Neoliberalism and Hindutva: Fascicm, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism

by Shankar Gopalakrishnan; a Politoco-Historical Overview.

Eight years have gone by since this text was published, and today we are in the midst of a set of
coordinates that are accurately placed forth in Shankar Gopalakrishnans book Neoliberalism and
Hindutva: Fascism, Free Markets and the Restructuring of Indian Capitalism (2009).The
aftermath of the 2014 general elections in India have been most ominous with a rise in hate crimes
against communities and the entrenchment of a moral police at multiple levels of our social reality,
be it the media, in educational institutions and in the streets. The value of this work before us is
in its diagnosis of the political strengths that have been drawn on by the Sangh (Hindu Right) in
the germination of the mass base that it commands in the country today. Crucially, what sets apart
Gopalakrishnans approach from the discourse encountered in left liberal circles, is an astute
archeology of political formations preceding the emergence of the NDA government and how it
has effectively superseded earlier styles of political action, most notably the New Farmers
Movement and the rise of regional parties in the eighties.

Crucial to apprehending such a development is untangling the alliance between Hindutva and
Neoliberalism as has emerged in the national constellation since trade liberalization in the early
nineties. S. Gopalakrishnans account seems to suggest that this in itself is a recent development
whose logic can be thought only within the historic transition of a semi-controlled economy that
India was up until the opening up of its markets. While the strength of this book certainly rests on
the unravelling of what the underpinnings of such an alliance may be, the arguments in
themselves do warrant a closer inspection, particularly the charge leveled against Hindutva in its
commodification of politics. We shall return to this later.

In beginning with a political question however, it is necessary to grasp how the effects of a certain
politics; Hindutva, materializes in our society. According to S. Gopalakrishnan the entry of capital
into petty commodity production in India has much to teach us about this. As a form of economic
exchange which bypasses both, state mediation, and the indentured nature of vestigial feudal
agriculture, it is relatively autonomous from the mode of production which has achieved
hegemony in India. To the historic bloc in power, it therefore represents its own exteriority, that
which has not yet been subsumed into a channeling of labour power and supply chains which
supports the reproduction of state and capital. Between this is the possibility of a contestation
which S. Gopalakrishnan points to, drawing on the legacy of the anti-fascist resistance harbored
by Marxism, notably the Greek-French sociologist, Nicos Poulantazs attempt at thinking how
capitalist states construct the concept of an individual, identical to all other individuals, but
disconnected from them with the only exception being their connection/unity as represented by
the state. N. Poulantaz called this individualization, the means via which the centralized,
bureaucratic state installs this atomization and, a representative state laying claim to national
sovereignty and popular will, represents the unity of a people as a nation, that is split into formally
equivalent monads. It is to be stated that this may be a limitation immanent to the form of a
constitution itself, which partly serves its purpose as the document bearing the guarantee of rights
for citizens, of whose binding principle is equality before law.

Capitalist society however is foremost built on relations tied to the exchange of commodities.
Hence, individualization in capitalist societies names the existing relations of production and the
social division of labour in their mediation via state practices which construct the monadic concept
of the individual as we know it. The individual here becomes the site where capitalist relations of
production are constituted and reconstituted. In returning to the question which S. Gopalakrishnan
raises; what happens when capitalist relations of production have not yet crystalized in their
entirety in the mode of production in a society? (as is the case with petty commodity production).
While it is apparent how such a form of exchange escapes capitalist relations of production (petty
commodity producers de facto, posses ownership of the means of production) is it conceivable
to dream of it emerging as a historic alternative at this stage of globalized industrialization which
facilitates the forms of trade and manufacturing we depend on? I doubt it. That said, the most
militant organizations resisting the dispossession of their livelihoods, land and resources are
precisely from the red corridor spanning through the south eastern states of India. This paper is
not about the Maoist-Naxal insurgency, though it acknowledges the politics that informs it and
why they fight.

Historically, the first traces of Hindutva garnering a mass base was witnessed in the aftermath of
the J.P movement, though the groundwork which facilitated such a rise was done earlier. The
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 1964, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 1925 and the Hindu
Swayamsevak Sangh have over the years, established themselves as committed social
organization whose outreach extends into most of the cities and many villages at the ground level.
It is hard not to admire the intent and commitment taken to establish this and any critique which
apprehends their rise in simply cultural terms fails to account for the drive to political action that
the organizations have garnered. At the level of Shakhas (daily meetings), to the multiple
organizations and in Parliament, the vision of a Hindu Rashtra is strived towards as we harbor in
these borders what resembles the unmistakeable totalitarian party. What is meant by this is that
the only division that such a party harbors is that between society, in its mind a Hindu society,
and its other - the foreigner. Its goal effectively is the subsumption of every other social
organization into the values and metric of the Sangh, consolidating a Hindu nation.

To understand how the Sangh finds itself in this position however, it is necessary to know the
political vacuum that they arrogated for themselves in its entirety. An essential socio-economic
consequence of the Green Revolution in India, particularly in the nineteen eighties was the rise
of a rich peasant class who led the New Farmers Movement. These years also saw the rise of
the Mandal Commission, yet this is not adequately explored in S. Gopalakrishnans account. The
New Farmers Movement however formed the bedrock of the regional parties that we see today,
parties such as the Telugu Dessam Party, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Indian National Lok
Dal. At its genesis, their campaign was built almost entirely on seeking minimum agricultural
prices via state regulations. The reactionary nature of peasant movements is difficult to overlook,
for while being led by almost entirely capitalized farmers who sought the states withdrawal from
agriculture, it would continue to assume that the state ought to regulate the prices of agricultural
products. This narrow mindedness ensured that the movement collapsed as soon as the market
was deregulated in ninety one.

The consequences of the New Farmers Movement were not however limited merely to the
agricultural sector, as Dalit and Tribal movements took on the vocabulary of the above mentioned
larger organization as this came to be the common sense of Indian politics. Even big businesses
who had founded large monopolistic cooperations since the seventies largely reliant on state
regulations to provide them with captive markets found that they needed new directions of
expansion. These pressures led the government to draft the New Economic Policy in 1985 which
increased support to petty commodity producers and decreased the restraints on capital as it
opened up Indias economy. The paradox of this historic moment was that while there was an
increased demand on the state to provide support for petty commodity production, there was a
decreased regulation of capital. This initially led to a rapid rise in rural investment, where
employment grew, real wages rose and poverty decreased. The boom however was built on
immense borrowings from NRI and local money lenders. This dependence on external financial
capital was fragile and its withdrawal in ninety one led to the crisis. Capitals flight opened the
door for the entry of neoliberalism.
Within these coordinates, the relation of the worker to the means of production and the state, is
what is inscribed in Poulantzas concept of individualization which emerges as the attritional site
which is gravely contested between the repressive arm of the state industrial complex - the police,
which seeks to apprehend threats that delegitimize its own moral position within the theater of
society, and the informalised associations which harbors the potential for resistance but which
have unfortunately, in the recent past turned lumpen and criminal in the absence of an organized
party. These circumstances have proved ripe for the embedding of the politics of Hindutva.
Crucially, almost all political parties endorsed neoliberalism yet it was never a mass political
project. Until perhaps the 2014 national election and Gujarat before it, no elections had been won
in India with neoliberalism as its modus operandi. And apart from consumption fueled aspirations,
no vernacular media ever endorses its principles.

At this point however, neoliberalism yet lacked a totalitarian party, and S. Gopalakrishnan
captures the moment where it was yet merely an ideology without an organization, apart from
elements of the state machinery itself. The discourse from the eighties, driven by regional parties
and the vestigial NFM was yet strong enough to block the subjugation of petty commodity
production to capital, as neoliberalisms ideologues bemoaned vote bank politics and the
blindness of the Indian masses to the miracles of the market. Neoliberalism required a stronger
foundation, and it was for this fateful step that the cunning of history had prepared Hindutva,
whom provided the vehicle needed for the establishment of neoliberalism per se.

A strategic alliance between Neoliberalism and Hindutva required a common agenda, the growth
of which was first observable in the English media, a fertile site for the bourgeois organic
intellectual. The symptoms started to emerge in the discourse which reduced social processes to
questions of individual choice. In its early stages, this was strongly reinforced by the collation of
the good hindu with the utility maximizing citizen. Eventually however what began to emerge was
the marginalization of state social regulations to the relegation of its role as a night watchman;
the market itself was to be the embodiment of the hindu rashta, a view championed by Dattopant
Thengadi, a hindu ideologue and union leader.

Consequentially, almost without it realizing so - the state itself facilitated the transformation of its
own othering as welfare, bureaucracy, legislation and political parties found that they were surplus
to and often in the way of the functioning of the ascendent hindu rashtra market which could now
effectively hegemonize the public sphere. A common place complaint of bourgeois ideology
today is that there is no worse crime than to politicize.

Crucial to note is the concept of hegemony as understood here is the subjection of labour power
via force, intellectual and morale leadership that builds the sense of a historical bloc that
represents the general interest. The Sangh described the Ayodhaya movement as an
awakening of national self confidence, this discourse has now been adopted by neoliberals to
describe India post ninety one. The eulogization of NRIs for example is strongly linked to the
abundant foreign investment that funds Hindutva organisations, as professional institutions are
recalibrated to dissolve any commitments to social justice with perhaps the only unifying goal
being a vague opposition to terrorism, endemically regurgitating justificatory ideologies mimicked
from the west.

The Sangh was able to cash in on the economic expansion, during the NDA period it set up the
largest private school network in India, Vidya Bharati, the largest NGOs working in tribal areas
Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, and recruitments swelled in Gujarat and Orrisa through the relief
operations in the 2001 earthquake and the 1999 cyclone respectively. The model of recruitment
is exemplified by the ekal vidyalayas (schools in tribal areas) which lead the present recruitment
drive. Acharyas (teachers) are briefly trained, provided a curriculum and asked to teach out to
school students. In practice, there is no clarity in either the curriculum, training or student
population and the only infrastructure are irregular textbooks (often promoting profoundly un-
scientific notions) and even when education is not underway, the acharyas often continue
drawing salaries. These lead one to strongly suspect that rather than school children, it is the
acharyas themselves who are the target of such a scheme.

The stable salary in often backward regions keeps them at it, with the ideological training
consisting primarily of apolitical social service which in our society, is a high status occupation.
Complementing the drive to village development is the forbidding of the youth from joining any
political party, as politics is said to introduce division in society. The choice is clear, de-politicize
to draw a salary, with the only commitment endorsed is to the Sangh. Methodologically, this is
how the Sangh has built a committed grassroots cadre who benefits capitalism in general and
neoliberalism in particular, for whom funds are made available and media access provided. This
entrenchment has been the answer to the nineteen eighties style of politics as it greatly weakens
the capacity of petty commodity producers to resist the assault on their livelihoods.

Gujarat, 2007 is where we first witnessed the Sangh-Neoliberal alliance gain electoral ground,
leveraged by big capital and proclaiming itself to be the savior of both businesses and the nations,
the Sangh rode to power over an opposition stuck in the eighties discourse of caste divisions,
farmers suicides, tribal distress and tokenistic secularism. It was a crucial lesson which went
unheeded, even on the national front that the time for such sweeping critiques proving to be
effective election programs had ended. What emerged was the the full dominance of capital with
state support. The resulting insecurity was fed off by the Sangh as their organizations either
poached or co-opted carders from all other political formations into itself. The totalitarian party
had reached its fruition.

What followed, is what happens in the wake of the emergence of a true totalitarian party, the
formation of a military alliance between the Sangh and neoliberal capital. Salwa Judum (meaning
either peace march or purification hunt) was launched in Chhattisgarh in 2005, an operation
representing the interest of security forces, the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram and driven by the
immense corporate pressure for mineral extraction, they killed hundreds and drove away
hundreds of thousands in the name of fighting Maoism. Over six hundred villages were emptied,
largely reliant on petty commodity production and subsistence agriculture. S. Gopalakrishnan
acutely notes that while neoliberalisms genesis parliamentary was in Gujarat, which was and is
perhaps the most capitalized state in India, it sought expansion into Chhattisgarh, being perhaps
the least capitalized state. Fueled by the need to access ever greater mineral resources, this
stage of expansion marked the shift from hegemony to violence. David Harvey has accurately
framed this as symptomatic of a global phenomena that he calls accumulation via dispossession.

The encounter with this political alliance on the ground is often in the form of its own
commodification. Its most visible spectacles have been the Yatras, which have been utilized as
a mass marketing platform, selling stickers, tridents, clothes and pictures and what has been
encouraged as a form of political participation itself is their sales. It was the Ayodhaya movement
however that converted the relationship of an individual and a physical object into the essence of
their relationship with the movement itself. Accompanied by the fetishization of pujas
such a platform synched with the increase of advertisement in rural India, establishing the
importance of brand as a basis for action. Hindutvas drive was to convert politics into a brand
itself, endorsed via the purchase of merchandise, exhibitions and/or worship. The essential
relation to uncover here is to comprehend how a brand is nothing other than the reification of the
commodity concept.

The Hindutva mobilization hence cannot be analytically exhausted via the categories of hate
politics and Hindu chauvinism alone. The drive of its recruitment has been led by, at least the
partial satisfaction of the material and ideological needs of its cadre, while converting those
needs into the driving force of individualization and the restructuring of social relations in favor of
capital. S. Gopalakrishnans thesis is that the partial coordination of interests between capital and
large sections of petty commodity producers constitutes the sense of identity that binds the
movement. This is how Hindutva has fundamentally re-constructed Hindu identity to mean 1.
individualized support for its movement, membership in its organizations and participation in its
violence. This indicates how it has been as much about the reconstruction of hindu society as it
was about targeting minorities.

- K.S Arsh