"If by Hindutva it is meant what we are witnessing under the BJP regime today, we don't need any more of it. The time has come to look for alternatives. This statement is like a political quote of the time and this is what exactly one can feel when he/she impartially gauges the feelings of the masses of India. Mind the fact that social interactive platforms of India today, which are hijacked by the feudal classes of India, may speak a different story, which, for their proponents, appears like one of the varieties of nationalism practiced as an ideology of opportunistic power struggle. No doubt, the Indian culture that is renowned in the world history as the most benign culture of the world for having given asylum to infinite number of tribes and migrants from time immemorial and having built a composite culture assuring a rightful place to everyone, has taken a regretful retreat to declare India as a land of fraudulent sectarian claimants.
The scope of this work also includes an enquiry into the matter to understand how India changed within a short span of time from her status as a benign and cosmopolitan society to that of a sectarian and authoritarian state. This also unveils the story of that fundamental change of India from Nehruvian socialism to Hindutva fascism.
The first ideological formulation in post-British India, Nehruvian socialism, derived its influence from multiple sources. The foremost was the economic idealism of Gandhi which advocated, among other things, the principles of simple living, localized production and trusteeship management. To begin with, Gandhi's idealism was put into practice with the help of socialist experiment, the lessons of which Nehru learnt from the communist government in Russia.
The establishment of state-owned enterprises, which were expected to cure the industrial backwardness of India on the one hand and to work as a state device to facilitate equitable distribution of wealth among vast multitudes on the other hand, became the most visible paraphernalia of Nehruvian socialism at this stage. Slowly and gradually, a large number of research and development institutions, engineering and medical establishments and educational institutions of all types sprang up all over the landscape of India. So far so good, and the regime led by Nehru stood as the most resourceful and most legitimate of all the regimes in post-British India.
Now the question is how this arguably adorable model of Nehru, which sought to wipe out the tears of the poorest of the poor, which envisaged the development of the nation through training, research and development, and which successfully plugged the communal divide in the country, became a non-entity in the territory. And the worst part of the story is that the proponents of Nehruvian socialism were summarily displaced from the social place, the reasons of which were unknown to them even to this day. This untold part of the story is one of the main topics of this work.
This enquiry takes us to understand the most important feature of the Indian society. In spite of its avowed respect to the idealism of Gandhi, in spite of its claim of being a beholder of ancient ethos, and in spite of its nonstop chanting of democratic values, the heart of India is filled with the most condemnable form of feudalism, which remained as one of the most fundamental features that decided its history in the past many centuries. The only fault that we could attribute to Nehru was that either he failed to identity these robbers of hard labor or he failed to neutralize them in spite of his awareness.
However, we may be compelled to exonerate Nehru, because the surviving feudal elements in the form of land-owning, money-lending and business classes remained as more or less submissive forces during the first few decades of independence. The public institutions that prospered under the leadership of Nehru became real bulwarks to protect the masses from the predatory instincts of these land-owning, money-lending and business classes in India for a considerable period of time.
Nehru deserves pardon on yet another count, because the problems faced by India right after the withdrawal of the British were too much for even the most resourceful leader to tackle. In addition to that, he faced the problems of lack of preparedness by the people and lack of consciousness of the people to participate in political programs to end a chronic disease like feudalism.
But we cannot pardon the Congress Party that built a new face of political feudalism as its own culture. When the Congress itself became a feudal organization that was survived by sycophancy, kitchen cabinet and hereditary rule, the people revolted. The revolt under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan was an untimely revolt unsupported by ideas necessary to settle the long lasting feudal dispute in India. The political progenies born out of the revolt of Jayaprakash Narayan became real disasters in Indian political space, because they tried to build feudalism of a new kind in their own rank and organization.
The rise of regional and caste-based parties reduced the might of the Congress Party, and this became the most sought after moment for the hitherto submissive feudal forces to raise their standards. The submissive feudal forces, which in the not so distant past had been the hard core supporters of the Congress party, at once changed their clothing and gathered around the Sangh Parivar to begin with. The rise of feudal forces in India became visible when Bharatiya Janata Party increased its tally in Lok Sabha from 2 in 1984 to 85 in 1989.
BJP gathered most of the parliamentary seats from the abysmally backward Northern States which survived visible pangs of feudalism. But the feudal forces in India came to understand that it was not enough to capture the power in the centre, and therefore they decided to hit below the belt. And they did it when Babri Masjid was brought down after a mass movement by the veteran LK Advani. In fact, dragging communalism to politics was found to be the only viable option to attract the attention of the broken and exploited masses.
Hardly 45 years have passed since independence, and the idea of Nehruvian Socialism was stabbed from back. It was the time that the Congress government started its liberalization policy and the process of disinvestment under the tutelage of the feudal forces that increasingly found intellectual space in India along with the rise of Hindutva.
However, the disinvestment policy of Congress was humane, gradual and rational in nature and ever since the beginning of disinvestment to the year 2018, the NDA governments divested twice as much as the UPA governments. It is also notable that 58% of the total divestment till the year 2018 was undertaken by Modi regime. From 2014 to 2019 this regime disinvested a whooping 2.75 lakh crore worth of state assets which were raised by the hard labor of many generations of Indians. It was also announced that the target of disinvestment for the year 2020-21 stood at 2.1 lakh crore rupees. During the initial stages of privatization the disinvestment program turned around the policy of Private Public Partnership, but lately under the Modi regime it began to turn around the tactics of selling or leasing public assets in order to realize the revenue deficit even when it was argued that such a policy amounts to bad economics. The Parliament which should act as the conscience keeper of the society as well as the upholder of justice was bypassed during this process with the majority numbers achieved by the fascist regime by the unholy tactics of communal polarization, intimidation tactics by state agencies and malicious propaganda by sold media.
Without deconsolidating feudalism in India, the story of disinvestment cannot be anything different from the following narrative. A father had five sons and one was more cunning than all others. When father was alive all children equally enjoyed the family assets. The cunning son stabbed the father from behind with a view to appropriate all family property. After the death of his father, he befooled all other four innocent sons and amassed all the property that had been raised by the hard labor of the whole family.
In post-British India, a robust public sector alone safeguarded the masses from the predatory instincts of the feudal forces surviving in the form of land-owning money-lending and business classes. With this purposeful murder of the Indian public sector, the social matrix of India was taken back to pre-independence times, and the Hindutva fascist government in India enrolled its name along with its own related species in the past in the forms of governments run by the Turks, the Mongols and the British. The tail end of the story is retributive and cannot be avoidable. In the future, when a new dispensation seeks ways and means to safeguard the interests of the poorest of the poor, the broken and the deceived, it will resort to a wave of nationalization bringing the most important means of production under the state control and in those times, the feudal forces in this country will be as submissive, as confused and as irrelevant as the fragile opposition that seems to be waning away from the political space of India today.
Now we have to decode the fascist attribution to the Hindutva forces in India. It is a fact that not only Hindutva ideology, but any ideology that banks on feudalism as a source of survival cannot fail to build oppression as a culture in its soul. It is merely for decorative purposes that the founders of Hindutva ideology were related to the fascist experiments in Germany and Italy. Therefore, it is not wrong to state that Hindutva fascism is an ideology conceived, nurtured and sustained in India by its own feudal forces. However this ideology lacks anything that can be called Indian, because its main credentials have been derived from the misrepresented history of India written during the period of European imperialism.
The change from Nehruvian socialism to Hindutva fascism was opportunistic inasmuch as it was ambiguous and in disguise. There were many honest people who were caught unaware by the chanting of cultural nationalism and revival of ancient ethos. They will regret in the future for having aligned with a visibly monstrous dispensation that unleashed communal and feudal forces to capture political power in a land that was known for the pacifism and magnanimity of Siddhartha Gautama, Vardhamana Mahavira and Guru Nanak. Any reasonable assessment can allot a period of 50 years from 1947 to 1997 as the prime time of Nehruvian socialism and a mere 25 years from 1997 to 2022 as the prime time of Hindutva fascism. Even though there is no notable opposition in the political arena, it is going to crush under its own weight accumulated under the tutelage of the feudal forces surviving in the country.
It is certain that India will move forward. India will move forward on her own terms and by means of her own ideas and institutions. It is also imperative that that any movement that wants to take India forward must pick its thread from the above narrative. The feudal forces in India are ever ready to patch with any dispensation that can safeguard their interests. In that case, in the near future the Hindutva forces will be rendered sterile. But beware of the fact that any new political movement that will be infiltrated by the feudal forces will face the same fate as the Hindutva ideology had faced.
Any movement that can successfully contest the regime run by the Hindutva fascists must have the following programs in its bandwagon. First, it should possess a credible ideology that can contest the ideology of Hindutva fascism. A territory that has seen the rise and fall of many civilizations over a period of time cannot ever settle with imported ideas to guide its process of social evolution. Second, it should declare convincing steps to deconsolidate the feudal forces which have been surviving in the territory for many hundreds of years. If it is not done, the feudal elements will infiltrate into any new regime that is setup and will make it as oppressive as any other fascist regime anywhere in the world. Third, it should liberate the collective ethos of Indian civilization from the shackles of the Hindutva fascists. It should be necessary to save many honest people who were trapped into the clutches of Hindutva fascism under the influence of cultural nationalism and love for the nation.
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