Journal of Business Ethics

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04259-9

ORIGINAL PAPER

Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion

Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil1

Received: 12 February 2018 / Accepted: 30 July 2019

© Springer Nature B.V. 2019

Abstract
Anxieties stemming from rising inequalities have led significant sections of the world’s population to reject democratic
practices and place their trust in politicians with fascist tendencies who promise to wrest control of their destinies from
elites. Ironically, elite interests, far from being threatened, are bolstered by the rise of fascism, as discredited democratic
institutions can be dismantled with impunity. The emerging alliance between the neoliberal project and fascist politics is a
phenomenon that the business and society scholarship is ill-equipped to confront as it remains trapped in the same neoliberal
pro-elite paradigms that neglect meaningful attention to material (in)equality and focus instead on ensuring a minimum floor
of rights required for subsistence. Neglecting the concentration of wealth among the elite, particularly in countries with
historic legacies of inequalities based on race, caste, ethnicity, and religion, creates ideal conditions for the eruption of fas-
cisms premised upon programmatic denial of the full range of civil rights to one or more sections of the population, so that
even the floor minimum becomes impossible to achieve for all. This paper argues that corporate collusions with fascism can
be challenged only by a commitment to redistribution of wealth and creating critical citizens and by generating knowledge
that can question authority: in other words, scholarship must become a subversive activity.

Keywords  Civil liberties · Fascism · Lynching

Threats to Democracy
The rise of authoritarian, proto-fascist strongmen is becom-
ing the new normal across the world (Levitsky and Ziblatt
2018; Mishra 2017; Stanley 2018). This preference for
strongmen by significant sections of the public has been
traced to the increasing discontent with inequalities result-
ing from the steadfast commitment of liberal democratic
governments to elite-friendly neoliberal policies (Brown
2017; Mishra 2017). Neoliberalism is defined as a “theory
of political economic practices that proposes that human
well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional
framework characterized by strong private property rights,
free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2007, p. 2). A logi-
cal corollary of neoliberalism is the steady reduction in the
role of the state in social welfare and the dilution of protec-
tions of the weaker sections of society—a dilution for which
* Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil
vishnup@iitb.ac.in
1
Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology
Bombay, Powai, India
civil society groups or the private sector cannot, or will not,
compensate.
The solutions offered by groups that recognize the result-
ing injustice and the dangers to democratic institutions, even
human rights groups, are limited to ensuring minimum pro-
tections, without challenging the inequality-widening log-
ics of neoliberalism (Moyn 2018a). However, inequality
results in “humiliating new hierarchies” (Mishra 2017, p.
13) which make the resentful willing to support authoritar-
ians who offer an escape from elite policies rather than sus-
tain a liberal democracy with high inequality (Brown 2017).
Rorty’s (1998, p. 90) observation that the disenfranchised
“will decide that the system has failed and start looking
around for a strongman to vote for…” has proven prescient
with many strongmen assuming power in unequal societies
through popular mandate.
While sharing the features of authoritarianism, fascism
involves racial, ethnic, or religious anxieties, in addi-
tion to wealth inequality. Fascism is “a form of political
behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with com-
munity decline, humiliation or victimhood” (Paxton 2004,
p. 218). Fascism therefore also involves “ultranationalism
of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural) with the nation

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 P. V. Poruthiyil
represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who
speaks on its behalf” (Stanley 2018, p. xiv). Discontent
among dominant groups as a result of declining economic
status and sociocultural status—as in the “dethroned
whites who have lost not just economic but also social
power and cultural pride of place”—(Brown 2017, p. 31),
has translated into condoning, if not actively supporting,
fascist policies across the world.
The consequences of inequality-driven fascisms are dev-
astating. Fascists often win elections through democratic
means but once in power, they dismantle the very demo-
cratic institutions or ‘guardrails’ that protect civil liberties
such as the judiciary, parliamentary procedures, and inde-
pendent investigative agencies (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018).
Ironically, in spite of their promises, they rarely disturb the
power of corporations that have caused many of the ine-
qualities and much of the discontent. Rather, the democratic
checks and balances that have been discredited in the public
perception are dismantled to facilitate corporate interests,
leading to a “strange merger of populism and plutocracy”
(Pierson 2017, p. 105), making it easier to curb egalitarian
alternatives that involve redistribution. As Amin (2014, p.
1) remarked, “the fascist solution appears to be the best one
for dominant capital.”
This collusion between corporations and fascist states is
an unexplored topic in business ethics. This paper illustrates
the risk of such collusion within India where democratic
institutions are facing unprecedented onslaughts from fas-
cist forces in power (Chatterji et al. 2019; The Economist
2017; Human Rights Watch 2019). The current regime has
distinctly fascist features: its underlying ideology, Hindu-
tva, its organizational principles, and its sectarian goals are
inspired by the fascisms of early twentieth century Europe
(Jaffrelot 2019; Mishra 2017). Its reelecttion in the 2019
general election has made agonizingly clear the extent to
which sectarianism has seeped into Indian society, across
caste and class, and particularly among the corporate classes
(Center for Media Studies 2019; Chatterji et al. 2019; Ven-
katramakrishnan 2019). For business and society scholars,
the complicity, or the lack of resistance, of the Indian cor-
porate elite to the rise of fascism demonstrates the gravity of
the threats facing democratic institutions, in India and across
the world, and poses an unprecedented challenge to a field
which is premised upon liberal and democratic consensus
among the corporate classes. The field has yet to reckon with
the possibility of indigenous and multinational corporations
participating in authoritarian and proto-fascist projects of
social transformation through choice and ideological affinity,
even if the engagement makes no economic sense.
The question is: might history repeat itself, with the pri-
vate sector in various countries entering into a lucrative
arrangement with fascist governments, at best ignoring and
at worst premised on human tragedies on a massive scale?
13
Big Businesses: Fascism’s Enablers
Fascism develops in stages (Paxton 1998), with big busi-
ness playing a central role in its growth and expansion
(Guerin 1938; Herf 1984; Kalecki 2011[1943]; Tooze
2008). In the first stage, fascism becomes popular among
disaffected groups by offering alternatives to democracy
which is portrayed, often correctly, as being run for the
elites. In the second stage, rooting, it develops a reputation
as “capable of acting decisively on the political scene”
in times of democratic impasse (Paxton 1998, p. 13). A
shared fear of solidarities that transcend national or racial
boundaries, particularly workers’ solidarity and the need
for discipline in factories initiate an extended “partnership
of big business with fascist upstarts” (Kalecki 2011[1943],
p. 79). Fascists now transform into ‘tough helpers’ for the
traditional elites through their use of parallel structures
for repression, often physical (Paxton 1998, p. 22). The
support for fascism widens to include conservative sec-
tions from “farmers and small-town shopkeepers to bour-
geois entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and urban professionals”
opposed to the Left (Kurlander 2011, p. 281).
Fascism gradually becomes unmoored from the anti-
elite program that contributed to its popularity and begins
to ally itself with the ruling groups (Paxton 1998, p.
14). Once in power—the third stage—fascists continue
to cooperate with the ruling elites who paved their way.
Businesses adjust to the ideological specificities of the
new regime in exchange for protection from international
competition and increasing business from war efforts
(Tooze 2008). The fourth stage is the stage of governing;
it involves tensions between the ruling elite, the fascist
leader and followers, the party, and the state. The develop-
ment of fascism reaches its fifth and final stage when the
parallel structures it has created either become more pow-
erful than the state, are disbanded, or become absorbed
into the state (Passmore 2014; Paxton 1998).
Fascists are not permanently committed to any eco-
nomic ideology or group. Tensions between groups of
small businesses that supported fascism for the sake of
protection from globalization in the early stages, on the
one hand, and export-oriented big businesses, on the other,
are resolved through a unique combination of socialist
ideas and liberal economic policies (Kurlander 2011; Pass-
more 2014). The success of the Nazis, for example, was
in the melding of “the merits of economic competition,
a dedication to building a classless Volksgemeinschhaft,
and unabashed liberal imperialism” (Kurlander 2011, p.
286). Foundational aspirations of welfare states such as
full employment, high corporate taxes, generous welfare
provisions, and the protection of indigenous farmers, were
originally conceived by fascist regimes (Moyn 2018a, b;
Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
Tooze 2008). While fascists were opposed to socialism
and feminism, they formed their own labor movements
and women’s groups. Indeed, a reason for the success
of fascism is that, in times of chaos, it has successfully
“amalgamated otherwise antagonistic groups into a single
movement” (Passmore 2014, p. 139).
Fascists rarely have total control over firms and certainly
not over all firms. Businesses resist fascist demands when
consequences are too risky—a freedom not available in
other totalitarian regimes like Soviet Russia (Buchheim
and Scherner 2009). Firms supporting the Nazi movement
outperformed others by 5–8% (Ferguson and Voth 2008).
In spite of the rhetoric against traditional elites, “the mem-
bers of this social stratum remain[ed] solidly entrenched in
the top tier of income and wealth distribution” in the Third
Reich (Tooze 2008, p. 177).
Fascism—A Blind Spot
History seems to be repeating itself, with the plutocracy
and proto-fascist movements fueling each other’s interests
in contemporary societies (Pierson 2017). This collusion has
escaped the attention of business ethics. For the sake of illus-
tration, I will focus on business and human rights (BHR),
a subfield in business ethics that is exclusively focused on
human rights violations by states, in which complicity by
corporations is a central concern (see, e.g., Santoro 2015;
Wettstein 2015). The organs of the United Nations which
should be acutely aware of the phenomenon, and which are
considered agenda setters in the field of BHR, sidestep any
reference to the rise of authoritarianisms and fascisms within
their member states (see United Nations 2019). Meanwhile,
the most recent review of the BHR literature identifies just
four themes: justification of the human rights obligations of
corporations; management processes that influence human
rights; the economic benefits of adhering to human rights
norms; and external influences (such as regulations) on
corporate engagement with human rights (Schrempf-Stir-
ling and Van Buren 2017, pp. 3–4)—none of which refer
to authoritarianism or inequalities. I argue below that this
neglect is the result of three basic assumptions of business
and human rights scholarship that are, in turn, inherited from
the larger field of human rights.
Assumptions as Blinkers
The idea that businesses have human rights obligations
started receiving more attention from business ethicists,
business leaders, and nongovernmental organizations
after initiatives by the United Nations including the Pro-
tect, Respect, and Remedy framework and the Global
Compact (Santoro 2015). The foundational philosophy of
BHR—‘embedded liberalism’—is based on a liberal democ-
racy characterized by a commitment to individual rights,
freedom of speech, and rule of law on the one hand, and free
and fair elections that translate popular views into political
power, on the other hand (Ruggie 2003; Whelan et al. 2009).
Equal dignity, or the equal distribution of freedoms with
universal applicability (Sen 2004) is, of course, the founda-
tion of human rights. As a derived field, the premises of a
liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to
BHR scholarship.
First, assumptions from standard frameworks drawn
from the canons of liberal philosophy (Kantian categori-
cal imperatives, utilitarianism, the social contract) inform
the bulk of arguments against corporate complicity in rights
abuse (Brenkert 2016; Wettstein 2015). Contributions in the
field which assign to corporations the moral duty to protect
human rights include justifications premised on universal-
ism. Scholars insist that businesses have “universal moral
duties” (Hsieh 2015, p. 219), and a recent review notes: “At
the heart of the BHR debate is the goal of creating universal
corporate human rights responsibilities” (Schrempf-Stirling
and Van Buren 2017, p. 5).
A second, related, assumption is that globalization would
lead to a weakened state with corporations having to take
up the slack (Arnold 2010; Scherer and Palazzo 2011).
Wettstein (2015, p. 164) recently asserted that the “power
and reach of national governments has gotten increasingly
constrained, while that of non-state actors, among them par-
ticularly large multinational companies, has dramatically
increased” (for exceptions to this, see Venkatesan 2019;
Whelan and Muthuri 2017).
A third assumption is the possibility of and respect for
public reasoning: decision makers and corporations are
expected to justify their actions, or principles, based on the
shared norms of a global public sphere. In the field of BHR,
there is an expectation that managers of multinationals share
liberal democratic values and prefer not to be seen as com-
plicit in human rights violations (Brenkert 2016). The claim
that “there are educational and regulatory effects besides
the judicial function of human rights litigation” (Schrempf-
Stirling and Wettstein 2017, p. 560) is again premised on the
notion that scholars, activists, and corporate leaders have a
shared conception of public morality and shame.
This set of foundational assumptions blind BHR from
recognizing that authoritarian and fascist states continue
to govern with absolute control over national territories,
notwithstanding globalization, and that corporations play a
facilitating role in the process. The field is yet to acknowl-
edge the trend among corporations to brazenly reject the
norms of liberal democracy like universalism, and with
it the troublesome requirements of public reasoning, pre-
ferring instead the smoother routes to wealth accumula-
tion that open up through collusion with authoritarian and
13
 P. V. Poruthiyil
proto-fascist regimes. If an area of scholarship which is
exclusively focused on human rights is blind to the prolif-
eration of such collusions between plutocracy and fascisms,
we can assume that this neglect is endemic and affects other
streams of business ethics and most areas of business schol-
arship. Indeed, as discussed below, the neglect of inequality
is characteristic of the larger human rights movement itself.
Human Rights: A Distraction from Inequality
Legal historian Samuel Moyn recently observed that the
human rights movement has neglected material equality
and has become satisfied with sufficiency (Moyn 2018a,
b). Sufficiency is concerned with “how far an individual is
from having nothing and how well she is doing in relation
to some minimum of provision of the good things in life,”
while equality is concerned with “how far individuals are
from one another in the portion of those good things they
get” (Moyn 2018a, p. 3). Moyn argues that limiting ambition
to sufficiency at the expense of challenging material inequal-
ity has resulted in the human rights movement becoming the
“signature morality of the neoliberal age” (Moyn 2018b, p.
32).
Moyn’s (2018a) critique reveals that the field of human
rights emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War as
part of a larger social policy aimed at egalitarianism. In the
1970s, human rights became detached from the egalitarian
project and its ambitions limited to preventing civil rights
abuses by dictatorial post-colonial states. This shift toward
ensuring only a minimum of rights suited the emerging
neoliberal agenda under which the demand being placed on
businesses is only for bare minima, and not for a reduction
in the gap between those who have less and those who have
more. Moyn notes, “hard as it is to envision in practice, there
is no contradiction between drastic inequality and fulfilment
of basic provision” (Moyn 2018b, p. 30).
Contributions to business and human rights, and allied
initiatives of the United Nations, also seem to have inherited
this satisfaction with sufficiency. Certainly, sophisticated
theoretical arguments are extended against violations of
basic human rights; concerns are expressed that go “beyond
supply chain labor rights, censorship and political repres-
sion, and the extractive industry to a broad array of issues
ranging from the environment and access to affordable
medicines to economic, cultural, and social rights” (Santoro
2015, p. 156). But the field is trapped in what Moyn refers
to as “spectacular violations” of rights, such as workplace
abuse, sweatshops, and child labor, that grab public atten-
tion (Arnold 2010; Brenkert 2016; Santoro 2015; Wettstein
2015).
Recent studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR)
and philanthropy have shown that heightened corporate
investments in social sectors can go hand in hand with
13
authoritarianism and extreme inequalities (Giridharadas
2018; Hofman et al. 2017). The corporate and scholarly
response is muted when issues that render workers precari-
ous, such as gutting of workers’ unions through outsourcing
and the normalization of the gig economy, are discussed
(Venkatesan 2019).
In short, it is disturbing that this distinct field, focused as
it is on the role of corporations in human rights violations,
has not yet acknowledged the part played by corporations
which use wealth accumulated through the entrenching of
inequalities to fuel the rise of fascism. The incentive for
corporations to collude with autocratic states is assumed
to be predominantly material, through the deregulation of
industries and crackdowns on civil rights groups that fight
against the exploitation of precarious labor and the extrac-
tion of resources from environmentally fragile areas (Baner-
jee 2010; Pierson 2017). As we will see below, however,
corporate interests in fostering fascism can also be driven
by the politics of identity, particularly when the state prom-
ulgates social policies that accentuate the prejudices and
supremacist identities of corporate elites.
Corporate Enablers of Hindu Fascism
The remainder of this article focuses on the role of Indian
corporations and corporate classes in fostering the BJP’s
accession to power and in the normalizing of Hindutva from
a fringe ideology to hegemonic status in contemporary India.
The Dismantling of Democracy
The return to power of the BJP in 2019, in spite of its dis-
regard for democratic institutions and its display of fascist
tendencies, raises serious doubts about the future of lib-
eral democracy in India (Chatterji et al. 2019; Jha 2019).
Scholars, political commentators, writers, filmmakers, and
scientists had consistently raised concerns over the increas-
ingly fascist tendencies of the BJP government during its
first term, including its violent assertions of majoritarian-
ism, suppression of minorities and criminalization of dis-
sent, propagation of pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism,
and infiltration by individuals affiliated with Hindutva into
institutions, particularly in education, converting them into
partisan organizations (Guha 2019; Halarnkar 2017; Human
Rights Watch 2019; Kumar 2017; Malekar 2016; McDonnell
and Cabrera 2019; Lokayat 2019; Mander et al. 2018; The
New York Times 2017; Reporters without Borders 2017).
The assertive majoritarianism and redemptive violence
associated with Hindu Rashtra (the Hindu Nation) has led
to systematic downgrading of pluralism and of minorities,
in particularly Muslims, from the public sphere (Jaffrelot
2019). Within the Hindutva cosmology, the cow is deemed
Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
holy and its consumption a sacrilege and an affront to Hindu
supremacy (Jha 2002). Lynchings of Muslims on account of
their trade, slaughter, or consumption of beef, by self-styled
gau rakshaks (cow protectors) affiliated with Hindutva is a
new phenomenon in India, often perpetrated with the active
collusion of state agencies, and has received considerable
media attention.
The United Nations Human Rights Council had also
warned in 2018:
In India, the election of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP), has been linked to incidents of vio-
lence against the members of Dalit, Muslim tribal and
Christian communities. Reports document the use of
inflammatory remarks by BJP leaders against minority
groups, and the rise of vigilantism targeting Muslims
and Dalits. (United Nations 2018, p. 10)
The results of the 2019 election show that none of these
warnings of impending fascism have had any effect. The
BJP was able to increase its vote-share in every category of
voters, except Muslims. Despite its dismal handling of the
economy and displays of sectarianism, the corporate elite’s
support for the BJP appears resolute. We now focus our
attention on the critique of the role of Indian corporations
and corporate classes in the BJP’s rise to power.
The “Dog on the Leash” Explanation
Passmore (2014) identifies three approaches to the study
of fascism—Marxist, Weberian, and totalitarian. Each
approach illuminates different aspects of fascism but the
three categories also have some shared assumptions. The
Marxist approach focuses on the “material motives that
attract different groups to fascism” (ibid., p. 8). Fascism, in
this view, is a tool in the service of capitalists and the petty
bourgeoisie against socialist alternatives. The Weberian
approach, in contrast, argues that fascism is a last ditch effort
by reactionary elites and feudal classes to resist the advance
of liberal democracy and socialism that threaten their status.
Populations experiencing rapid social change are attracted to
“fascists who promise to restore old certainties” such as race,
caste, and gender hierarchies (ibid., p. 11). There are obvious
overlaps between these two perspectives as the traditional
elites are usually the contemporary owners of private capital.
Totalitarian approaches focus on fascism’s drive to incorpo-
rate the masses within “a hierarchical, mobilized, militarized
community” to serve the interests of the nation (ibid., p.
12) and to “flatten out social differences in an undifferenti-
ated mass” (ibid., p. 135). The Weberian focus on fascism’s
assurance to traditional elites to restore order is therefore
acknowledged in the totalitarian perspective.
Most critiques of corporate involvement in the devel-
opment of Hindutva in India have adopted a Marxist
perspective, typically explaining the collusion as intri-
cately linked to the policy turn toward neoliberalism of the
early 1990s (Chacko 2019; Gopalakrishnan 2008, 2009).
These critiques track the role of corporations from reluc-
tant to active enabler of Hindu fascism through various
stages of its development.
An unavoidable tension involved in melding neolib-
eralism and Hindutva was noted at an early stage: neo-
liberalism demands unrestricted globalization, including
the global flow of ideas along with capital, whereas the
reactionary tendencies of Hindutva make it wary of any-
thing without indigenous roots (Gopalakrishnan 2008,
2009). Initial support for Hindutva came predominantly
from small and medium traders and social conservatives
who were opposed to economic and cultural liberaliza-
tion facilitated by secular liberal governments (Corbridge
and Harriss 2000). Big businesses had more to lose than
gain from the growth of a protectionist force like Hindutva
(Gopalakrishnan 2009; Patnaik 1993; Sarkar 1993).
However, by the late 1990s, the proponents of Hindutva
had started reconciling its dissonances with neoliberalism,
like other fascist movements that transform their anti-elite
stance to become supporters of the prevailing elite. Under-
lying this change was political expediency, particularly
the need to appeal to upper class voters eager for liber-
alization and globalization (Gopalakrishnan 2008). As
noted above, the support of indigenous corporations for
fascist leadership is motivated by the need for temporary
protection from international competition, consolidation
of labor, or resentments against inequality (Kalecki 2011,
p. 141). Hindutva too served as a useful political mecha-
nism to break up or extinguish other forms of solidari-
ties (labor, class, consumer, environment protection, etc.)
that could have posed serious threats to business interests
(Gopalakrishnan 2009). Consequently, by the turn of the
century, Hindutva, and by extension the BJP, had become
far more committed to open markets, actively wooing
international investors and deregulation of labor (ibid.).
While Indian big business elites identified the bene-
fits of a totalitarian ideology like Hindutva in countering
both subaltern mobilizations that threatened to segment
markets and state interventions in business decisions
(Gopalakrishnan 2009), they were careful at first not
to endorse its reactionary, communal, and obscurantist
political planks. This led Patnaik (1993, p. 76) to won-
der whether Indian corporations saw Hindutva as nothing
but a “dog on a leash,” to be set loose on trade unions
and other labor mobilizations when necessary. Indeed, in
the 2000s, and particularly during the 2014 election cam-
paign, the BJP had to publicly distance itself from the most
regressive foundations of Hindutva and portray itself as a
center-right party in order to make itself acceptable to the
corporate sector (Gopalakrishnan 2006).
13
 P. V. Poruthiyil
Limitations of This Critique
The troubling truth of contemporary India is that the baring
of its fascist face during its first term (2014–2019) has not
dampened corporate comfort with the BJP. In 2016–2018,
the party received 93% of the total funding from 1731 cor-
porate sources, and 86% of the funds from trusts set up by
corporations for electoral funding (Association for Demo-
cratic Reforms 2018; Rodriques et  al. 2019). Corporate
support for BJP was extended into its reelecttion campaign
in 2019 with the party securing a similarly large share of
corporate funds, helping fuel its massive electoral apparatus
and steamroll opponents (Center for Media Studies 2019).
Enthusiastic right-wing ideologues lost no time in calling for
the “pseudo-secular/liberal cartels” to be “discarded from
the country’s academic, cultural and intellectual landscape”
(Madhav 2019, p. 1). BJP’s reelecttion sparked a huge rally
on the Indian stock exchange, indicating that the corporate
perspective on prevailing Hindutva-infused politics is very
positive.
There is an obvious contemporary contrast with the
United States of America where the Trump era has resulted
in a wave of corporate activism against the party in power, if
not for social justice, at least for liberal causes (Bohm et al.
2018; Chatterji and Toffel 2018). Fear of reprisals from an
increasingly vindictive BJP may be part of the explanation
for the meekness of the Indian corporate sector (Poruthi-
yil 2018). The proclivity of the Indian government to use
various agencies under its control—the vicious network
of party-sponsored trolls, the investigating agencies, tax
departments, police, media—to suppress any opposition to
its cultural agenda could be constraining corporations from
publicly challenging state support for sectarianism.
Still, the silence cannot be attributed entirely to fear of
reprisal. The contemporary BJP defines itself as friendly
to businesses. The government has shown its desire to be
endorsed by the corporate classes, for instance, by boast-
ing of its rise in the ‘ease of doing business’ index and by
dismantling what remains of regulatory oversight (Ruparelia
2015). Moreover, in contrast to the economic conditions that
drove German and Italian industrialists to support fascist
movements, Indian corporations are not facing any ideologi-
cal threats from a Left that has been entirely emasculated by
two decades of neoliberalism and ideological drift (Prashad
2015). If they were uncomfortable with sectarianism, cor-
porations could have shifted allegiance to other parties such
as the Indian National Congress, which have also not been
averse to using security agencies to curb perceived threats
to corporate interests (Shrivastava and Kothari 2012; Sundar
2016). Cozying up to the violence of sectarianism was not
necessary for big businesses to secure their economic inter-
ests. Therefore, the Marxist critiques of corporate support
for Hindutva as “dog on a leash” to neutralize the threats
13
from the Left, does not offer a complete explanation. The
business elites’ facilitation and normalization of the tran-
sition of Indian society into fascism requires additional
elucidation.
The next section uses Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) concepts
of capital, doxa, and habitus that is inspired by both Marx
and Weber to explain how neoliberalism fused with Hindu-
tva has become the dominant worldview of the corporate
elite in India.
Neoliberalism and Hindutva as Constituents
of a New doxa
Habitus, Doxa, and Capital
According to Bourdieu’s account of human behavior, action
can be “coherent without springing from an intention of
coherence and a deliberate decision; adjusted to the future
without being the product of a project or a plan” (Bourdieu
1990, p. 51). Bourdieu (1977) sees social activities organ-
ized into fields, such as the realms of religion, business, and
politics. Each field has its own habitus which is the unspo-
ken knowledge that plays an important role in the mainte-
nance of the field and social positions. Habitus conditions
individuals to “generate dispositions objectively compatible
with these conditions and in a sense pre-adapted to their
demands” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 54). The social position of
individuals in a field determines their habitus. Though habi-
tus gives opportunity for creativity, it does not involve con-
scious deliberation on our decisions. Rather, the habitus pro-
vides “a spontaneity without consciousness or will” (ibid.,
p. 56) and is the “durably installed generative principle of
regulated improvisations” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 278).
Habitus is regulated, or curtailed, by an even more funda-
mental concept that Bourdieu calls doxa. Practical engage-
ment with the world involves significant misrecognition of
relations and actions of others. This misrecognition is not
an error, but the result of doxa, that is, “taken-for-granted,
preconscious understandings of the world and our place in
it that shape our more conscious awareness” and a condition
imposed on new entrants to a field in order to “obtain from
them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naïve, native compliance
with the fundamental presuppositions of the field” (Calhoun
2003, p. 711).
Bourdieu defines capital as resources which are specific
to the field like wealth (economic capital), networks (social
capital), or prestige (cultural capital). Individuals engage
in struggles to achieve a higher social position in one field
through capture of capital relevant to the field. Higher posi-
tion in the field also means having the power to define which
capital is valuable in that field.
Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
The conversion of control over capital from one field to
another is one of Bourdieu’s original contributions (Calhoun
2003). For example, consider different fields like law, lit-
erature, education, religion, and politics, each with its own
rules. Successful lawyers often convert their capital from
the field of law into politics. Capital can result in intergen-
erational transfer with successful politicians transferring
acquired capital, such as name recognition and access to
funding, to their children. Religiosity can similarly be trans-
ferred to the field of politics when requiring the endorsement
of religious voters.
Neoliberalism is one of the most pervasive doxas in con-
temporary societies. Referring to neoliberalism, Bourdieu
observes that “the most successful ideological effects are the
ones that have no need of words, but only of laissez-faire and
complicitous silence” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 133). By the early
2000s, neoliberalism was already the doxa of the Indian cor-
porate elite (Chopra 2003). As the next section shows, their
ease with the sectarianism of the current political establish-
ment can be explained by the grafting of Hindutva onto the
prevailing doxa.
Neoliberal Hindutva: The Doxa of Corporate India
Hindutva is premised on three principles (Chandra 2019):
(1) a totalitarian flattening of internal diversities and con-
flicts of Hinduism into an undifferentiated uniform mass;
(2) the imposition of “brahmanical patriarchy” (Chakravarti
1993) as the organizing principle, described below; and (3)
the conflation of nation with the majority religion, in this
case Hinduism (Palshikar 2017). The first and the third fea-
tures are standard to all forms of fascism and will not be dis-
cussed here (see Passmore 2014). The second, brahmanical
patriarchy, being unique to India, is briefly discussed below.
Brahmanical patriarchy refers to a worldview that accepts
the Hindu conservative notions of purity (Chakravarti 1993).
Upper caste habits and rituals (vegetarianism, temple ritu-
als, Sanskrit, etc.) are considered pure and the customs and
traditions of lower castes (particularly meat consumption)
are impure. The belief in purity also constrains women into
traditional roles of subservience. The idea of brahmanical
patriarchy is not a critique of all individuals belonging to
any specific groups (Brahmins or men), just as racism is
not a critique of all white men. The label is used to capture
an interlinked set of prejudices that is often internalized by
men and women from all castes through sociocultural and
political processes. My argument is that features of the field
inhabited by corporate classes, and conversions of capital
between fields, have led steadily to the fused form of neolib-
eral Hindutva becoming the dominant doxa, with the brah-
manical component being a crucial ingredient.
The first feature to consider is the domination of reli-
giously inclined upper caste Hindus within the corporate
classes (Jodhka 2016). Homophily (love of sameness),
derived from membership in religious, caste, and spiritual
groups, has been found to influence board composition
of the top listed companies in India (Bhagavatula et al.
2017; Naudet and Dubost 2016). The social and economic
capital available to these corporate classes translates easily
from the spiritual–religious–political sphere to lucrative
corporate jobs (Ajit et al. 2012; Khan 2019). Association
with affiliates of BJP has helped large Indian companies
to strong-arm multinational corporations, no doubt por-
traying them as “foreign,” into accepting revenue-sharing
agreements that are not ideal (see Bhardwaj et al. 2017).
Second, religion wields a significant level of influence
on decision making by Indian managers, which exposure
to globalization and education has not dented (Chan and
Ananthram 2019; Nanda 2011[2009]). Illiberal aspects of
Indian culture such as caste systems, patriarchy, ritual-
ism, and superstitions have shown considerable resilience
and survived and even thrived post globalization and eco-
nomic liberalization (Gupta 2000). Nanda (2011[2009], p.
140) observes: “The banal, everyday Hindu religiosity is
simultaneously breeding a banal, everyday kind of Hindu
nationalism.” Religiosity, hijacked by the prejudicial ver-
sion of Hindutva, “operate[s] as accessible gates” into the
corporate classes (Waghorne 2019, p. 4). This explains
the lack of corporate resistance against sectarian public
policies, such as banning beef, which reinforce Hindu-
tva worldviews (Chigateri 2008; Doctor 2013; Sarkar and
Sarkar 2016). It is not surprising, therefore, that these
groups do not object when public funds are directed to
‘research’ to substantiate the ‘medicinal benefits’ of the
cow in treating cancer, or its ability to exhale oxygen and
to secrete gold in its urine (Ramachandran 2016).
Like other forms of supremacist ideologies, Hindutva
reassures members of upper castes that are threatened by
the rise of lower castes and, like other supporters of fas-
cism, long for “order, calm, and the inherited hierarchies
of wealth and birth” (Paxton 2004, p. 22). Support for the
BJP therefore rises “as we go up the class hierarchy, as
well as the caste hierarchy,” with its popularity highest
among anti-minority voters (Palshikar 2017; Sridharan
2014, p. 75; Venkatramakrishnan 2019). A subtle process
through which brahmanical patriarchy establishes its dom-
inance across caste lines is sanskritization: the emulation
by the castes of brahmanical rituals and practices from
which they were historically excluded (Srinivas 1956).
This process of sanskritization and its association with
pro-business policies also works to extend Hindutva’s
appeal beyond upper castes to include the backward castes,
particularly the upwardly mobile “neo-middle classes” as
they enter the corporate milieu (Jaffrelot 2013). Fascist
credentials become an essential password for entry into
the Indian corporate elite.
13
 P. V. Poruthiyil
Third, the rise of spiritual gurus (babas) is another factor
aiding the melding of neoliberalism and Hindutva as the
doxa of the corporate sector. Even under previous regimes,
these babas successfully monetized the cultural anxieties
of the upwardly mobile classes and set up “divine enter-
prises” (McKean 1996) that had a large following among the
influential classes (Nanda 2011[2009]). Politicians across
the spectrum have remained beholden to these gurus in the
expectation of influencing followers’ votes. Their power
has, however, increased manifold under a Hindu nationalist
regime. Some gurus that actively campaigned for the Hin-
dutva agenda, including cow protection, use their influence
in favor of corporations that have colluded with the state
to suppress civil rights (Khare 2016). Politically influen-
tial babas use their followers, composed predominantly of
upwardly mobile classes, as captive markets to launch lucra-
tive businesses that commercialize traditional knowledge
such as yoga and Ayurveda (McKean 1996). These babas
cynically leverage their influence over the ideological pref-
erences of devotees to bargain for patronage from the state,
leading to the uniquely Indian phenomenon of “crony babas”
(Bhatia and Lasseter 2017; Khare 2016).
A fourth factor to consider is that the influence of a global
network of supremacists, particularly from hugely significant
countries like the United States and India, can lead to the
institutionalization of supremacy. The Indian diaspora, or
non-resident Indians (NRIs), are some of the most vocal and
influential supporters of Hindutva (Therwath 2012). While
benefiting from progressive policies that defend immigrant
rights they also perpetuate purity norms of brahmanical
patriarchy in their host nations (Equality Labs 2018). Their
ideological and organizational links with white supremacists
provide a transnational network and resources with which to
damage and dismantle domestic liberal democratic institu-
tions (Thobani 2019).
Fifth, the clarity offered by technology has fascinated fas-
cists seeking a way to control societies (Herf 1984). As Herf
(1984, p. 105) observed with reference to the Nazi regime,
“Authoritarian technology required an authoritarian state.”
The use of technology has benefited governance in India
by reducing pilfering and corruption, and has improved the
quality of government services. However, the BJP has dis-
played a fascination with the use of technology to curtail
democratic rights, for instance, through improved surveil-
lance, which major technology firms and entrepreneurs have
sought to exploit (Aneez et al. 2019). Technology entre-
preneurs are transferring their legitimacy (gained through
decades of association with liberal politics and the quintes-
sentially neoliberal phenomenon of outsourcing) to develop
technologies for surveillance which meet the emerging needs
of authoritarians, and have even funded litigations in the
court against civil society groups struggling to challenge
the state’s attempt to entrench surveillance (Thaker 2018).
13
The grafting of these features of Hindutva onto the
prevailing doxa of neoliberalism in India is leading to a
“state–temple–corporate” complex (Nanda 2011[2009]) that
allows a variety of upper class and caste interests to merge
seamlessly with religious groups and politicians (Poruthiyil
2018). The social and spiritual benefits add to the mate-
rial benefits of being associated with the party in power.
Corporate interests become indistinguishable from those of
religious institutions which are themselves businesses. Poli-
ticians tap the influence of religious institutions which bar-
gain for protection of regressive customs and pro-corporate
policies that entrench their grip on society.
This doxa now circumscribes the habitus of various fields
inhabited by the influential Indian corporate elite. The vio-
lence of fascism is seen as unproblematic, even desirable,
for these groups, as their privileges do not just remain intact
but are enhanced in the supremacist society envisaged by
Hindutva.
The Combined Effect of Neoliberalism and Hindutva
The effects of neoliberal Hindutva can be illustrated through
two examples.
(1) The lynching of Muslims by vigilante groups is a new
phenomenon in India. Vigilante gau rakshaks, with the
connivance of the state and, troublingly, almost with-
out public outrage, systematically track and organize
assaults on Muslims and Dalits, accusing them of sac-
rilege by involvement in the trade, slaughter, and con-
sumption of beef (Human Rights Watch 2019; Mander
et al. 2018). Of the recorded cow-related lynchings that
occurred between 2012 and 2019, 97% took place after
the BJP assumed power at the center, with 122 inci-
dents (46 of them fatal, and 57% targeting Muslims)
recorded between 2014 and 2018 (IndiaSpend 2019).
Observers worry that Muslims in India are, to borrow
Martin Luther King’s words, living “constantly at tiptoe
stance,” accepting the possibility of being lynched as
the new normal (Mander et al. 2018).
Jayant Sinha, a minister in the BJP government, serves
as an example of the fusion of neoliberalism and Hindutva.
Sinha is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Business
School. He has spent years abroad and had stints as consult-
ant and as fund manager with recognizable global entities
such as McKinsey and Company and Omidyar Network. His
Wikipedia page notes that Sinha has also contributed to aspi-
rational publications like the Harvard Business Review and
the Financial Times.
On June 29, 2017, Alimuddin Ansari was lynched in Sin-
ha’s constituency, Hazarabagh in Central India, on suspicion
Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
of carrying beef. The Hindu mob made and shared videos of
the lynching which reached Ansari’s teenage son in real time
(Mander et al. 2018). By the time the son scrambled to the
location in the city center, his father was dead. The ensuing
legal processes, for the first time in a trial of this kind, found
the accused guilty, raising hopes that the justice system had
finally recognized the dangers of cow vigilantism.
Sinha’s response reflects the doxa of neoliberal Hindu-
tva. He not only financed the legal costs of the accused,
but in an action of blatant disregard for human rights, also
publicly garlanded them when they were released on bail.
Sinha claimed that the accused were innocent and he was
merely upholding justice for his voters. But he did not find
it necessary to meet the family of the victim, who are also
residents in his constituency (Gettleman and Kumar 2018).
These actions triggered a public outcry and disappointment
among those who expected that Sinha’s academic and pro-
fessional background would lift him above the inflammatory
vitriol of BJP ministers steeped in Hindtuva (ibid). But the
public outrage was too meek to threaten his standing within
the party, his ministerial position, or his reelecttion.
(2) India is driven by crony capitalism. A majority of bil-
lionaires are making their profits from ‘rent-thick’
sectors that involve the state on a grand scale, in giv-
ing licenses and deploying security forces to effect
massive displacements of communities (Gandhi and
Walton 2012; Oxfam 2018, p. 35). The beneficiar-
ies of the state–temple–corporate complex inevitably
oppose human rights and progressive movements as
the latter create barriers to wealth extraction and seek
the unraveling of regressive social institutions ands,
and practices that reinforce the privileged positions of
corporate elites in traditional social hierarchies. The
overlapping interests between crony capitalists and
sociocultural organizations can be seen in the response
to an incident involving coastal villagers in India and
a subsidiary of the London-based Vedanta Resources,
controlled by an NRI.
Successive federal governments in India have provided
the Vedanta subsidiary with permissions to build and expand
its copper smelting operations in the environmentally fragile
coastal zone in south eastern India. These permissions have
been granted with no regard for the local villagers’ concerns
that effluents from the plant are polluting their sources of
water and causing the unusual incidence of health problems.
The company refuses to accept responsibility and the state
continues to allow it to expand its operations. Recently,
frustrations boiled over and triggered a massive protest of
around 200,000 people, mostly local villagers and human
rights activists. The response of the provincial government,
run by an affiliate of the BJP, led to 13 unarmed villagers
being gunned down, and scores of others injured (Deva-
sahayam 2018). This brutality by the state on behalf of a
corporation and against some of the poorest sections of the
population elicited a strong response from civil society.
The response from the increasingly powerful right-wing
sections of the media demonstrates the interpenetration of
interests of Hindutva and neoliberalism. Seeking proximity
to whichever party was in power, Vedanta had become a
public backer of the BJP’s political agenda (The Wire 2018).
Hindutva-affiliated news outlets branded protestors part of
an “anti-national” conspiracy funded by “Jihadis,” and even
the Church of England (Subramani 2018; Venkatesan 2018),
thus evoking prevailing prejudices against non-Hindus por-
trayed in Hindutva discourse as opposed, by default, to the
“national interests” (narrowly interpreted as wealth crea-
tion). The corporation also received support from influen-
tial babas like Jaggi Vasudev and Baba Ramdev, both of
whom have sprawling business enterprises and considerable
followings among the core supporters of Hindutva (Bhatia
and Lasseter 2017). In a particularly insensitive choice of
vocabulary, given the context, Vasudev declared: “Lynching
large businesses is economic suicide” (quoted in The Indian
Express 2018).
These examples show how the doxa constituted by the
interpenetration of neoliberalism and Hindutva results in
the protection not just of economic but also of the socio-
cultural interests of the corporate elite in India. Adhering to
the tenets of Hindutva is now considered essential for Indian
neoliberalism (Chacko 2019; George 2014). The hegemony
of this doxa over the corporate sector, and indeed the entire
country, is expected to entrench itself, as the BJP’s massive
electoral victory is bound to be interpreted as an endorse-
ment of both neoliberalism and Hindutva.
Reconfiguring BHR Toward Material Equality
In his study of Nazi death squads, Ordinary Men, Brown-
ing (2017[1992], p. 216) observed that a “combination of
situational factors and ideological overlap that concurred
on the enemy status and dehumanisation of the victims
was sufficient to turn ‘ordinary men’ into ‘willing execu-
tioners’.” Recent studies on the rise of supremacist ideol-
ogy across the world are reaffirming that the role of “social
and psychological attachments to groups” can inure people
into accepting the cruelties inflicted by political groups they
support (Achen and Bartels 2017, p. 32). Those who may
not initially be inclined toward fascist policies could, after
a period of time, recalibrate their beliefs to suit the group’s
interests. This is particularly true when the violence is seen
as redemptive and therefore devoid of guilt (Berbrier 2000).
The social transformations underway in the contempo-
rary world scarcely give confidence that members of those
13
 P. V. Poruthiyil
corporate classes will not become another generation of
“ordinary men” who perpetrate extraordinary cruelties. The
corporate classes share the ideological prejudices of fascists
and are becoming inured to, or even profiteer from, the vio-
lent exclusions and mass crimes that may unfold. This is
especially true of societies with particular historic legacies,
such as slavery in the United States and Brazil and caste
and religious strife in India, where the wealth and privi-
lege are predominantly retained by elite groups with shared
identities.
Business scholarship and education has an important role
to play by inoculating corporate classes against the appeals
of fascism. The wider business community—including com-
panies, scholars, and activists—must respond to this defiant
role of big businesses in the proliferation of authoritarian,
proto-fascist states across the world. As history has shown,
casual engagement with fascism can rapidly spin out of con-
trol into an atmosphere conducive to regressive social poli-
cies with tremendous social costs (Arendt 1973). If business
graduates are contributing to the entrenching of fascisms to
protect material or sociocultural interests, educators cannot
escape the blame for failing to warn them. I suggest three
broad strategies below to prevent this turn of events.
Address Inequality, Meaningfully
As Piketty (2014, p. 263) notes, whether inequalities can
be maintained “depends not only on the effectiveness of the
repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the
effectiveness of the apparatus of justification.” Critics of the
eagerness to privilege profit maximization and reluctance to
engage with systemic injustices have suggested that business
scholarship is part of this apparatus (Ghoshal 2005; Marens
2007, 2010). Even within business ethics, a field that claims
to resist the dominant tenor of the field, there is a noted
preference for political philosophies that are compatible with
inequality (Lockean and libertarian approaches) over those
that challenge the concentration of wealth (Rawls, Marx)
and risk repelling the consumers/funders of business school
education (Marens 2007).
Superficial approaches, such as focusing on minimum
protections of human rights while ignoring widening ine-
qualities, are a limitation of the human rights movement as
a whole (Moyn 2018a). Goal 10 of the UN’s Sustainable
Development Goals, to “reduce inequality within and among
countries,” is a good example. The concern with persistent
inequality is that “large disparities remain regarding access
to health and education services and other assets” with the
focus primarily on status equality, that is, discriminations in
access based on gender, caste, race, disability, and sexual-
ity (United Nations 2015). It is not surprising, therefore,
that derived fields—such as business and human rights—are
affected by the same malaise.
13
Indeed, the current celebration of the United Nations’
consensus on human rights obligations of businesses—the
premise for the existence of a field called business and
human rights—stems from the discourse’s failure to date
to address the increasing concentration of wealth, as long
as minimum protections are assured. In addressing SDG
10, corporations are likely to opt for a diluted version of
equality that distracts attention from the deeper mecha-
nisms of wealth accumulation (Giridharadas 2018). For
instance, corporations can claim credit for compliance
with a diluted form of human rights such as increasing
diversity on company boards, or philanthropic invest-
ments—activities that have minimal impact on profit mar-
gins—while refusing more substantial policies like facili-
tating worker participation in boards, actively lobbying for
removal of policies that result in lower corporation taxes,
and weaker protections of labor and Nature. A refocus on
material equality, and not just sufficiency, is necessary for
the meaningful defense of human rights (Moyn 2018a, b)
and by implication for management studies. This would
involve the recalibration of attitudes toward redistribution,
states, and unions.
Meaningful attention to inequality, including redistribu-
tion of wealth, can address the issue of increasing tribalism
and the growth of majoritarian politics. Redistribution can
break the vicious cycle of capital transfer between the fields
of corporate activity and fascist politics. For instance, in
India, reduced wealth concentration among the elite groups
with affinity for fascism would mean reduced resources for
sectarian politics, and a reduction in wealth transfers to
crony babas and their influence on politics. In the United
States, redistribution could reduce the funding for political
groups bound by supremacist ideas, in favor of those who
argue for redistribution of wealth and the revival of trade
unions.
Preference for a minimal state, though for different rea-
sons, is a shared feature both of advocates of neoliberalism
and human rights (Moyn 2018a), and of business and society
scholars (Scherer and Palazzo 2011; Wettstein 2015). How-
ever, achieving material equality requires a greater role for
the state that is oriented toward egalitarian goals, such as
creating policies that nurture unions, distribute ownership
of means of production, and hold private actors accountable.
Unions have been at the vanguard of social justice and the
foundation of a multiracial and multicaste social movement
against sectarianism. It is important that business scholar-
ship challenge prevailing prejudices in the corporate sector
against workers’ solidarity. Analyzing industrial disputes
(e.g. Herod 1999), investigating executive pay ratios, and
addressing the role of race and caste in the nature of wealth
accumulation must figure just as prominently as the current
focus on living wages, safe working conditions, and minimal
protections against workplace abuses.
Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion
Recognize Human Inclination for Cruelty
A recent article in The Atlantic observed that among Trump
supporters “their shared laughter at the suffering of others is
an adhesive that binds them to one another” (Serwer 2018).
Social media posts shared by Hindutva groups of themselves
lynching Muslims reveal a similar shared enthusiasm, a grim
solidarity (Mander et al. 2018). For the perpetrators, these
cruelties are performative and valorous actions devoid of
guilt as the intention is to defend a community that perceives
itself as facing existential threats (Rushdy 2012).
Philosophical concepts such as trust, virtue, empathy, and
justice are standard fare in business ethics; they support the
self-image of business graduates and corporations as ideal
agents for addressing social issues, given that the state is
being rendered redundant by globalization. However, as a
phenomenon that is integral to human nature, particularly
in groups associated with authoritarian movements, cruelty
should also be a subject of study in business ethics (e.g.
Shklar 1982).
There is a way for business ethics and education to recog-
nize our frailty as human beings: by bringing humanities—
history, literature, rhetoric—into their curricula and teach-
ing (Nussbaum 2010; Zald 1996). The surge in adherents
of Hindutva in India has answered Nussbaum’s question:
given the downgrading of humanities in universities “Would
democracy in India survive today’s assault upon its soul?”
(Nussbaum 2010, p. 4). In a warning particularly suited to
business education Nussbaum (ibid., p. 23) notes that:
educators for economic growth will do more than
ignore the arts. They will fear them. For a cultivated
and developed sympathy is a particularly dangerous
enemy of obtuseness, and moral obtuseness is neces-
sary to carry out programs of economic development
that ignore inequality.
Democracy requires, Nussbaum argues, what humanities
foster: an ability to see other people as human beings, “rather
than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s
plan…. To build democracy we need to foster individuals
who are able to create relationships that are meaningful
rather than entering into relationships with an intention to
manipulate” (ibid., p. 6).
Business Education as a Subversive Activity
The fragility of a society that is prosperous but com-
posed of compliant individuals who fear not only others’
autonomy, but also their own, cannot be overstated. The
tendency to “obey in advance” is well-suited for tyranny
(Snyder 2017, p. 17). The seeds of totalitarianism are eas-
ily sown in an uncritical population disinclined to question
authority, unable to define societal problems or to decide
which problems are worth addressing. Individuals who do
not know how to learn and how to find solutions are easily
swayed by demagogues who offer emotional arguments
that fail the test of reason or fact. They become receptacles
and channels for the spread of elite-friendly, communally
divisive political agendas.
As Hindu nationalism began to grow as a serious threat
to secularism and democracy in India, Amartya Sen (1993)
identified its “militant obscurantism,” particularly of his-
tory; more recently, he highlighted the interest of Hindu-
tva ideologues in “arbitrary augmentation of a narrowly
sectarian view of India’s past, along with undermining its
magnificently multireligious and heterodox history” (Sen
2007, p. 1). Engagement with the historical method, for
instance through a study of business history, can equip
students with the capacity to scrutinize and debunk the
obscurantist history that is often used to promote victim-
hood and justify violence. The curriculum could include
the historical role of German companies in the transfor-
mation of fascism through the various stages, cultural
legacies that explain the entrenchment of race, caste, and
colonial rule in the contemporary structuring of the cor-
porate world, and the politics of redistribution and labor
movements, as well as research to foster critical thinking
among business graduates.
Postman and Weingartner (1969), in their classic Teach-
ing as a Subversive Activity, note that educators “serve as
the principal medium for developing in youth attitudes and
skills of social, political and cultural criticism” (ibid., p. 2).
Classrooms, they argue, must become inquiry environments
that are structured as a series of human encounters where
learners learn by doing the process of learning (Postman and
Weingartner 1969). As expressed by Nussbaum: in a state of
inquiry “each student must be treated as an individual whose
powers of mind are unfolding and who is expected to make
an active and creative contribution to each classroom discus-
sion” (Nussbaum 2010, p. 55). Education should become
experiential—“An education of ‘I wonder’, instead of ‘I do’”
(Freire 2008[1974], p. 32) that shuns the tendency to simply
transmit inert ideas and principles that do not challenge the
status quo.
The brunt of anti-intellectualism of authoritarian-fas-
cist groups across the world has been borne by humanities
departments—gender studies, history, and sociology are pri-
mary targets (Guha 2019; Kerr 2018; Mathur 2018). These
disciplines pose a serious challenge to imagined foundations
of fascism such as gender and racial hierarchies, caste purity,
and the mythical golden ages (Sen 1993). That business edu-
cation has not been in the cross-hairs of right-wing extrem-
ism should be disconcerting as it means that the knowledge
and graduates emerging from business schools are devoid of
intellectual content that fascists might find threatening. Con-
versely, one measure of the success of a research or teaching
13
 P. V. Poruthiyil
program in defending democracy is its ability to generate
antipathy from fascists and/or their paramilitary forces.
Conclusion
The simultaneous proliferation of billionaires with global
business interests and fascism poses a challenge to core
assumptions in the field of business ethics. It seems that
democracy is not essential for wealth accumulation, as was
once thought, nor are corporations naturally inclined to
accept rational arguments on global standards of morality.
Global capital can extract and transfer profits more smoothly
through a network of authoritarian-controlled spaces when
compared to democratically run countries that value human
rights. Corporate collusions with authoritarian governments
are not always forced. Significant sections of the corporate
elite seem willing and able to finance and condone cruel-
ties by fascist governments they have voted for, without any
associated guilt.
This paper makes the case for business scholars to
acknowledge the prevalence of corporate collusion with
fascisms as a consequence of inequalities inevitable to capi-
talism. The continuing neglect of meaningful attention to
inequality in business scholarship through radical measures
like redistribution and unionization, in favor of sufficiency, is
partly explained by its interests being enmeshed with those
of the corporate sector. This must be rectified.
Settling for minimum protections means that the best pos-
sible outcome that business ethics can achieve is the perpetu-
ation of a combination of plutocracy and authoritarianism,
at best in a benign dictatorship. Under full-blown fascism,
where discriminations based on race, caste, or religion are
programmatic, maintenance of even a minimum floor of
human rights will become unviable.
Genuine attention to inequality would involve linking
material inequalities to the violation of human rights. This
would mean supporting alternatives to neoliberal capitalism
that, for reasons explored above, businesses and business
education have until now avoided. Indeed, the increasing
popularity of socialism in major capitalist democracies
could, if history is any indication, push businesses into
favoring fascism rather than risk losing their economic and
sociocultural privileges. Very soon, business schools might
have to choose sides.
Acknowledgements  The author wishes to thank the Section Editor,
Business Ethics and Critical Studies and three anonymous reviewers
who provided extensive feedback that significantly sharpened the argu-
ments and streamlined the paper. Paula Bownas assisted with editing.
The author is grateful to Harsh Mander for organizing the Karwan-
e-Mohabbat (Caravan of Love) as a means of mobilizing public out-
rage and compassion against the normalization of lynching in India;
13
this paper is dedicated to his relentless efforts to ensure justice for the
victims.
Compliance with Ethical Standards 
Conflict of interest  Author A declares that he/she has no conflict of
interest.
Ethical Approval  This article does not contain any studies with human
participants performed by any of the authors.
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