Global Fascism: Lessons from India

By Christopher Balcom

Understanding the far-right is key to making sense of our political moment.

We are witnessing a resurgence of explicitly fascistic organizations, like the “active clubs” springing up in several Canadian cities, as well as strains of right-wing populism that clearly recall the tactics and rhetoric of historical fascism. Debates over the fascism label/analogy have tended to gravitate towards discussions of Donald Trump and Trumpism.

Similar conversations have been taking place in many contexts, however. In India, the affinities between the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and European fascism have been subject of serious discussion on the left for decades. Attending to Indian anti-fascist criticism and considering the common features and differences between contemporary far-right movements around the world can enrich our understanding of the global right and its relationship to historical fascism.

In one sense, the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and fascism is not a question of analogy at all.

The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s paramilitary parent organization, subscribe to a project explicitly inspired by European fascism. Hindutva, their guiding creed, is premised on the idea that India is a Hindu nation in which non-Hindu minorities live on sufferance. V.D. Savarkar, who defined modern Hindutva in the early twentieth century, greatly admired European fascism and fantasized that India’s Muslims “would have to play the part of the German Jews.” Hindutva’s ethnonationalist ambitions threaten many communities in India, but its proponents have always reserved a particular animus for India’s Muslims. Today’s Hindutva ideologues may be less likely to invoke Hitler and Mussolini as inspirations, but they embrace Savarkar as a national hero.

The contemporary Indian debate over fascism began in earnest in the early 1990s. The watershed moment in the political ascendancy of the BJP was the illegal 1992 demolition of a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya by party activists. Ensuing anti-Muslim riots killed hundreds, especially in Mumbai. In the wake of the violence, leftist activists and scholars drew pointed comparisons between the RSS-BJP and European fascism (Sumit Sarkar’s 1993 essay, “The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar” is a major intervention).

The violence and polarization only fuelled the BJP’s success; the party won its first national election six years later in 1998. This pattern of profiting from anti-Muslim violence has shaped Modi’s own career: he was propelled to national prominence by his notorious complicity in the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, while he was Chief Minister of the state. Today, Modi presents himself abroad as a business-friendly reformer, but his twelve years in power have also been marked by the mass disenfranchisement of Muslims, intensifying repression in Kashmir, and a rise in mob violence and lynchings directed especially against Muslims and Dalits. 

Historian Jairus Banaji has drawn particular attention to the work of Arthur Rosenberg, a communist member of the Reichstag. Rosenberg’s 1934 essay, “Fascism as a Mass Movement,” distinguishes fascism from other reactionary political movements, above all by its mass character and strategic use of paramilitary violence. As Banaji argues, these features of fascism are disturbingly present in contemporary India. The RSS has been periodically banned since its founding in 1925, including in 1948 after one of its members assassinated Gandhi. Today, the paramilitary organization counts millions of members in its ranks and has managed to deeply embed itself in Indian civil society, operating through thousands of front organizations and affiliated groups including student associations, trade unions, charities, and more. Known for their marches and parades, RSS cadre have a well-earned reputation for instigating violence and harassing political opponents.

The RSS boasts an organizational infrastructure and capacity for mass mobilization that is unique among the global right—fascistic non-state actors elsewhere generally still belong to looser, inchoate networks, and are more likely to carry out lone-wolf attacks than coordinated assaults.

If the Indian context is in this sense, exceptional, there are other significant parallels between fascistic movements in India and the rest of the world. For example, they are united in their deluded fantasies of victimization; where white nationalists in the West promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, Hindutva activists imagine themselves on the defensive in a “demographic war” purportedly waged by Indian Muslims. While this conspiratorial paranoia is consistent with past fascisms, the far-right in India and elsewhere has generally dispensed with the utopianism of historical fascism. Supporters of far-right movements worldwide appear quite willing to accept business-as-usual austerity and rapacious capitalism to see their enemies humiliated. Modi’s rule, as Richard Seymour puts it, might be aptly described as “capitalism with pogromist characteristics.”

While the impulse to “provincialize Europe” typically takes the form of a positive reclamation of non-European traditions, Indian anti-fascist critics have long observed how claims to post/decolonial difference have been exploited by the Hindutva right. Understanding the global far-right demands serious attention to reactionary movements beyond the West. Far-right actors themselves recognize the connections between their movements; Trump advisor Steve Bannon has admiringly referred to Modi as “Trump before Trump.” Contemporary fascism consists of a diverse array of forces; to the extent that a “Fascist International” can be said to exist, it encompasses movements including MAGA, Zionism, and Hindutva, which are united in their shared violent ethnonationalism and Islamophobia. Any adequate left response to this challenge requires the development of global solidarities and a principled universalistic politics that stands firm against the rising tide of nationalism everywhere. History might suggest, however, that this is easier said than done.

In India, as in the United States, the electoral success of the extreme right has not seen the complete destruction of democratic institutions and dictatorial seizure of state power associated with classical fascism. Since 2014, the BJP has faced major challenges to its authority on the streets and, recently, at the polls: in 2024 the BJP lost its majority in the Lok Sabha and now leads a minority government. For some, this fact alone might seem to invalidate the fascism diagnosis. However, as Dilip Simeon argues, recent Indian history might helpfully serve to “dispel apocalyptic theorisations of fascism.” Rather than a “singular event,” in which political possibility is suddenly and definitively eclipsed, this is fascism as a “slow bleeding process”: a protracted corrosion of democratic institutions, increasing exposure to state and mob violence, and a chilling of public dissent.

We must remain alert, in short, to the dangers of fascism in the making. As Arundhati Roy puts it: “The division in opinions on the use of the term comes down to whether you believe that fascism became fascism only after a continent was destroyed and millions of people were exterminated in gas chambers, or whether you believe that fascism is an ideology that led to those high crimes – that can lead to those crimes – and that those who subscribe to it are fascists.”

Christopher Balcom defended his PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in 2025.

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series “The Time of Monsters.” It looks at the challenges contemporary times pose to history and how historians can and have responded to it. Our aim is to highlight how history and historians can address matters such as denialism, the manipulation of public history, the appeal of authoritarianism and a host of other topics. The editors encourage submissions or personal reflections. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Roberta Lexier at rlexier@mtroyal.ca.

You can find the first post in the series here.