Thinking Together

Fascism is a repressive form of administration, which is resorted to by a capitalist state at the highest stage of capitalist development to deprive the people of all the democratic rights so long enjoyed by them. But rarely do they opt to this path and that too only when they are being threatened to lose the power by the working class.  Whether this presumption is correct or not?

Sunil Baran Chakraborty, Kolkata

THE most authoritative and to date scientific analysis of the nature and emergence of fascism was made by Georgi Dimitrov in his penetrating address to the Seventh International in 1935. He defines fascism as the "open and terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital". The capturing of state power by fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another but the substitution of one form of the ruling class state by another – bourgeois democracy by `open terroristic dictatorship'. This comes as a response of the ruling classes to the acute crisis that threatens its class domination. This threat emerges as a consequence of the crisis generated by its own class rule, both from within its own camp, as well as and often simultaneously with the challenge to its class rule by the toiling sections of the working people.

The situation obtaining in our country today is not exactly similar to the period leading to the emergence of fascism in Germany. The threat of immediate seizure of power by the proletariat is not today on the agenda. The crisis of the bourgeois-landlord class rule, however, has reached a stage where one section, the most reactionary section, represented by the BJP, is seeking to consolidate its hold over state power. In the process, they are more than willing to undermine and render dysfunctional all institutions of parliamentary democracy. 

The BJP, it must be repeatedly underlined, is only the political arm of the RSS. The RSS has a clear fascist agenda. The former RSS chief, M S Golwalkar chillingly articulated the fascistic character of the RSS "Hindu Rashtra" in his treatise,  "We, Or Our Nationhood Defined".

Having declared that all others except Hindus are foreign elements, Golwalkar proceeds to state: "there are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race…. There is, at least should be, no other course for them to adopt. We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races, who have chosen to live in our country."

And how should `old nations’ deal? "To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by."

It is the unfolding of this agenda that seeks to metamorphose a secular democratic India into a fascistic "Hindu Rashtra" that we are witnessing today.