War, (Anti)Fascism, and The Political Task of Emancipatory Social Movements By Abdul Vajid

The brief but highly volatile flare-up of armed conflict between India and Pakistan brought several key political contradictions and dynamics in South Asia to the forefront: colonial occupations of frontier regions, militarization of politics and fascization of postcolonial national identities  (Clary, 2025.) Particularly within India, the escalation of fascism ever since the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party’s pivotal election in 2013, has seemingly achieved a cohesive political purpose and objective in the aggression against Pakistan. This is a conflict that is  historically rooted in Indian Occupation of Kashmir; an ever-present and demystifying contradiction to the rosy narratives of India’s postcolonial modernity.

However, a crucial problem that emerged in the context of the war was the way in which the entirety of India’s opposition,including its radical and self-proclaimed anti-fascist currents,chose to support the war despite such dangerous developments,  thereby effectively endorsing a fascist spiral. In this context, the question of Kashmir serves as an illuminating political analytic for understanding the contradictions of (anti)fascism in India. 

Fascism is generally understood as an authoritarian political order defined and shaped by popular racism and violence, primarily directed against its minority and marginalized populations, negation of democratic ethos and rule of law, and extreme repression of dissent and opposition. In India, it is precisely such a definition that has been prominently used by civil society commentators in order to periodize pre- and post-2013 political developments (Rajasekaran, 2025.)The main conclusions of such an analysis tend to be that Indian fascism—led electorally by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and at the popular level by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—constitutes a subversion of India’s constitutional morality, secular nationalist ethos, and liberal democratic values. Hence, left-wing and liberal opposition becomes committed to the programme and orientation of nostalgic recovery of the authentic idea of India (Khilnani, 1997.)

But as we see, this nostalgic nationalist anti-fascism requires completely ignoring and sidestepping the oppressive occupation of Kashmir; a history of injustice as long as the history of postcolonial India itself (Zia and Bhat, 2019). Even worse, India’s left-wing and liberal groups continue to deny the charge of occupation, insisting that Kashmir is an ‘integral part of India,’ a stance taken against a population whose right to self-determination has been systematically and violently denied, leaving them with the stark choices of assimilation or extermination. 

Considering this historic complicity, it is not surprising that the Indian left, liberals, and civil society opposition, rather than opposing an aggressive and dangerous war led by fascist leadership and galvanized by a highly fascizised population base, instead became its defenders and cheerleaders. While nationalist wars often generate existential fear and ‘rally-around-the-flag’ effects—temporarily sidelining political contradictions in favor of wartime unity—in India, this has occurred at a moment when urgent and sustained opposition to fascist politics was critically needed. While such collusion with the fascist consensus might be understood as a consequence of the intense and widespread political repression in India—aimed at stifling any genuine dissent, where rallying behind the war became a performative act of loyalty to a nation now overwhelmingly overdetermined by fascist ideology—the question of Kashmir reveals a different genealogy for the Indian opposition’s foreshortened antifascism.

Aimé Césaire’s often-quoted formula (Césaire, 1950) of fascism as the return of colonial techniques to the metropole is an instructive analogy here. That is to say, the fascist kernel of Indian nationalism was already operative (Kanjwal, 2023) in the Occupation of Kashmir, where a project of racial and demographic engineering was carefully constructed and maintained through regimes of military violence, political repression, and total surveillance imposed on Kashmir’s Muslim-majority indigenous population. The colonial occupation projects did not require the negation of democratic ethos, constitutional morality, secular values, or rule of law, but were in fact done under its name through legal constructions of ‘state of exception’; (Sen, 2015) in which separate regimes of oppression were legitimated for the colonized populations (effectively non-citizens). 

Additionally, the regimes of Islamophobia in India, (Kunnummal, 2022) which structurally underpin its fascist program, were prefabricated through liberal War on Terror regimes (Sethi, 2014) of racial securitization, generalized suspicion, and mass incarceration; processes that began within India well before the post-2001 global War on Terror discourse, notably through the counter-insurgency campaign that began in 1980s in Kashmir. The enduring success of India’s fascist movement—which combines landslide electoral victories, a hegemonic hold over strategic institutions, and an unparalleled grassroots infrastructure—lies in its critical mobilization and generalization of colonial states of exception into the unsettled question of Muslim citizenship in postcolonial India (Kunnummal, 2024.)

But whereas, once the state held exclusive control over declaring and managing states of exception, under the conditions of fascist democratization, this sovereign power is now diffused and shared between state apparatuses and a mobilized mass public. As a result, practices of exclusion and extermination are no longer solely top-down but are enacted and even initiated from below. This shift radically alters the notion of “the people,” which nationalist opposition movements have traditionally romanticized as a source of political redemption. Instead, the ‘people’ are now increasingly defined by chauvinistic hatred of internal and external others.

That is to say, the Indian opposition by treating fascisization as merely a case of false consciousness constructs a dishonest political reality. In doing so, it not only evades the responsibility demanded by this catastrophic historical moment but also tacitly aligns with the fundamental assumptions of an already fascized public sphere. The historical roots of such oppositional timidity can be further traced to its decade-long complicity in the Occupational regime of Kashmir; defined by militarism, majoritarianism, and ensuing structures of exception that have now been generalized through broaden social projects of fascism.  

War on Terror-defined draconian laws (Singh, 2012) such as Prevention of Terror Act (POTA), Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA); exclusionary redefinition of national belonging (Kunnummal, 2024) that shapes Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, National Registry of Citizenship (NRC); the legalization of Babri Masjid demolition (Khan, 2020) and the recent Waqf Board Billl (Peerzada and Amin, 2025) are constructing legislative conditions of Indian fascism, which converges with the popular and democratized violence of pogroms, lynching, and racial ghettoization. These were not aberrations in the idea of India but intensifications of its key political contradictions, expressed most strikingly in the Occupation of Kashmir and structural otherness of India’s Muslim minorities. War is the inevitable culmination of such exclusionary social formations.  

The ongoing tensions between India and Pakistan did not originate with the Pahalgam militant attacks in April but are rooted in a long, tumultuous political history marked by the incomplete and improper processes of decolonization—processes that were undercut by the demographic engineering projects of Partition. The construction of peoplehood in South Asia has historically been shaped by projects of forced assimilation and otherization (of its exceptions), laying the inevitable groundwork for authoritarian and fascist political formations, most notably in present-day India.

For social movements operating within this context, it is crucial not to take ‘the people’ or postcolonial constructions of national belonging—such as ‘the idea of India’—as settled or given. When politics merely trails these inherited conceptions, it reproduces a limited field of action rather than forging new, emancipatory possibilities for common existence. Such political tailism not only fails to resist fascism but also often facilitates subtle, continuous forms of entrapment into a rapidly fascisizing social current. Conversely, the task of an emancipatory social movement is to constitute a new people; one forged primarily through the values and practices of resistance, solidarity, and internationalism.

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