by Christopher Balcom
Understanding the far-right is key to understanding our political moment.
We are clearly witnessing the resurgence of fascist organizations, viz “Active Club” A number of Canadian cities have also sprung up, as have strains of right-wing populism that clearly recall the tactics and rhetoric of historic fascism. The debate over the fascism label/analogy has turned to discussions of Donald Trump and Trumpism.
Although similar conversations have occurred in many contexts. In India, The relationship between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and European fascism has been a matter of serious discussion on the left for decades. Attending to Indian anti-fascism critiques and considering common features and differences among contemporary far-right movements around the world can enrich our understanding of the global right and its relationship to historical fascism.
In a sense, the relationship of fascism with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is not at all a question of analogy.
The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the paramilitary parent organization of the BJP, subscribe to a project clearly inspired by European fascism. Hinduism, their guiding religion, is based on the idea that India is a Hindu nation with a non-Hindu minority living in hardship. VD Savarkarwho defined modern Hinduism in the early 20th century, praised European fascism widely and envisioned that Muslims in India should “play the role of German Jews.” Hinduism’s ethno-nationalist ambitions threaten many communities in India, but its proponents have always reserved a special animosity for India’s Muslims. Today’s Hindutva may be less likely to invoke Hitler and Mussolini as inspiration, but they embrace Savarkar as a national hero.
The contemporary Indian debate on fascism began in earnest in the early 1990s. The watershed moment in the BJP’s political ascendancy was the illegal demolition by party workers of a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Hundreds were killed in subsequent anti-Muslim riots, particularly in Mumbai. In terms of violence, left-wing activists and scholars have drawn subtle comparisons between the RSS-BJP and European fascism (Sumit Sarkar’s 1993 essay, “Family fascism“a major intervention).
Violence and polarization fueled BJP’s success; The party won its first national election in 1998, six years later. This pattern of profiting from anti-Muslim violence has shaped Modi’s own career: his infamous involvement in the 2002 massacre in Gujarat brought him to national prominence when he was the state’s chief minister. Today, Modi presents himself abroad as a business-friendly reformer, but his twelve years in power have been marked by widespread disenfranchisement of Muslims, intensifying repression in Kashmir, and an increase in mob violence and lynchings directed especially against Muslims and Dalits.
historical Jairus Banaji Special attention is drawn to the work of Arthur Rosenberg, a Communist member of the Reichstag. Rosenberg’s 1934 essay, “Fascism as a Mass Movement,” distinguishes fascism from other reactionary political movements, above all by its mass character and strategic use of paramilitary violence. As Banaji argues, these features of fascism are disturbingly present in contemporary India. The RSS has been banned periodically since its founding in 1925, including in 1948 after one of its members assassinated Gandhi. Today, the paramilitary organization counts millions of members in its ranks and has managed to embed itself deeply in Indian civil society, operating through thousands of front organizations and affiliated groups including student associations, trade unions, charities and more. Known for their marches and parades, RSS cadres have developed a reputation for inciting violence and harassing political opponents.
The RSS boasts an organizational infrastructure and mass mobilization capabilities that are unique among the global right—fascist non-state actors typically still belong to loose, inquisitive networks, and are more likely to launch lone-wolf attacks than coordinated attacks.
If the Indian context is exceptional in this sense, there are other significant parallels between fascist movements in India and other parts of the world. For example, they are united in the delusional fantasy of being persecuted; While white nationalists in the West propagate “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories, Hindutva activists defensively envision themselves in a “demographic war” waged by Indian Muslims. While this conspiratorial delusion is consistent with past fascism, the far-right in India and elsewhere has generally fallen out with the utopianism of historical fascism. Supporters of global far-right movements seem quite willing to accept business-as-usual austerity and crony capitalism to see their enemies humiliated. Modi’s regime, as Richard Seymour says, can be aptly described as “Capitalism with pogromist features.“
While the impulse to “provincialize Europe” usually takes the form of a positive recovery of non-European heritage, critics of Indian anti-fascism have long observed how Claims of post/decolonial difference have been absorbed by the Hindutva right. Understanding the global far-right demands close attention to reactionary movements outside the West. Far-right actors themselves acknowledge the connection between their movements; Trump adviser Steve Bannon has admiringly referred to Modi as “Trump before Trump”. Contemporary fascism consists of different forms of power; To the extent that a “fascist international” can be said to exist, it includes movements including MAGA, Zionism and Hinduism, which are united in their shared violent nationalism and Islamophobia. Any adequate left response to this challenge requires the development of global solidarity and a principled universal politics that stands firmly against the rising tide of nationalism everywhere. But history suggests that this is easier said than done.
In India, as in the United States, the electoral success of the extreme right has not seen the complete destruction of democratic institutions and the authoritarian seizure of state power associated with classical fascism. Since 2014, the BJP has faced major challenges to its authority on the streets and, more recently, in the elections: in 2024 the BJP lost its majority in the Lok Sabha and now leads a minority government. To some, this fact alone may seem to invalidate the diagnosis of fascism. However, as Dilip Simeon argues, recent Indian history can be instrumental in “dispelling the doom theory of fascism”. Rather than a “single event” in which political potential is suddenly and definitively eclipsed, it is fascism as a “slow bleeding process”: a chronic erosion of democratic institutions, increasing exposure to state and mob violence, and cooling popular discontent.
We must be alert, in short, to the dangers of fascism in the making. As Arundhati Roy writes: “The division of opinion on the use of the term comes down to whether you believe that fascism only became fascism after a continent was destroyed and millions of people were exterminated in gas chambers, or whether you believe that fascism was an ideology that led to those high crimes—that can leads to that crime – and those who are members of it are fascists.”
Christopher Balcom defended his PhD in social and political thought at York University in 2025.
This post is part of an activehistory.ca series called “The Time of Monsters”. It looks at the challenges that contemporary times pose to history and how historians can and do respond to them. Our aim is to highlight how history and historians can deal with issues such as denial, manipulation of public history, appeals to authoritarianism and a host of other issues. The editors encourage submissions or personal reflections. If you are interested in contributing or even learning more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse (email protected) Or at Roberta Lexier (email protected).
You can find the first post in the series here.
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Previously published with activehistory.ca Creative Commons License
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