is the case in many South Asian countries where conservative parties use the language of modern liberal democracy to do their bidding. Although the governments aren’t technically fascist in terms of being run by single-party powers, they are fascist in every other sense of the term. It is not merely the government but a large section of the population that is driven by majoritarianism, religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. Hence, it would be a sound political choice to term the ruling dispensation in India as “fascist” to point clearly and impactfully to the direction where we’re headed. 

The Nature of Indian Fascism

Fascism in South Asia is built on otherisation and subjugation of ethnic and religious minorities, translating into anti-Muslim hate in India. Women, gender and sexual diversities are also attacked as a part of this fascist project. Dalits and indigenous people are exploited, and their lands and cultures are under attack. Parts of indigenous and minority lands are illegally occupied with the aid of excessive militarisation, like Kashmir in India and Pakistan. The dispossessed are ignored and overlooked, and their marginalisation is invisibilised in a state of economic crisis coupled with privatisation of public goods and services and neoliberal, corporate control of every aspect of life. The climate crisis is systematically overlooked, and those resisting environmental degradation are silenced. This is the nature of fascism in South Asia.

The ‘Roots of Hate SSEA Asia’ report by Noor (Wijesiriwardena 2024) notes that “Fascism has always built on the legitimate protest of the dispossessed classes, backed by the middle class who fear that their share of the cake is not big enough or could be threatened.”

The current dispensation in India came into power eleven years ago after a nationwide “protest against corruption” led by the middle classes. The Modi-led BJP, which replaced the earlier government that was perceived as “corrupt,” promised a “clean” government dedicated to “development.” The voters of the BJP strongly believed in the promise of infrastructural development, economic growth and prosperity. These voters are happy with the news of economic growth in India outpacing other major economies, becoming the 5th largest economy after surpassing the UK (Inamdar 2024). Visible large-scale infrastructural development is prioritised under the Modi government, with many new roads, airports, ports, and metros built in different parts of India. However, full-time work with security has become scarce, and the ILO data suggests that the share of educated youth among the unemployed has increased from 54.2% in 2000 to 65.7% in 2022 (India Employment Report 2024). The worst aspect of the economy is the violence of the widening economic gap in India, noted in different national and international reports. Jean Dreze notes that there is no significant growth in the real wages at the all-India level since 2014-15, which shows the nature of poverty in India more effectively than the data on unemployment (Dreze 2023). When coupled with increasing inflation, living costs start becoming difficult to manage for the majority. Select groups, on the other hand, experience the benefits promised for all. Cronies of Modi and company, like Gautam Adani, one of the richest people on the planet, have benefited immensely. Adani’s conglomerate doubled in the year after Modi was elected and then grew eightfold when he was reelected in 2019 (Travelli 2024). A wedding in the household of the Ambanis, another business mogul family in India, in 2024 was a highly publicised event, showing opulence in every way possible for the world to witness. Household debts, starvation and an all-encompassing sense of insecurity, however, have not managed to make it to the headlines.  

The most significant aspect of this fascist dispensation is the surge in overt and symbolic hate. The India Hate Lab Report 2024 notes incidents of dehumanisation, calls for violence, conspiracy theories, and social boycotts are overwhelmingly (98.5%) targeting Muslims (Report 2024: Hate Speech Events in India). This has resulted in cases of mob lynching and other acts of violence on the ground. An interesting trend that the Pew report on religion in India notes that while the majority of Indians agree that it is important to respect all religions, a majority also see little in common with other religions, and most religious groups in India prefer to live separately from one another. (Sahgal et al. 2021) This report also notes that an overwhelming majority of 64% of Hindus say that being Hindu in India is very important to being truly Indian. The same report also notes that across India, one in five Muslims says they have personally faced religious discrimination recently, with around 40% of Muslims in North India reporting this. This highlights the nature of fascism in India today.

Fighting Fascism: Epistemologically and Materially

It is, however, important to understand fascism in the context of its similarities and differences with colonialism, settler colonialism, plunder capitalism and genocidal practices, as Souad Souilem notes in her Reflection with Noor (Souilem 2025). This will require a careful examination of injustices and inequalities across and within continents with equal fervour and sincerity. This examination would also entail reimagining colonial notions of State and nation and critically renewing progressive projects of constitution-building from the histories of the Global South. 

The ‘Roots of Hate SSEA Asia’ report (Wijesiriwardena 2024)  notes that while there is ample critique of European and Western colonialism, not enough critique of the anti-colonial nationalist projects has been done. Movements in South Asia haven’t adequately addressed nationalist projects in the region that offer a “mixed bag” with a definite presence of the revivalist faction within these projects. A critical inspection of these nationalist projects would throw light on histories of exclusionary ideologies that are interspersed with progressive parts of the ‘independence’ movements. This would entail excavating critical resources for our progressive histories. Since conservatives from the past to the present have hidden behind the language of modern liberal democracies, the histories and ideologies of nationalism and democracy would also need critical reevaluation. 

As countries in South Asia struggled for independence from colonial rule, sections of these independence movements started adopting the Western idea of development in their agendas and programs. Economic growth accompanied by large-scale infrastructural and market-led development came to mean “development,” and concerns for the environment, equality, and justice in society were simply overlooked. Movements against the degradation of the environment and the displacement of indigenous communities, like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement) in India, questioned this idea of development and provided alternatives of egalitarian, community-led, sustainable development to the dominant ideas and agendas around “development.”

The revivalist conservative factions among the nationalist movements against colonialism also built an exclusionary nationalism impervious to questions of equality and social justice for women, indigenous, and marginalised communities. They fought the ideas of gender equality, naming them “Western” and, as a result, essentially evil. Their utopias of the “new nation” consisted of religious and ethnic majoritarian revivalism, which overlooked, actively excluded or demonised minorities and indigenous groups. They sought to either “civilise” or to actively exterminate these marginalised groups. 

Most fascist, fundamentalist, and conservative political parties and groups of today are the descendants of these revivalist factions within the anti-colonial nationalist movements in South Asia. Hence, it is imperative to reevaluate history to identify the fault lines within the independence movements that have come to define the identities of the South Asian countries. 

A careful consideration of the progressive and revolutionary values contributing to egalitarian, just and inclusive ideas in South Asia would ensure powerful ideological resources for contemporary progressive movements. One such project in India is the reinterpretation and translation of the values enshrined in the Constitution of India by various progressive movements. In 2019, a ‘Citizenship Amendment Bill’ (CAB) along with a proposed ‘National Register for Citizens’ (NRC) was introduced in the Indian parliament that threatened otherization, disenfranchisement and exclusion of Muslims as Indian citizens. Part of the nationwide protests against the CAB and NRC was a massive sit-in at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, where thousands of women led the struggle for a secular, just and inclusive India. The Shaheen Bagh sit-in, eventually replicated in various other cities, displayed copies of the preamble of the Constitution of India at the protest sites, which proclaims equality, liberty, fraternity, justice, secularism, democracy and socialism as foundational values of India. In 2017-18, when Adivasi (indigenous) lands were under threat of acquisition by big businesses and for large-scale infrastructural projects in the state of Jharkhand, indigenous communities held a unique form of protest. As a nod to the indigenous custom of erecting stone slabs, various indigenous villages in eastern and northern India erected stone slabs on the borders of the villages with inscriptions from the Constitution of India, particularly the sections of the constitution guaranteeing non-interference of outsiders in indigenous lands and culture. This act of radical reclamation of the Constitution by various indigenous communities in India strengthened the project of contemporary renovation of Constitutional principles through social movements. Progressive groups across India are engaging in activities promoting cultural translations of the Indian Constitution for different communities of India and strengthening the values that empower the struggles of women, gender and sexual diversites, religious and ethnic minorities and disadvantaged and dispossessed groups. 

Fascism has to be fought simultaneously on multiple fronts. Identifying gaps in the knowledge and building knowledge and resources for progressive struggles is an important front in the fight against fascism. So is on-ground alliance building. This would require as much empathy as one would need critical sharpness in our collective struggles. 

List of resources

Dreze, J. (2023) Wages Are the Worry, Not Just Unemployment. Indian Express, 13 April. Available at: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jean-dreze-writes-wages-are-the-worry-not-just-unemployment-8553226/ (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Huang, C., Fagan, M. and Gubbala, S. (2023) Views of India Lean Positive Across 23 Countries. Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/08/PG_2023.08.29_views-of-india_report.pdf (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

India Hate Lab (IHL) (2025) Report 2024: Hate Speech Events in India. Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH).

International Labour Office (2024) India Employment Report 2024: Youth Employment, Education and Skills. Geneva. Available at: https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/India%20Employment%20-%20web_8%20April.pdf (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Inamdar, N. (2024) India’s Economy: The Good, Bad and Ugly in Six Charts. BBC News, 1 May. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-68823827 (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Pew Research Center (2021) Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2021/06/PF_06.29.21_India.full_.report.pdf (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Souilem, S. (2025) Reflections on Fascism and Frameworks of Collective Resistance. We Are Noor. Available at: https://wearenoor.org/reflections-on-fascism-and-frameworks-of-collective-resistance/ (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Travelli, A. (2024) What 10 Years of Modi Rule Has Meant for India’s Economy. The New York Times, 1 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/india-economy-election.html (Accessed: 22 July 2025).

Wijesiriwardena, S. (2024) Roots of Hate: Fascist and Fundamentalist Narratives and Actors in South Asia and Southeast Asia Regions. Noor.

Yadav, Y. (2019) मजमाशाही की ओर बढता हमारा गणतंत्र (Our Democracy on the Way to Mobocracy). Dainik Bhaskar, 11 September.

Citizens for Justice and Peace (2025) India Hate Lab Report 2024: Unveiling the Rise of Hate Speech and Communal Rhetoric. Available at: https://cjp.org.in/india-hate-lab-report-2024-unveiling-the-rise-of-hate-spaeech-and-communal-rhetoric/ (Accessed: 22 July 2025).