The world has been mourning the white-supremacist fascist terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand’s Christchurch on 15 March 2019, where 50 Muslims were killed when they were offering their Friday congregational prayer. However, unsurprisingly, the RSS-led Indian Hindutva fascist terrorist camp celebrated the incident with much fanfare, like the western white-supremacists and the Zionist terrorists. Many of the prominent Hindutva fascism supporters, rabble-rousers and social-media influencers, who support the incumbent Narendra Modi-led BJP government, shamelessly defended the terrorist attack on the Muslims by vilifying the community as a harbinger of terrorism and violence. Banned by the micro-blogging site Twitter for hate speech earlier, a certain advocate was found featuring in a video shared by Hindutva thugs, in which he tried to legitimise the Christchurch terror attack and build up support for the white-supremacist fascist terrorism that’s blistering at an epidemic proportion throughout Europe, North America and Australia. Many other Hindutva flag bearers were found lambasting the Muslim community for purportedly waging a “jihad” against the non-Muslim world by citing western propaganda and justified the terror strike as a method to resolve the problem. These type of propaganda became viral on social media platform Facebook as well. Though these platforms worked swiftly to delete the video of the terrorist attack, nothing was done to curb hate speech and profanity that was spewed by the Indian Hindutva fascist terrorists on social media. No action was taken by the Indian government’s security agency against these communal vitriol mongers and terrorism supporters, though it’s claimed that India has “zero tolerance policy against terrorism”. What stopped the government machinery from taking action against the culprits if not an open pact with them? This display of unapologetic hatred against Muslims isn’t an isolated incident or a deed of few fringe elements, rather, as an institution, the Indian government and the state machinery endorse the jaundiced views of these Hindutva fascist terrorists. As these narratives go quite well with the ruling party’s political line and its poll propaganda, therefore, the state machinery unapologetically stood behind those who openly expressed their support for a terrorist killing Muslims in New Zealand. Prime minister Modi wrote a letter of condolence to the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, calling the attack an “act of terrorism” and expressed his grief. This was an official letter and was written following due protocols as the head of the government. However, as Modi has turned social media, especially Twitter, into his default press release publisher, it was expected that apart from a letter to his Kiwi counterpart, the prime minister would at least tweet a few lines condemning the terrorist act by using the same cliche that he reiterates whenever the menace of terrorism strikes anywhere in the world. Alas! Such a tweet became a lacuna in the prime minister’s daily communication, despite reports of seven to nine Indian citizens being killed in the terrorist attack. The prime minister disappointed those who expected such a condemnation of white-supremacist terrorism from someone like him when the elections are less than a month away and the support of the hardcore Hindutva fascist elements and ruling classes is quite essential for the BJP to retain its dominance over India. Not a single word of condemnation of the terrorist attack on Christchurch came from Modi; even his government didn’t take any action against those who have been justifying the barbaric crime on social media and internet. The BJP or the RSS didn’t say what actions it will take against those who have been celebrating the New Zealand terror attack. This nonchalant attitude isn’t quite surprising to any non-liberal sane mind that’s aware of the intricacies of Indian politics. What keeps Modi silent on the issue of such a terror attack that has killed people of his own country? Why Modi and the Hindutva fascist camp have not condemned the Christchurch terror attack? Why are the Hindutva fascists celebrating a white-supremacist terror attack, when the killer’s manifesto names Indians as one of the major threats to European civilisation apart from Chinese and Turks? How can someone celebrate the killing of their own by a foreign terrorist? The answer to these questions lies in the toxic political ideology of Hindutva fascism and its severe effect on the minds of the Hindutva indoctrinated terror-mongers. To understand the complicity between the white-supremacist fascism and Hindutva fascism, one needs to delve deep into the history of fascism globally and its influence on India. The Hindutva fascism isn’t a monolithic block that can be defined by citing the example of the Modi regime or its parental body — the RSS — which is called the fountainhead of Hindutva fascism. It’s a fascist ideology, that’s a collaborative project in which each has provided according to their own to put up a large canvas, saffron and grotesquely reactionary. The Hindu, Hindu Nationalism and Hindutva Fascism Like evolution of species, before the multitude of Hindutva fascist organisations following a rickety narrative came into existence, the religion named “Hindu” was formed by the British colonial rulers when they started enacting laws according to religious customs of all major sects and communities in India. The British colonial rulers’ categorisation of the Hindu religion, absolving all non-Abrahamic faiths in it, including different religions like Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism and the pagan tribes, was driven by the Brahminical upper-caste feudal landlords and comprador capitalists’ aspiration to remain in the “majority community” despite being numerically inferior vis-a-vis the Bahujans, ie the ostracised Dalits, the lower-caste shudras, the tribal people, Muslims, Christians and followers of other non-Brahminical religions. To hold the compartmentalised caste blocks together and promote the interests of the comprador upper-caste Hindu capitalists, it became necessary to carry out some reformation of the religion. Thus, from the Arya Samaj movement to Vivekananda’s Hindu arousal movement, all started under the aegis of British imperialism. A peculiar character of the Indian comprador bourgeoisie, who were born out of the colonial womb, has been their liberalism regarding economy while adhering to strict feudal conservatism in the spheres of politics, society, etc. Both Hindu and Muslim social-reformers of the 19th century, portrayed as the “pioneers of Indian renaissance” by the Indian rulers so far, have been socially conservative. Yet, those among them who opposed some social evils like sati system or advocated women’s education, like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, had to face strong vitriol from the conservative ruling blocs, despite having the patronage of the colonial rulers. It was at the beginning of the 20th century, when a popular movement started in the Bengal province against the evil design of the British imperialism to divide the province into two parts with a divisive communal agenda, that the need to distract and deviate any nationalist outrage was felt by the British rulers. The upper-caste Bengali Bhadralok community began a massive movement in the urban areas, burning British commodities, and many taking to militant revolutionary struggle by assassinating British government staffs to oppose the colonial hegemony. The frightened British imperialists first tried to suppress the movement by unleashing state violence, failing which they tried to ensure that the Muslims are segregated from the Hindus, who were at the forefront waging the struggle, by forming the Muslim League in 1906. With the formation of the Muslim League it became easy for the British colonial rulers to spew communal hatred among the people and incite riots. The Muslim League adopted the Two Nation Theory propounded by Sir Khan in the 19th century, which gave an opportunity to the British imperialism to vilify the Muslims as enemies of Hindus and thereby paved the way for the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915 by turncoat revolutionary VD Savarkar, along with Hindu comprador bourgeoisie like Madan Mohan Malviya and Lala Lajpat Rai, a disgruntled Congress leader. The Hindu Mahasabha laid the foundation of the Hindutva fascism at least a decade before the formation of the RSS and had been a major political force in India until the 1960s, when it was finally cast into oblivion by the RSS’s rise. VD Savarkar coined the term — Hindutva — by mixing Hindu identity with the nationality of an Indian nation, which has been since depicted as a goddess. Bengali upper-caste bureaucrat-turned-author Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s fictitious work Anandamath, which played a crucial part in arousing the anti-colonial nationalist fervour among petty-bourgeois revolutionaries, was used by Hindu Mahasabha to build up its version of nationalism. The Hindu nationalist idea, which earlier played a progressive role in arousing the Bhadralok community against foreign oppression, became a reactionary weapon under the Hindutva fanatics, who — as stooges of British imperialism — used the occasion to deprive it of any revolutionary and anti-colonial essence. The Hindu nationalism used fictitious claims from the Anandamath and other sources to depict the narrative of a glorious Hindu past of an Akhand Bharat, a land from where the Aryans, claimed to be the superior race, originated and spread all over the world. It was claimed that the real enemies of the Hindu nation was the Muslims and Christians, who have stolen the wealth and glory of the Hindus. It called for a revival of the Hindu culture and restoration of a Hindu state founded on Brahminical hegemony. A Hindu goddess Bharat Mata, narrated in Anandamath and earlier revered by revolutionary militants, was turned into a cult for Hindu nationalists and Vande Mataram, a song in the fiction, became the war cry, with even the Congress using it as its slogan. Following the international fascism’s trait in later years, the Bharat Mata, a vulnerable woman and mother, was shown under threat from the “other” — ie the Muslims, Christians and those who are secular. The threat quotient was intensified to spread the xenophobia, which is still continuing, and the Hindu “sons” of the vulnerable Bharat Mata are called upon, even now, to save her honour from the Muslims, Christians and other enemies. The concept of Bharat Mata, plagiarised from Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, is used in a sheer patriarchal way to show women as weak, vulnerable and in need of masculine protection. This patriarchal and feudal masculinity, quintessential of the Hindutva’s Hindu, has been an aspiration for generations of Hindutva fanatics across different organisations to become feral and boisterous. However, though the Hindu Mahasabha and the Muslim League were quite well splitting the Indian people on religious lines to weaken the anti-colonial struggle, the 1917 November Revolution in Russia and the growth of Bolshevik revolutionary theory, which started weaning a large number of youth, frightened the British imperialism, which took up the task of building a militant organisation to thwart the menace of communism and foment communal trouble. To serve this goal, the British colonial rule and its infamous Intelligence Bureau (IB) formed the RSS with turncoat nationalists from Brahminical castes at its helm in 1925. Since then, in the last 94 years, the organisation have been a crucial support system for colonial and neo-colonial rule in India. One of the major differences between the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, despite their similarities in many other things, has been the RSS’s strategy of building a movement from the grassroots calling for a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) and the Hindu Mahasabha’s frantic attempt to replace the Congress and become the political alternative for the upper-caste Hindu feudal landlords and comprador capitalists of colonised India. Other differences were over leadership, strategy and tactics of the two organisations. While the Hindu Mahasabha unapologetically spilled the beans and shared its political vision of getting a share of state power from the British imperialism, the RSS wanted to work from the backstage and use different offshoot political outfits for ventriloquism in the political sphere.

Part III: Understanding Hindutva fascism’s support for white-supremacist fascism

Tanmoy Ibrahim Politics

In this special series, we will delve into the historic growth of Indian fascism — the Hindutva fascism — and its ties with global fascist movement with which it shares outlook and organisational ties.

Hindutva fascism’s white fetish character and Aryan supremacist dogma

Despite revering Hitler, the Hindutva fascist doctrine countered his claim that the Germans are the only true Aryans in the world. The Hindutva fascists claimed that the Indians are the true Aryans and it’s from India that the Aryan race has reached different corners of the world. This indigenous Aryan theory or Out of India theory has a large school of followers in the right-wing. It claims that the Indian Aryans are of the same superior race like the Germans, while the latter migrated to Europe from the Indian subcontinent.

Using different mythologies and hearsay as evidence, the Hindutva fascists preached that the Aryans weren’t invaders of India, as is historically argued by Marxists, but its natural inhabitants, without giving an iota of historical evidence till date. They claimed that the Aryans carried the Hindu culture and civilisational values with them throughout the world from India and later, many Aryans were lured to Christianity and they lost their culture.

The forceful occupation of the Indian subcontinent by the Aryan race, enslavement and subjugation of its aboriginal people and imposition of Brahminical hegemony are denied by the Hindutva camp. They claim, as white-skinned and as a superior race, the Aryans are destined to rule the world. The rise of the Third Reich, was, for the Hindutva camp, an inspiring event. Following the upper-caste Hindu community’s undying love and servility towards whiter races, the RSS also worships the white race as superior even now. Following the model of Nazi monster Heinrich Himmler’s “Lebensborn” programme, under which the Nazi regime took steps to produce a “perfect and pure”Aryan breed, the RSS’s affiliates are claiming in the 21st century that their Ayurvedic treatment will help non-white and smaller parents have tall and white-skinned babies. The RSS’s Arogya Bharati calls this programme — “Uttam Santati” — which literally means the best offspring.

It’s this white fetish character of Hindutva fascism that makes the saffron camp members ardent lackeys of the Nazi-inspired white-supremacist fascist movement. The Nazi doctrine is not only effectively Hindufied by the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha during the 1930s, but it also gave them an opportunity to spread the idea that the north Indian upper-caste Hindus, with Aryan blood, have been historically superior to the dark-skinned Dravidians, tribals and other non-Aryan races.

While addressing a gathering of faculty and students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on 17 December, 1960, Golwalkar manifested the white-supremacist outlook of the RSS more clearly than ever by saying:

“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientist of today. If some human crossbreeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding the Namboodiri Brahamanas [sic] of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodiri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kshatriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first offspring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodiri Brahmin and then she could beget children by her husband.”  

Organiser, RSS’s English mouthpiece, 2 January, 1961.


The concept of racial supremacy of the upper-caste Hindus, who have Aryan genes, led to the idea of a culturally homogenous Indian nation with the hegemony of Aryan, north Indian upper-caste Hindu culture and Hindi language. Not only this hegemony is imposed upon the Dravidians, the people of east and northeast, the tribal people and the Dalits, but even Muslims and Christians are asked to adhere to this way of life, which, according to the Hindutva fascist doctrine will help in their inclusion into the Hindu Indian society as second-class citizens.

Talking about the “Muslim problem”, the infamous Golwalkar said

“From this standpoint, sanctioned by the experience of shrewd old nations, the foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, ie of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights.”

We or Our Nationhood Defined, Bharat Publications, Nagpur 1939 (eBook)

The white supremacist view of the Hindutva fascist camp, the self-concocted notion of considering the north Indian Aryan upper-caste Hindus equal to the modern caucasian race, this loathing of dark-skinned aboriginal people whose land and resources are plundered now by the upper-caste Hindu elites, this shared Islamophobia and anti-minority outlook have combined together to form a bridge between the current Hindutva fascists and the white supremacist neo-Nazi movement in the west.

The unholy alliance between Hindutva fascism and white supremacist fascism

From the time of the Ram temple agitation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the RSS and its offspring — the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), started receiving huge fundings from the CIA, which has been promoting the neo-Nazi movement in the US to distract the anti-establishment waves into the abyss of fascism. The RSS and the VHP then tapped the anger of the upper-caste Hindus of middle and lower-middle classes against the Congress rule in India. They exploited the disarrayed and weakened position of the leftwing movement in India to hoodwink the masses by donning an anti-incumbent and anti-establishment attire, which harped on the same myths and Hindu Rashtra narrative to lure and mobilise a support base outside its traditional upper-caste Hindu supporters in north India’s cow belt.

The advent of the neo-liberal economic system in India following the IMF’s and World Bank’s directive, opened a gate to immense opportunities to the Hindutva fascist camp that promised the foreign corporations and their Indian comprador allies a supportive state policy, promotion of cronyism, tax cuts, bailouts during crisis hours and sops to loot Indian natural resources, labour, etc, to gain support for its political aspiration. After the formation of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led Hindutva fascist NDA regime, which oversaw the massacre of Christians in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj, the 2002 Gujarat pogrom and an intensification of Islamophobia spread by the state, the Hindutva fascist camp became a very close ally of the US imperialism and its lackeys like Zionist fascist terrorism and Wahhabi fascist terrorism.

After the fall of the Vajpayee regime in 2004, though the BJP went into oblivion, the RSS used the Hindutva laboratories in Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh to experiment new formulas of communalism, most of which revolved around the attempt to woo and wean away the Dalits, backward castes and tribal people under the Hindutva banner. The Congress-led UPA I and II regimes’ soft-Hindutva stance, the Islamophobia spread by the state machinery and its legitimation by the mainstream media helped the RSS to promote its leitmotif “Hindus under siege” cacophony using vitriol spread through a plethora of propaganda mediums and outlets.

It was the RSS’s resilience in proving its worth to the crisis-ridden Indian ruling classes and the US imperialism-led global finance and monopoly capital that helped the BJP to become a formidable force for the entire non-BJP camp to reckon with in 2014. The rise of the alt-right movement in the west, the legitimisation of neo-Nazi ideology and movements, sponsored by the CIA, helped the RSS to strengthen itself in the global arena and receive support for the project “Narendra Modi” in 2014. The RSS’s projection of the Brand Modi as the only solution to India’s problems and the path to revive the lost glory of a Hindu Rashtra — Bharat — purportedly destroyed by aggression of Muslims and Christians, matched the global template set by the white-supremacist neo-Nazi fascists and used their tonality.

Today, the unholy alliance between the Indian Hindutva fascists and the white supremacists is not only strengthening the RSS and the BJP, but also giving oxygen to other Hindutva fascist outfits. Organisational level tie-ups have increased globally between the Hindutva fascism and neo-Nazi white supremacists. In the US, capitalist Shalabh Kumar-led Hindutva fascist Republican Hindu Coalition has been a major supporter of Donald Trump and his sheer Islamophobic white-supremacist fascism. The Hindu Republican Coalition played a crucial role in propagating Islamophobia among the Indian Hindu diaspora during the 2016 Presidential Election,

Hindu Samhati’s Tapan Ghosh, a Hindutva fascist and serial hatemonger, from West Bengal, was invited by a British neo-Nazi MP to the House of Commons. He was seen rubbing shoulders with British neo-Nazi leaders as well. Ghosh, an ex-RSS man, is infamous for inciting riots, hate speeches and exhorting violence against Muslims by using Islamophobic cliches. It’s suspected that his organisation has links with the Zionist Israeli intelligence agency — Mossad. The open hobnobbing between Ghosh and the British neo-Nazis show the strong bonding between these two international fascist trends, the European white-supremacists and the Indian Hindutva fascists.

It’s one of the unique non-white support to the white-supremacist forces, whose members despise the Indian people as much as they loathe the Mexicans, Africans or Middle Eastern people. Despite officially despising, persecuting and massacring Christians, the RSS and its progenies have been warmly embraced by the white-supremacists, most of whom profess a reactionary and fanatic version of Christian faith. This anomalous nexus may look quite surrealistic for political pundits because of its oxymoron appearance, however, it’s this alliance that’s transforming the political landscape across the globe.

The RSS’s experiments with terrorism and manipulation of state machinery from within using its clout, muscle power and liberalised purse string helped it to elevate itself as a topmost global fascist organisation. After years of vocally supporting the Zionist Israel’s gory atrocities against the Palestinian people, the RSS and its progeny organisations have now intensified their unapologetic support for the white-supremacist fascist camp and its attacks on Muslims, Jews and immigrants in Europe. The RSS and the Hindutva fascists led by it at present will support all Islamophobic forces to fan its support base and incite violence against Muslims on a global scale. It will continue to partner with the Saudi Arabian monarchy and its Wahhabi terrorist ideology so that more Muslims can be vilified by accusing them of being terrorists citing the heinous crimes committed by the Wahhabi forces at the directions of the US.

Actually, isolating the RSS singularly as the enemy, isolating it from the gargantuan imperialist machinery that’s promoting global fascism to rescue itself from a severe crisis, will be a political blunder. The catastrophe is not the Hindutva fascism’s meteoric rise, rather it’s the inability of the left, democratic and anti-imperialist forces in building a strong global resistance struggle against imperialist loot, plunder and oppression. The stronger the resistance to imperialism in a global scale will be, the stronger will be its repercussions on the local-level resistance to Hindutva fascism and the forces like feudalism, comprador capitalism and foreign capital that buttress it strongly.

Neither white supremacist fascism nor the Hindutva fascism can be defeated isolatedly or through a nihilist attitude. The white supremacist and Hindutva fascism are all set to persecute the Muslims and marginalised people to strengthen imperialism’s global hegemony. It’s by axing hard at the roots of the US imperialism-led global imperialist system and its accomplices like semi-feudal production relation and comprador-crony capitalism that the menace of terrorism and fascism can be uprooted once and for all from the society. To do this, it’s imperative that by casting away sectarianism, parochial outlook, and self-obsession, the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist forces start forging an iron-strong alliance against the imperialist system and its byproducts like all forms of fascism.

In India, this can be done correctly if the struggle against the Hindutva fascism can be taken down to the rural and urban poor, who have been at the receiving end of this sheer inhuman system. It’s out of the drawing room of the urban liberal upper-caste Hindu bourgeoisie that the real Indian people, the workers, the peasants, the toiling people, the unemployed youth, the students, the unorganised workers are suffering and it’s essential that they are united, organised and aroused to take on Hindutva fascism and defeat it. The defeat of the Hindutva fascist mantle will definitely hasten the downfall of imperialism’s favourite white-supremacist fascism. The faster the united struggle is started, the faster one can stop the innocent lives being used in the altar of sacrifice to satiate the bloodlust of the upper-caste Hindu elites and middle class. As soon as the common people can be drawn away from the Hindutva fascism and white-supremacist fascism incidents like Boko Haram or ISIS terrorists killing Christians or Yazidis, or the white-supremacist terrorists killing Muslims or Jews, can be prevented and the future of humankind — saved.

Tanmoy Ibrahim
Website

An avid reader and a merciless political analyst. When not writing then either reading something, debating something or sipping espresso with a dash of cream. Street photographer. Tweets as @la_muckraker

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