Popular activist and writer Arundhati Roy on Sunday, October 9 said that India under the current regime has descended into fascism. Substantiating her argument, she said that all the constitutional institutions have conflated themselves with a political party, the BJP. She was speaking at the 13th memorial meeting of Human Rights Activist Balagopal in Hyderabad. Stating that India has all signs of fascism, she said, “We are at the stage where the state and its institutions themselves have conflated with the political party. There is no separation between the party, the state and its institutions. Whether it is the media, whether it is the courts, whether it is the educational institutions, all of them function as one thing. It is fused together into a single organism and that is fascism.”
The Booker prize winner said that the BJP government wants totalitarianism in the country. “When you have a Prime Minister who openly campaigns saying they want a Congress-mukt bharat, which is the only other national party, you are saying that you want an Opposition-mukt bharat. You are not willing to tolerate any form of opposition.”
Roy said that India was more like a continent than a country because of its diversity with thousands of dialects, hundreds of languages, various religions, ethnicities and castes. “We are a country of minorities, there isn’t actually any majority. And all the violence that we are seeing today of Hindutva, fascism, is an attempt to create an artificial majority, which actually does not exist. They are trying to create it and it isn't new. It started long ago when the representative government began to replace imperial power.”
Roy, referring to the RSS, said that they got anxious about numbers when the British were about to leave. “Until then it did not matter to them that millions of people oppressed by the Hindu caste system were converting to Islam, to Sikhism, to Christianity. It didn't matter that caste followed them into those religions. These conversions didn't matter to them then because the numbers didn't matter. Then it was alright to be an exclusive Brahmanical society where a very few people control everything.” But when the anxiety of numbers began, then began Hindutva, she said. “Then began the idea of this political religion. Then began the anxiety of conversions. Then began the meetings of Jat Pat Todak mandal and Arya Samaj especially to woo the millions of Dalits back into the ‘Hindu’ fold. This was the beginning of modern fascism.”
Roy, who has written The Doctor and The Saint, an essay which was published along with Dr BR Ambedkar’s seminal work Annihilation of Caste, was speaking about the supremacy of Brahmins in the caste order and said that fascism in India began much before Nazi Germany who believe in the Aryan race as being superior.
Bengaluru-based lawyer Clifton D Rozario, who is also the Central Committee Member of CPI(ML) said that there is a need to make a distinction between the ‘Hindutva government’ of the BJP and the previous governments. He said that though the previous Congress government did not respect constitutional institutions, it did not work to dismantle them unlike the present BJP government.
Clifton said that the present government has contempt towards the working class, which it draws from the Hindu philosophy of “do work and do not expect anything in return.”