By Dilip Simeon

Ideology is the most devilish variation of the lie: Hannah Arendt

To speak of reaction is to counterpose it with progress. This terminology is not helpful. Stable issues of political life, such as legitimate authority, justice, transparent government, clarity on the means vs ends problem; along with issues of character such as fair-mindedness; respect for difference; and empathy for the suffering – are denuded of their perennial nature and placed on a temporal plane. Progress implies that History with a capital H is going somewhere, and things improve with time. Reaction is the force which resists History. 

But is this an accurate depiction of human experience? How should we understand the recurrent attempts to overcome history, either by ceremonial re-enactments of the final victory of good over evil; or by ideological performances in real time wherein the living are punished for the crimes of the dead?

Let us approach this issue with a definition: conservatism is the belief that things could get worse; progressivism the belief that things can get better. A conundrum arises: those conservatives who decry the destructive aspects of modern society and seek to reverse these via cultural and political activity are progressives; and those progressives who wish to return to a real or imaginary moment of the not-too-distant past (in India’s case, say, the Nehruvian era) – are conservatives. Radicalism also acquires an ambiguous tint when applied to such practices. 

There is nothing conservative about contemporary right-wing politics in India. What is unfolding is an assault on tradition in the name of preserving it; combined with de-regulated capitalism, and the use of state power to benefit corporate interests. This is not extraordinary: the past century witnessed numerous instances of the embrace of democracy by social forces which had been hostile to the very idea of governance based on popular consent. In his book The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Carl Schmitt (not yet a Nazi) claimed that acclamation was superior to voting procedures, and that Italian fascism and Bolshevism ‘were certainly anti-liberal but not necessarily antidemocratic.’ 

Within a few years after the Great War a new phenomenon had appeared, a pseudo-democratic politics which tapped into authoritarian populist impulses including antisemitism, militarism and the yearning for charismatic leaders who could offer a way out of uncertainty. Thus began the era of right-wing populism.

The Wider Landscape

Confining our discussion to nation-states as they appear now would be a mistake. This is not only because these states are successors to an empire within which questions of social reform, religious conflict and nationalism first arose; but also because political relations between these states – and events within them – are the matrix within which we may discuss conservatism, reaction, ideology, and justice. 

The simplest way to observe this is the movement of displaced populations, and the crises caused by political upheavals such as the partition of India and the civil wars which have taken place in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka over the past decades. Prolonged insurgencies have taken place in India’s border regions as well as in the interior: the latter are Maoist-led tribal movements. All such events have an impact not only on the internal politics of the respective countries; but also on neighbouring states. Matters of security become dominant in political discourse, and given the prime role of identity, more often than not these are framed in communal language. 

The state uses such situations to increase its powers, and neutralise the judiciary and criminal justice system. The dominant position of the military in national affairs can be seen evolving in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan even as I write these lines. All countries of the region have witnessed murders of political figures, not to mention instances of mass violence – political assassinations of humble people. The carnage of Sikh citizens in Delhi (in the aftermath of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination) in early November 1984; and the Gujarat massacre in 2002 are just two grisly examples. What is noteworthy is that the criminal justice system has proven incapable of protecting innocent citizens. This begs the question: why?

It is only in light of these phenomena that we can begin to understand the nature of so-called reactionary politics in India and South Asia. Claims to legitimacy are often connected to divine authority, but tangentially. These politics are not conservative, and if they are reactionary, that is so only in a qualified manner. What is unfolding is militarist nationalism verging on state-worship, a totalitarian politics. Education, justice, policing and administration – financial or otherwise – are being subjugated by ideological loyalty, and even the pretence of an impartial state is being eroded in full light of day. 

It is the tyranny, less of persons than of ideologies.

Purification: the precursor to cultural homogeneity

Indian culture is marked by festivals, pilgrimages, days consecrated to revered personages etc. These cut across religious boundaries and can attract members of many communities. They also involve music, feasting and ceremonials, the paraphernalia of which are provided again, by different communities. Such ceremonials could be interpreted as the erasure of historical time in favour of something perennial. Historically, the attempt to ‘purify’ belief has been led by reformers among the intelligentsia. On this canvas, those who sought, or seek to preserve the inclusive features of tradition are conservatives; and those who wish to replace syncretic practices with sharp lines of separation see themselves as progressives working toward an ethos of homogeneity.

The matter provokes several questions, What part of tradition is sought to be altered or preserved; who launches such programmes and why; and by what standards may we judge the norms for which people fight? Is the rectification of the past the preserve of so-called right-wing reactionary politics; and the longing for total revolution the defining element solely of left-wing politics? I think not.

Leaving aside the fact that revolution means the completion of a circle; a return to a pristine starting point; the problem with this rule of thumb is that these ideological characteristics are often exchanged across political boundaries. As George Orwell put it, who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. Leftists also rectify history; and rightists also yearn for a utopian future. The totalitarian regimes of the past century represented themselves as socialist, but they also functioned as tyrannies.

The inner tensions of Indian nationalism

Radicalised conservatism in India can be called reactionary only with caveats. An academic sympathetic to the ruling party has dubbed the assassination of Gandhi a ‘gatecrashing into modernity’. A book explicating the German version of this phenomenon is titled Reactionary Modernism. This is an alternative modernity; and it is democracy that it is reacting to. The section on reactionary socialism in the Communist Manifesto provides a clue. This can first appear as an opposition to capitalism; but it is capable of embracing capitalism on its own terms. 

It is an unwarranted assumption that modernity possesses unalloyed democratic features: to the contrary, it is a blend of domination and chaos. Its global nature always sat uneasily with democracy and nationalism. This is visible in the fusion of archaic elements with technological progress. This is why Bukharin compared Stalinist modernisation to the methods of the pharaohs; and why in 1938, Freud opined: We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism. 

These features are as true of the post-colonial world as they are of the West. In India communalism became the name for ideological movements that sought to mobilise entire communities as nations. Such a definition – as opposed to territorial nationalism, wherein people embark on defining a new form of social friendship over and beyond religion and caste – is fraught with divisiveness. Here, I shall keep the focus on communalism, the Hindu variant of which goes by the name of Hindutva, a term invented by its political patron Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a prime accused in the Gandhi assassination case. (Hindu nationalism includes moderate currents, and is not historically equivalent to Hindutva). Muslim nationalism was the politics which led to the foundation of Pakistan. Characteristic features of communal ideologies include monarchical nostalgia; dreams of rectifying history; returning to a mythic golden age, and the glorification of a warrior ethos manifested in the militarisation of civil society, leading to its decline as an autonomous social phenomenon. 

When communal movements claiming to speak for the Nation capture power, such a state proceeds to dismantle the nation. (The relationship of religion to communal ideology is akin to that between Judaism and Zionism). This process began during the decline of the British empire, and continued in its successor states after World War 2. It is a record of prolonged civil war; and a continuous evocation of the danger of internal enemies: a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

Every time there is an Indian election, at the provincial or central level, the ruling political party conducts its propaganda – among more immediate matters – in terms of a battle with the Mughal dynasty (dead for three centuries); and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, who died in 1964. Sub-historical propaganda is also focused on local heroes: this is why elections which could be over in days are extended over several weeks, to enable the rulers to micro-manage their messaging, much of which is done via smartphones. All this requires a pliant Election Commission, which omits (selectively) to enforce the code of conduct for elections. This leads to an embittered political atmosphere.

The determination of the ruling dispensation to transform itself into a permanent authoritarian bloc is accompanied by measures which are tantamount to creating an atmospherics of permanent civil war. This cannot remain a mere performance, we have seen several outbreaks of mob or vigilante violence. The thrust toward homogeneity and so-called national integration leads inexorably to its opposite. The longer this carries on, the closer the polity inches towards disintegration. 

Rule of law or rule of ideology?

The most ominous feature of Indian politics is the subjugation of justice. Here is an instructive observation about the early successes of Nazism:

 (The counter revolution) tried many forms and devices, but soon learned that it could come to power only with the help of the state machine and never against it… the Kapp Putsch of 1920 and the Hitler Putsch of 1923 had proved this… In the centre of the counter revolution stood the judiciary… Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice’ (emphasis added).

The judiciary has become increasingly pliable, with disturbing judgments and unconscionable delays. As a background to this, we should consider the highly controversial death of Judge Brijgopal Harkishan (1966-2014) who was presiding over a case concerning the extra-judicial deaths of alleged terrorists in Gujarat. A high-level politician was implicated in the affair. The judge was intimidated via several phone calls and the withdrawal of his security detail. He was a healthy man, but was found dead in a rail compartment in 2014. He had physical wounds, but was pronounced dead of a heart attack in a highly dubious manner. Two of three close friends to whom he had confided about the threats also died, one barely escaped an ‘accident’. A new judge disposed of it in three days. An extensive investigation was conducted by an intrepid journalist, whose findings were published in a magazine. His book disappeared from circulation.

There are many similar cases, including lynching; custodial deaths, disappearance of crucial evidence in criminal cases involving political allies of the ruling party; the deployment of financial investigative agencies as levers of political pressure, etc. Related to financial matters are the massive loans owed by India’s leading corporations to public sector banks; many of which now deemed unrecoverable. (See the article on Indian Big Business, reference to which is given below. Further information on human rights in contemporary India may be found on the website of the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights).

Ingrained tradition, autocratic practices, indiscriminate accusations of seditious intent directed at critics of the ruling party, ideological influence upon the bureaucracy – all these manifest the erosion of secular democracy by absolutism. A glaring instance of this is the assault on education: every year, hundreds of thousands of Indian students migrate to foreign countries for higher education. The number currently studying abroad is estimated to be 1.8 million, up half a million from last year. This is because an over-burdened educational system is now under the grip of an ideological tyranny that uses political power to fill teaching posts with political allies, and censor academic debate. The most recent example of this is the cancellation of a seminar on land rights at the Delhi School of Economics; obliging its convenor to resign in protest.

Our liberties are now at the mercy of a self-appointed imperium. 

What has gathered speed over the past four decades is the criminalisation of the state. This is true for all the successor states of the former empire (and Nepal): Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, combined with recurrent bouts of mass violence in Bangladesh and India. The tendency on the part of certain contenders for power to encourage polemical religiosity has resulted in the migration of radical sentiment into polarised pseudo-religious camps. Equally dangerous is the habit of severe repression of civic protest. India’s current dispensation has taken to embroiling activists under a preventive detention statute. Dissent is being criminalised: the latest is police action against citizens of Delhi protesting the high levels of pollution in the city.

Violence as virtue

Violence in our polity is a serious issue. Not only because much of it is sanctioned by ideology, and ideology masquerading as religious belief; but because it functions as a lever of power. Communal and caste-related outbursts of violence are losing their spontaneity. Controlled mobs and politically affiliated vigilante groups are taking their place.

The RSS (whose name translates as National Volunteers), parent body of the governing party, exercises increasing control over course content in central educational institutions and those in BJP ruled states. Ideological historiography communalises the identities of victims and aggressors; and seeks to portray one side as wholly evil and the other as wholly innocent. Propaganda is now spread by high functionaries, with the Prime Minister’s recent exhortation to ‘remember the horrors of Partition’ – advice rendered into an instruction for officially-run educational institutions. There was indeed a tidal wave of mass violence in the years 1947-1948, with about 14 million persons displaced from their domiciles and forced to migrate; and about 800,000 victims of violent death. These numbers included Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims – there is no evidence that ‘one side’ dominated the other. But it is remarkable that the Prime Minister should ask us to remember – as if we had forgotten.

Militarism and martyrdom are pronounced elements of state propaganda, and often highlighted in election campaigns. The hostility to Mahatma Gandhi on the part of the Maoist Left and the radical Right (the dominant faction of the latter, let it be clear, is ruling the country), is aimed at his principled opposition to violence as a political weapon; and his concept of satyagraha; which means ‘holding fast to truth.’ Truth and non-violence are not exactly the highest ideals of those obsessed with the ideological subjugation of the polity.

The ultra-nationalist ambience of politics has accentuated pre-existing fault-lines in society. These ideas have become crucial to the project of cementing control of the state. Human beings are now seen as biomass for the mindless momentum of the state machine. We inhabit a living example of Orwell’s dystopia from 1984: by becoming permanent, war has been abolished. As Mobarak Haider, in his article A Society at War with Itself writes: War is a tragedy but a society at war with itself and everything around, with no objective and no remorse is more than a tragedy; it is a total disaster. Our society… is at war with itself and the world, with other religions and its own religious diversity. It is in a state of schizophrenia passing into paranoia. The roots of this mindset lie in our narcissism, in our self image of righteousness. (Dawn, January 29, 2013). This was a comment about Pakistan, but is applicable to other countries in South Asia. We define ourselves by enmity.

Criteria of political judgment

We need to revisit the defining elements of a politics of the labouring poor and oppressed populations. Such a politics would include a separation of powers as opposed to a singular pole of state authority; an independent judiciary coupled with autonomy of prosecution; the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt; proscription of preventive detention without trial; an autonomous election commission; freedom of the press, conscience and worship; of public protest and mobilisation; autonomous trades unions; and all those liberties which used to be undisputed features of democratic politics in its struggle against absolutism.

The reality which we have confronted for decades is a gradual degradation of the above features. Our cultural nationalists – always ready to berate Macaulay’s proposal of 1834 to anglicise Indian education – do not recall that preventive detention in India began with Regulation III of 1818, around the same time as imprisonment without trial was introduced in Britain; and has continued on the statute books under altered names, until this day. It is now called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

This degradation has deep social and traditional roots. Given the severe turmoil of the 1920’s, the stresses of the national movement produced often intractable political divisions – this was abetted by a retreating empire embroiled in global war. Communal conflict in the 1920’s was described by some observers as incipient civil war; thereafter northern India from east to west was engulfed in waves of mass violence from the Calcutta Killing of 1946 onwards, which did not abate until after Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948.

Despite these difficult circumstances, India’s ethical resources remained rooted in syncretic culture, nostalgia for heritage sites and ordinary human decency. But a destructive dynamism has taken domestic politics in its grip; a politics which grasps the potential of violence in word and deed as being the simplest route to power. In brief, Indian political culture could draw on a varied provenance; but became increasingly inclined toward the more vicious one. Mass violence, combined with erosion of criminal justice on the one hand, and the curtailment of humane impulses on the other have undermined the integrity of civil society. In such a situation, there is no single camp of reaction; and even categories of Right and Left need to be rethought and recreated; before they lose all relevance.

Resistance

The years since 2013 have seen nation-wide mass protests such as the one against the  Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) that lasted for five months before being brutally suppressed, and the united peasants movement against the Farm Laws, that lasted an entire year, from the winter of 2020 till late 2021. The government painted both as anti-national conspiracies, and attempted – as it usually does – to bring in a communal tinge. This was especially marked in the case of the CAA bill, that sought to exclude Muslim asylum-seekers; and seemed to undermine the secular provisions of the Indian Constitution. Many persons are still under trial for their involvement in this movement. 

The Farm Laws were ultimately withdrawn, in a great victory for India’s peasants (now renamed ‘farmers’ by the media and officialdom). Over 700 members of peasant families perished for various reasons during the year-long sit-in; the longest satyagraha in Independent India. There have also been successful agitations against Special Economic Zones, which were designed to bypass labour laws. However, the vindictive repression adopted by the government makes it clear that only large-scale mass resistance can keep despotism at bay. 

Conclusion

Political stability in South Asia is a chimera. Structure and ideology have fused together in a nihilist dynamic whose only purpose is self-aggrandisement on the part of various power-hungry sociopaths. The result is systemic implosion. It would be futile to predict where this will lead, but the tendency is clear enough: it is a process which tends towards the disappearance of civil society and its absorption by the state. Such a culmination is not inevitable. However, the only conceivable counter to it remains what it has been throughout the twentieth century: social-democratic resistance to militarism and absolutism, transcending national and religious boundaries.

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Further reading

Anubha Bhonsle; Mother, Where’s My Country? Looking for Light in the Darkness of Manipur; 2016

Dilip Simeon; A Brief History of Indian Fascism; in Jairus Banaji, (ed); Fascism: essays on Europe and India; 2013

Dilip Simeon; The Broken Middle (2014)

The Lady Vanishes – a comment on justice and ideology in the 20th century

H. S. Phoolka & Manoj Mitta; When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath; 2007

Jairus Banaji; Indian Big Business: The evolution of India’s corporate sector from 2000 to 2020. Phenomenal World, December 20, 2022

Kishalay Bhattacharjee; Blood on My Hands: Confessions of Staged Encounters; 2015

Manoj Mitta; Modi and Godhra – The Fiction of Fact Finding; 2014

Niranjan Takle; Who Killed Justice Loya; 2022

Peoples Union for Democratic Rights, Delhi

Pritam Singh; Economy, Culture and Human Rights: Turbulence in Punjab, India and Beyond; 2010

Prem Shankar Jha; The Dismantling of India’s Democracy; 2025

Rahul Pandita, Neelesh Mishra; The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance; 2010

Srinath Raghavan; 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh; 2013

Published in Logos; Vol 24; # 1 -2

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