India has elected its first fascist government.
At no point in the last three decades had the electorate given such a resounding mandate to a political force so hardline. The previous BJP governments were dependent on coalition partners and a need to softsell the party’s hard right partnership with RSS. No longer. With the award of a clear mandate to Narendra Modi, the hard right of the hard right is now in power.
India has elected its first fascist government.
“If the BJP becomes dominant in the next government, the Sangh juggernaut will likely begin rolling, entering a period of potentially unprecedented activity to fulfil its broader social goals.”
The quote above is from an excellent article in the Caravan on the RSS, the political mobilizing force behind the BJP. If the BJP is the electoral arm of the Hindutva movement, the RSS is its torso and its legs, keeping it strong and keeping it moving. In conjunction with the BJP, the RSS represents the threat of fascism in India. As the head of the organization said in the article, if the BJP wins this election, it threatens to rule for 25 years.
Whether or not that belief is accurate, the 2014 Indian election is an enormous moment for India, for the future of apolitical Hinduism, and for secular politics. Those concerns make this election important for Indian workers: you can’t have political consciousness in the working class if they are brainwashed into rightwing religious politics, especially once that politics descends into national or international violence as in Sri Lanka and the U.S. imperial wars. Avoiding that kind of catastrophe, among others, is what this election is about for the international working class.
If you want to save India, start this year, by defeating a prime ministerial candidate that is already linked to religiously inspired pogroms and a fascist ‘volunteer’ organization. He, Narendra Modi, is the poster child for the RSS-BJP alliance. And if he wins, RSS will have at least a few years to start implementing ‘Phase 2’: rolling out out their policies and programs with the imprimatur of the Indian government.
I don’t want to wake up in a couple of decades wondering how it all went wrong, why a national and maybe even an international humanitarian catastrophe wasn’t prevented. I don’t want to see a repeat of the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 on an international scale, I don’t want to see an increasingly aggressive nuclear-tipped standoff between India and Pakistan, I don’t want to see an entire generation of ordinary people brainwashed into rightwing lies through schoolbooks and the media.
Do you?
Nomita Nath is the 26-year-old President of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation, the largest garment workers’ union federation in Bangladesh. BIGUF has 42 unionized factories as member unions and several more pending. Nath was recently in Washington, DC for an International Labor Rights Forum conference on women’s rights and worker rights as well as several meetings with U.S. government officials. Outspoken, clear, and committed, Nath is a leader of and an ally to garment workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere around the world.