After the 1920s and the 1930s, no era can be characterised as defined by the global right-wing as much as the present one. The present era arguably represents the high-water mark of the ‘global Right’ much more than the inter-war fascism of a century back. This is because right-wing movements now are not just ascendant in the Euro-Atlantic region but have also become deeply embedded in the governing structures of the rising middle powers: India, Israel, Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Brazil and Russia.
Among these middle powers, India definitely represents the pre-eminent case where right-wing forces have institutionalised their political and cultural dominance. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the umbrella organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, have integrated their everyday discourse within the discursive universes of the global Right, employing themes like ‘Soros conspiracy’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ against their political opponents.
In a recent book, World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order, a group of political scientists and international relations scholars have charted how this global right-wing upsurge “has transformed not only domestic politics but also international relations”. These right-wing movements interact and learn from one another and, together, are shaping the global terms of engagement around powerful interpretative frameworks such as strategic autonomy, civilisational values, and multipolar orders. “While the various nationalist personalities and parties — from Trump in the US to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India, to Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz — are far from unified in their ideas and policies, a globally connected Right is emerging.”
The past week of the winter session of Parliament had become engulfed in a strident BJP offensive aimed at the Congress for ‘colluding’ with ‘anti-India’ forces backed by the American investor, George Soros, a favourite bugbear of the global Right, from the United States of America, Turkey, Hungary to Russia, Brazil and beyond. This was the apparent answer to the Congress’s questions on the relationship between Gautam Adani and the prime minister following the indictment of the businessman in a US court for allegedly orchestrating a $250 million bribery scheme.
The menacing spectre of the ‘Soros network’ and the wider ‘foreign hand’ has been gaining ground in the discourse of government functionaries. Last year, explaining the timing of the BBC documentary on Modi, the foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, told a friendly radio broadcaster: “I can’t tell you if election season has started in India or not, but it has definitely started in London and New York.” The vice-president, Jagdeep Dhankhar, similarly warned of a “sinister kind of politics that is sought to be practised from within and outside the country, to tarnish, taint the fair name of our governance, democratic polity and institutions.” As the political commentator, Bharat Bhushan, had then observed: “The new narrative being enforced is that an envious world, upset with the regime’s global influence, India’s economic growth, and its military power, is trying for a regime change in 2024.” The setback received by the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections has further supercharged the symbolic significance of the ‘Soros conspiracy’.
The RSS was founded on the day of Vijayadashami in 1925 and the annual Vijayadashami address by the RSS sarsanghchalak has since evolved into an event of central significance where the supreme guide reformulates the doctrine of the organisation in light of the present priorities of the RSS and to lay out its stand on issues of contemporary politics. In his last two speeches, the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, has begun focusing on the ‘cultural Marxist’ theme.
Drawing on the discourse of the global far-Right, Bhagwat last year defined “cultural Marxists or woke” as “deceitful and destructive forces” who claim to be working for “lofty goals” but whose “modus operandi involves taking control of the media and academia, and plunging education, culture, politics and social environment into confusion, chaos, and corruption.”
This year, Bhagwat delivered a wide-ranging exposition on the ‘woke’ phenomenon, drawing on protest movements from Bangladesh to the Arab spring and connected them to “similar evil attempts all around Bharat — especially in the border and tribal areas.”
“Words like ‘Deep State’, ‘Wokeism’, ‘Cultural Marxist’ are in discussion these days. In fact, they are the declared enemies of all cultural traditions… Direct conflicts are created by finding fault lines in the society. An atmosphere of anarchy and fear is created by intensifying distrust and hatred towards the system, laws, governance, administration etc. This makes it easy to establish one’s dominance over that country,” said Bhagwat.
At a deeper level, the Hindu right-wing borrowing its conceptual signifiers from European right-wing/fascist vocabulary is hardly a new phenomenon. In 2022, the Italian researcher, Marzia Casolari, detailed the embryonic and extensive linkages between the European and the Hindu Right in the 1920s and in the 1930s in the book, In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationships Between Indian Radical Nationalism, Italian Fascism and Nazism. Casolari’s extensive research, conducted across archives in Italy, India, and the United Kingdom, brings to life the extraordinary influence Italian fascism exerted on the worldview of the Marathi press of the 1920s and the 1930s. Fascism was seen as a model that could transform India from a predominantly agrarian society into an emerging industrial power, much like Benito Mussolini had in the prevailing fascist propaganda through the instilling of discipline and order in a deeply divided society.
The stream of glowing articles on Mussolini and fascism, Casolari suggests, would have also influenced the RSS’s founding figures. After all, the pre-eminent figures of both the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, K.B. Hedgewar, M.S. Golwalkar, V.D. Savarkar and B.S. Moonje, all had Marathi as their mother tongue. Indeed, in 1931, Moonje famously went to Italy to study the functioning of the fascist mass organisations from where, Casolari suggests, the RSS drew several of its organisational ideas such as the structure of its basic units (shakhas). In Rome, Moonje met Mussolini himself and, later, praised the charismatic qualities of Il Duce (Great Leader). Thus, as Casolari writes, “by the late 1920s, the fascist regime and Mussolini had many supporters in Maharashtra. The aspects of Fascism, which appealed most to the Hindu nationalists, were, of course, the supposed shift of Italian society from chaos to order, and its militarization. This patently anti-democratic system was considered a positive alternative to democracy, seen as a typical British institution.”
A key difference between inter-war fascism and the present, global right-wing ascendance is that countries like India have now outgrown their European forebears and now constitute the more powerful historical force. Unlike the ‘national populists’ of the Western world, the right-wing regimes of middle-power nations like India, Turkey, Israel and Russia (to some extent) have more successfully grafted their Manichaean depiction of the ‘good people’ and the ‘evil elites’ onto a shared religious symbology and a tangible arc of historical narrative.
As S. Tepe and A. Chekirova (2022) explained in a recent paper, the distinctive rhetoric of regimes like those in India, Turkey and Russia springs from a common populist genus characterised by three features: one, creating a ‘religious-imbued’ meaning of “the people”; two, calling for national unity by “weaving together narratives of historical victories”; and three, a promise of “restoring the pivotal place” of their respective countries on the global stage.
These regimes have also been able to locate their nationalist discourse in certain genuine grievances over “Western hegemony” and the need for “strategic autonomy” for the purpose of crafting their own path in the world. In a speech to a RSS-linked think tank, Jaishankar recently observed that “traditions have much to teach us” as they provide a solid foundation for how “we approach the world”. “To approach modernity without a sense of tradition is to say I’ve forgotten who I am, but I think I know what I want to be,” Jaishankar said.
Except the question of “who I am” is not being guided by the traditions of classical or modern Indian philosophers but ideologues like Savarkar, Golwalkar and Moonje who, in turn, drew their ideas from European fascism.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
