Dispatches from Hindunazistan

It looks as though I am a reluctant prophet once more.

By now, I assume that my readers won’t need a thousand word background filler to bring them up to date on the political situation in India; I’ve written enough about it over the last few years that you’ll be able to just, you know, refer back to my previous writings if you need a refresher course.

If you recall, I had predicted a rising wave of Hindunazi fascism and intolerance in the wake of their electoral victory in 2014. I had further predicted that as reality caught up with the hollowness of the Hindunazis’ promises, people would get steadily more disenchanted, and the Hindunazis would react with increased intolerance and fascist violence.

Well, that’s happening, and much faster than I’d have expected.

You see, things are not going so very well in the Republic of Hindunazistan.

In order to get into power, the Hindunazis had made promises that were not just deliriously optimistic, they were such tall tales that no adult should have spent five seconds on them before dismissing them out of hand. They had not, actually, needed to make those promises, because the government before them was so spectacularly incompetent, so incredibly venal, and so utterly unpopular that the electorate was desperate for change. They’d have voted for anyone, at all, who might make things better. All the Hindunazis had to do was make realistic projections about what was possible, and contrast them to the incompetence of the incumbent Congress government.

Instead, they unleashed a laptop army which promised the sky, if only given the chance. The electorate reacted by giving them that chance. And then, reality being what it is, it’s very, very unsurprising that none of those promises – not one single, solitary one – has been kept.

The economy is in the doldrums. Prices continue to rise. There are no jobs to be had. Corruption is still as high as ever. The slush funds Modi had promised to get back from abroad within a hundred days of taking office still lie in their Swiss bank vaults, growing fat on the interest. Even the liberals of the Great Indian Muddle Class, who had voted en masse for Modi on the basis of the Golden Age he’d promised, are now thoroughly disillusioned and increasingly alienated. That kind of happens when a government tells people what they can or can’t eat, can or can’t wear, can or can’t think, and the like.

Like the Nazis they so love and admire, the Hindunazis have looked for an internal enemy to focus public wrath on, and an excuse to manufacture this wrath. They imagined they’d found it in the question of beef consumption. Now, this may be a surprise to most people, but India has, actually, a very high rate of beef consumption, and is also the single leading exporter of beef in the world. And, also contrary to general belief, a lot of Hindus eat beef. Beef was, historically, a prized food which was served to honoured guests; to this day it is a source of cheap protein – the only one they can afford – to millions of Indians.

One of the pet Hindunazi projects is the Hindu Rashtra (literally nation, but rasthra has connotations going beyond nationhood, and encompasses a cultural and social homogeneity  more akin to tribal identity; something like the Nazi Volk). Despite having a more than 80% Hindu population, India is still officially and largely genuinely secular, mostly because Hinduism is not so much a religion as a collection of different religions with a few points of similarity. There are vegetarian Hindus and beef eating Hindus, atheist Hindus and Hindus who donate huge amounts to temples and fast one day a week; there are Hindus who, in one part of the country, worship gods whom Hindus in another part of the country have never even heard of. Imposing a common Hindutva (“Hinduness”) on them has been a long standing Hindunazi project, and one which has always come a spectacular cropper.

But that doesn’t mean the Hindunazis have ever given up trying.

Here’s something I said on a website talking about the Hindunazi project:

The fact is that the Hindunazis, for all their alleged aversion to Christianity and Islam, actually are in love with both religions and helplessly admire them. They adore the extreme fringe of both faiths – the Saudi Wahhabis and the evangelists in Amerikastan – and want to make Hinduism just like them. That’s why their primary attempt is to homogenise Hinduism, force it into a strait jacket, in which no variation, cultural, dietary, or in terms of free thought, is to be tolerated...That’s why they use beef as an issue to force through Hindu fundamentalism nationwide, even though many, many Hindus eat beef and most of the rest don’t care who eats it or not as long as they don’t. That’s why they talk about the need of Hindus to have “suicide bombers” and self-righteously unleash their troll army to bully dissenters online. Fortunately, India is far too diverse – and Hinduism is far too resilient – to fall to the Hindunazis. They might love Hitler’s edict – “Ein Reich! Ein Volk! Ein Führer!” but they’ll never get any of those things. 

The Hindunazis started by banning beef in states they ruled, beginning with the huge western Indian state of Maharashtra and then – in a move of mind-boggling hubris and idiocy – in India’s only Muslim majority state, Kashmir, where a separatist insurgency continues to simmer and the common people still protest what they regard as Indian hegemony. The logical and common sense option would be to try and accommodate their concerns and not go out of one’s way to alienate them, right?

That only works if you’re not a Hindunazi. Common sense and logic don’t apply to them.

The stoking of passions on beef began, predictably, to spiral out of control. Hindunazi (or Hindunazi-inspired) mobs have beaten and burned several Muslims to death on the basis of rumours that they were “eating” or “smuggling” beef. Modi maintained a deafening silence for far too long before conceding, reluctantly, that perhaps these lynchings should not have happened, but he couldn’t be blamed for them.

This was not exactly the kind of response calculated to endear him to anybody.

The intellectuals are up in arms. In response to the growing intolerance and religious violence, over forty eminent writers (at last count) have returned their government-bestowed awards. The Hindunazis responded to this by unleashing their pet right wing media zealots and online troll army in a desperate attempt to smear these authors, but it backfired badly. Many of them had impeccable Hindu credentials, and they were clearly responding in disgust to the prevailing atmosphere. They couldn’t be clubbed together in some mythical anti-national alliance designed to denigrate the Hindunazis.

In fact nobody needs to denigrate the Hindunazis. They’re doing an excellent job of that on their own.

As I write this, Modi is poised to lose a major state election, in the state of Bihar. It would not have been a particularly major election, and it would not have been Modi who lost it, but for the fact that he, very stupidly, threw himself into the campaign and so made it a de facto referendum on himself. He’d done the same thing earlier this year in the state of Delhi; and the electorate of the state had wiped the floor with him, mass voting instead for the centrist Aam Aadmi Party, which has a broom for an election symbol. But apparently being a Hindunazi means not having to learn from history.

Well, that’s not actually very surprising, since the Hindunazis have no love of history and spend a considerable amount of time mythologising it to suit their own interests.

So, what’s a good Modi worshipper* to do?

[*There is a standard term anti-Modi people use nowadays to refer to Modi worshippers – Modi bhakts, literally “disciples” or “acolytes”. It’s fully part of Indian English lexicon now. However, I think Modi-worship is a better term for this phenomenon since these people are all willing to worship Modi, but don’t seem to have learnt anything from him.]

What they can’t do is take the way out that was pioneered by the previous Congress Party government, the one that set new standards in venality, incompetence and criminality. They can’t say, like the previous (unelected, rubber stamp) “Prime Minister”, Manmohan Singh, that his hands are “tied” by the compulsions of coalition politics. They can’t do that because, in the election whose results they celebrated with delirious joy just 16 months ago, Modi was given a handy majority on his own. He does not need coalition partners to rule. Nor can they wish away the misgovernance of the Modi regime...or the fact that Modi, himself, is hardly ever in the country. He seems to imagine that being Prime Minister means being able to fly from Mongolia to Kyrgyzstan and Japan to Argentina on taxpayers’ expense, and the hell with what happens back home.

As far as I can see from my interactions with non-Hindunazi Modi worshippers, their focus is now to protect him. They can’t do much about the Hindunazis of his party, their increasing disconnect from reality, their growing infighting and jockeying for power, their spectacular inability to come up with any actual solutions for the country’s problems. So their new theory is that everything that’s going wrong with their hoped for Golden Age is...

...owing to Modi’s lieutenants and rivals in his own party, trying hard to sabotage him. Yes, that’s right. Modi is a helpless innocent, trapped in a power play between unscrupulous people whose primary purpose is to bring him down. That’s even though he’s their poster boy and the only reason they got so many people to vote for them in the first place.

Where have we heard that before?

Oh yes, over and over in history when despots began to show their feet of clay.

I could name a few.

 

[Image Source: The Psyche Of Hindu Fascism]