The result of the recent Indian elections, which gave Narendra Modi’s Hindu Supremacist Party a second five-year term, confirms the basic argument regarding the nature of fascism. There is a fundamental difference between the 2014 elections that brought Modi to power and the 2019 elections. In the 2014 elections Modi’s victory was made possible by his slogan of “vikas” or “development”. He did not spell out how he was going to bring about “development”, which is typical of all fascism: his only “analysis” was that “development” had suffered because of the preceding Manmohan Singh government’s weakness. He would overcome this weakness, while pursuing the same neo-liberal policies with greater vigour.
While he won those elections, his five years in power have brought little respite from the crisis; on the contrary the crisis has worsened. The real per capita income of the agriculture-dependent population has barely moved up after 2013-14; within it the peasants and agricultural labourers must have become worse off. Unemployment is reportedly at a 45-year high, prompting the government to suppress employment data altogether. In the 2019 elections therefore, there was no mention of “development” at all. This only shows that fascism has no economic programme and relies on a discourse shift, towards Hindutva “nationalism”, to come to power, which it has done.
Read More https://www.networkideas.org/news-analysis/2019/06/modis-electoral-triumph/
