A couple of days ago, during a tête-à-tête at a think tank in London, Rahul Gandhi referred to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as a “fundamentalist, fascist organisation”. Going by some of The Fascist Decalogue (1934) and The Ten Commandments of Fascism (1938), published for consumption by Mussolini’s Blackshirts, it seemingly is.
According to many of the ten warning signs in Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007), the likelihood seems probable. Reading Professor Jason Stanley in The Guardian (America is now in fascism’s legal phase, 2021), the stark overlap seems—but only seems—inescapable.
But there is fascism, and there is fascism. A far deeper drive to understand the country-specific nature of fascism—adaptations of the broad groundlaying of the term—is evident in Umberto Eco’s ‘Ur-Fascism’, published in The New York Review in 1995: “Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes. ... Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian....”
If fascism is to be defined by its geolocation, then it is not one thing: it is many. Unfortunately, like so many breakthrough Western thinkers (such as the New Atheist Richard Dawkins and his cohort), Eco chooses not to range beyond the commentating confines of Euro territory, wherein fascism is not the same, but is, yet, closely related. In a sense, Eurofascism, across the length and breadth of the continent (and the US) is not miscegenetic.
But Indofascism is perhaps a distant cousin of Eurofascism, a homegrown brand rooted in triumphalist religiosity (as is fascism in Myanmar, with its roots as far back as nearly a century ago, which—as Matthew Browser writes in his 2020 study, Burmese fascism and the origins of Burmese Islamophobia, 1936–38— used “the racialised term kala to conflate the ideas of the coloniser, Indian, and Muslim, [and] Burmese fascists inflamed hatred against Indian Muslims, Indian Hindus, and even indigenous Muslims, such as the Rohingya”).
There exists, therefore, a form of Asiatic fascism that is distinct from Germanic/Italianate fascism. The differentiator is religion as a primum mobile. There was even a form of Sinofascism that preceded full-blown Sinocommunism. Not many people are aware that the Chinese/Taiwanese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who converted from Buddhism to Christianity, never concealed his admiration for Nazism (until Germany’s alliance with Japan during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937) and modelled his Blue Shirts in the Kuomintang on Mussolini’s Blackshirts.
Given these differences and specific identifiers, it is left to us to determine if political identifications in this part of the world need nomenclature, differentiating them from their Euro-American counterparts. After all, as a political scientist and author Rajshree Chandra wrote in The Wire (2019), “We may call these disorders authoritarian-democracy, majoritarian-fascism, fasco-liberalism and so on. But even the most astute political theorist knows that two terms stitched together by hyphens are yesteryear oxymoronic foes, conceptually insufficient to grasp the nature of the disorder.”
In every sense, the word Indofascism is necessary to redefine fascism in the Indian context—extant or apprehended, documented or anecdotal—and to put a brand on it. Similarly, the portmanteau Indoliberalism might help separate subcontinental liberalism from its entirely different—indeed, ideologically opposite—counterpart in the US, Americoliberalism. The liberal in the US remains conflated with what in India would be seen as the Right. The Indian liberal almost invariably leans Left, which is far more Left—or le côté gauche (the left side), in the language of the original Left-Right separator, the French national assembly (1789)—than the American Left.
Is Indocommunism a different beast from Eurocommunism? I believe so. Notwithstanding the underpinnings of classical Marxism—and even the sanctity of that is in dispute in regions of the world where apostatic debate is still upheld as crucial to progress—they differ critically both in doctrine and praxis. Indocommunism remains deeply invested in the sort of classical doctrinaires that Eurocommunists downgraded as insufficiently versatile long ago. They are both parliamentary, but neither has much in common with Cuban Latinocommunism and its barely functional unicameral parliamentarianism but serviceable benign populism.
What, then, do we do with democracy, one of the most seductive and ductile—and, therefore, corrupted and misused—systems of governance on the planet? On the ground, is Indian democracy different from, say, the British one? Prima facie, yes. The Norwegian one? Absolutely. The Icelandic one? The other end of the spectrum. Vis-à-vis Indonesia? No, and yes. In 2022, the Economist Intelligence Unit marked Indonesia as run by “cartel parties with extensive power-sharing among parties and limited accountability to voters”; India, on the other hand, is a majoritarian democracy. Both Indonesia and India are “flawed” democracies.
India is the world’s largest democracy; the US is the world’s oldest. They are comparable only in that their plinth is the individual voter. Other than that, they are dissimilar: India is a multiparty democracy, the US a two-party democracy; India has a bicameral parliamentary system, the US a bicameral presidential one; the US has checks and balances on its corpo-political funding, India has none.
Do they deserve to be mutually distinguishable at the first read? This seems indisputable. Therefore, Indodemocracy and Americodemocracy. This would also help to highlight the crucial fact that while the US seeks—in vain and with much hyperviolence—to insert American-style democracy everywhere in the world, India hasn’t yet gotten around to implementing that form of manifest destiny (although there is another sort of georeligious expansionism that the plentiful proponents of saffronism are rather vociferously contemplating).
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist