Hindutva and other Fascist tendencies in India

The Rsahtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS) is not like the classical fascist organisations in the West. While
the focus of Fascist and Nazist organisation were on race, the RSS is more sophisticated with
advanced methods of cultural nationalism and it can even appropriate the minorities, Dalits and
other marginalised sections under its rubric and mobilise for the cause of Hindutva cultural
nationalism. In this way, the Hindutva is more complicated and dangerous than classical fascism.
It has undergone several changes and various reformation through decades and diversified its
platform through systematic steps. At the same time, Islamist organisations like the Jamaat e
Islami, Popular Front of India, and the SIMI are well organised and more professional than the
Sangh Parivar to the extent that the Islamist forces can channelize any opposition against the
Hindutva or its cause whether it may be in the name of minorities or not. By using a peculiar
modus operandi, any attack against the Islamist organisations and Ideology can be projected as
anti- Islam or pro Hindutva. Any opposition or resistance towards an activist from the Ilsamic
fascism or against Islamist organisation can be blamed as the interest of Hindutva. The complex
relation of the Hindutva and the nationalist common sense makes things easy by using the tactics
of simplifying complex logic. Even though it is hegemonic to any extent the version of official
nationalism, interest of Hindutva, and the agenda Islamism etc., should be differentiated
carefully. Any exercise to look this complicated phenomenon and further problematization should
not leave the ethics of historicization, contextualisation and prioritisation since the lack of clarity
in conceptualisation give space to the contestation of identities and the competition of identities
for the sake of identities gives room for the fulfillment vested interest of dominant and
hegemonic interests of the cultural nationalism and religious fascism. What we need is an
analysis not devoid of a political economic treatment which also capable of the power equations
and dynamics of the concept of identity. The identity for representation or articulation is not
sufficient but the identity of/for realisation which the requirement of the time. As in the case of a

difference between class in itself and class for it self its a matter of consciousness. The praxis
and will of political consciousness.