Why the Trump-Modi friendship is so dangerous

In May 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi was re-elected in India, an evolution many of us concerned about social, economic and environmental justice denounced as very dangerous.

We were wrong. It turned out to be exponentially more dangerous than we imagined.

During its second term, the BJP government moved with unexpected speed and determination to bring India on the path of full-fledged fascism. In this, they have received apparent support from the United States.

But before we examine what they did, let's back up and examine the term understandably understandable fascism.

BJP's roots without fascination

The fascist roots of the BJP are deep.

The BJP is (by its own admission) a political front for an organization called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which dates back to the 1920s. B.S. Moonje, mentor to RSS founder K.B. Hegdewar, visited Italy and personally met with Mussolini.

He was very impressed with what he called the military regeneration of Italy under Mussolini, and wanted to recreate it in India, but, in very speaking language, he called his idea of ​​military regeneration of the majority Hindu community. The arsenalization of Hindu identity by today's BJP (and India's undisputed equation with Hinduism) dates back almost a hundred years.

Another former RSS leader, Mr. S. Golwalkar, praised nazi germany in his writings, claiming that the Nazi purge of the Jews was aimed at maintaining the purity of the nation and its culture, and that it was a good lesson for us in (India) to learn and enjoy. Golwalkar has never retracted these views, and the RSS only belatedly rejected them after almost seven decades.

V.D. Savarkar, another of the early Hindu nationalist leaders (and plot architect to assassinate Gandhi), explicitly linked Nazi ideology to Hindu nationalist views on Muslims. he claimed in a speech of 1939 that Indian Muslims are on the whole more inclined to identify and defend their interests with Muslims outside India than Hindus who live next door, like Jews in Germany. Note the identification of Indian Muslims and German Jews like the other, outside the body of the nation.

This story deserves to be deepened, not for its academic value, but to fully understand the far-right political project in India as a shameless fascism.

Locks and concentration camps

The actions of the BJP governments since their re-election last May represent a fundamental continuity with this ideological foundation. The best known example internationally is Kashmir, where the Indian government has intentionally escalated a decades-long conflict spurred by Kashmir's demands for self-determination.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir (in which Muslim-majority Kashmir is the most populous region) has long enjoyed special legal status in India, with Article 370 of the Indian Constitution granting the state a certain degree of autonomy. It is important to understand that this was the condition for the accession of states to India in the first place, not an act of appeasement, as the Hindu rightists describe it.

Last August, the Modi used a parliamentary procedure of questionable legality to drop section 370, send more troops to the already heavily militarized region, and impose a communications blockade without the Internet, mobile or landline to obviously cover horrible violations of human rights, with reports deaths, torture and detentions (including the detention of children) at the hands of Indian forces.

The Modi government was even willing to risk a confrontation with neighboring Pakistan (which could even lead to regional nuclear war) with its actions in Kashmir. Both countries have nuclear weaponsand have a long history of conflict, largely around their rival land claims over Kashmir.

The BJP government has also embarked on an overtly fascist project of using ethno-nationalist criteria to define who deserves (and by extension, who does not deserve) Indian citizenship. In the northeastern state of Assam, which borders the Muslim-dominated Bangladesh, the government demanded that every resident prove their citizenship, claiming that there were a large number of Bangladeshi migrants undocumented in Assam.

Of 2 millions people dispossessed of their nationality due to their inability to provide documents (in a country where many rural poor people do not have birth certificates), most are Muslim. And a disproportionate number are transgender another vulnerable minority who can conveniently be a scapegoat and demonized.

In an approach that will be strangely familiar to American readers, the government is building concentration camps to house people (including children) made stateless by design.

Authoritarianism in its own right

Last December, the government went further on the slippery slope towards full-fledged authoritarianism by pass a bill called the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) which granted citizenship to undocumented non-Muslim immigrants from predominantly Muslim neighboring countries.

There are two main reasons why this represents an escalation, beyond what the government has done in Kashmir and Assam.

First of all, in Kashmir and Assam, there is a bit of plausible denial, even if the government's anti-Muslim intention is clear. Kashmir is experiencing, after all, a revolt against Indian rule, so the government can say that its response is for reasons of national security. Likewise, in Assam, there is no dispute that there are undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh (leaving aside the questions of how much, how we find out who is and who is not ; is not undocumented, and most importantly, how a state that values ​​human rights and dignity treats the presence of undocumented immigrants).

With the CAA, however, the mask came off, with the explicit exclusion of Muslims from citizenship enshrined in law. Many argue that it is a clear violation from india secular constitution, which declares that all people are equal regardless of a number of criteria, including religious beliefs. Secular politics had been founder of the national identity of India before Hindu nationalist ideology begins to undermine it.

Politically, however, there is another factor at play. Kashmir and Assam are border states on the outskirts of India, far from its main population centers. A large majority of Indians do not live there, have never been there and probably do not know anyone from there. But when the government targets Muslims more broadly, the distance suddenly becomes real for Muslims all over India, as well as countless others.

This includes other religious minorities such as Christians, as well as Dalits (Hindus who are lowest in the caste hierarchy), who, along with Muslims, were targeted for violent attacks by Hindu nationalist hate groups. It includes all Indians who care about the human rights of people with a different identity, or secular constitutional principles and the idea of ​​a pluralistic state.

Trump comes to the rescue of Modis

In a sign of hope, CAA was the last proverbial straw and unleashed massive protests Across the country. Protesters were confronted with vicious attacks from right hindu crowds, the police acting as unhappy spectators (or worse, joining the attacks). But intimidation and violence did not stop the protests.

In this climate of growing dissent in India, and growth international recognition of serious human rights situation in the country, the Modi government may have felt besieged. But a powerful figure on the world stage has recently come to the rescue of governments.

US President Donald Trump, during his recent visit to India, made it clear that he was on the side of the Fascist government, making absurd claims that the BJP government worked very hard to have great open religious freedom. Trump shared the stage with Modi at a country style rally 125,000 supporters, demonstrating a level of support that goes far beyond the usual formalities of a state visit. And just to drive the point home, the United States signed a $ 3.5 billion deal with India for advanced military equipment.

Words count. Barely after Trump left India, Hindu nationalist crowds began openly attack Muslim homes, businesses and places of worship in Delhi, the national capital, chanting that India belongs to the Hindus.

Hate crimes and pogroms against Muslims (as good as Dalits, Sikhs, and others) often occur in India, and Modi has been involved in concealment such a pogrom when he was the head of state of Gujarat years ago. What makes this recent upsurge different is that it happened in the national capital while the global media was still in Delhi because of Trumps' visit. Clearly, the support of the president of the most powerful country in the world emboldened the Hindu fascist leadership.

As fascism takes hold of India, it will be with the active support of the United States. The Trump regime's friendship with the Modi regime is disastrous for countless Indians.

An omen for the United States

Americans should also be very concerned about Trump-Modi friendship, and not just because it represents a manifestly unethical foreign policy choice of the United States. But it also has disturbing implications for U.S. domestic policy.

Trump-Modi friendship is not just a cynical decision by the United States to support an oppressive but powerful country with the worlds fifth highest GDP and a lucrative domestic market for American companies to export or invest in. Of course, this is a factor. But there is more to the story.

Basically, friendship is about a shared far-right ideology. The United States and India are part of a growing number of authoritarian far-right governments around the world, whose members include Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and more, as my colleague John Feffer explained it so clearly in a recent report.

The parallels between the BJP's Hindu supremacist policy in India and the White Trumps supremacist policy in the United States are many and frightening. These include writing Islamophobia in law and politics, dehumanizing and hold undocumented immigrants (including children), and criminalize Indigenous-led movements against ecologically destructive resource extraction (and even confluence these movements with terrorism).

The dangerous political agendas of Trump and his Indian fascist friends do not stop at the limits of official government policy. Fashionable by demagogues throughout history, the American and Indian regimes are encouraging violence opened by hate groups in their political base against those perceived as others.

The particular importance of these parallels to the American people is that the Modi government in India has become much more daring in pursuing its entire ethno-nationalist exclusion program during its second term. , considering re-election as a mandate to fulfill febrile fascist dreams. ideological ancestors such as Golwalkar and Savarkar.

In the United States, we should also be concerned about the re-election of the Trump regime in November. Yes, we have a government that holds children in concentration camps, written anti-LGBTQ hatred in the law, and openly awards politically favored oligarchs in their quest for profit at the expense of most of humanity. But as experience in India shows, things could get much worse if the Trump regime comes back to power.

For the future of humanity, the wider alliance between authoritarian and far-right political groups around the world (as politically astute protester in India media said) must be stopped in its tracks in the US elections, and in global solidarity to isolate and defeat the Modi regime in India, the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil, and everywhere else that new fascism has raised its ugly head.