Excerpted with permission from The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India, published by Cambridge University Press.The Sangh Parivar has garnered mass support by posing as anti-elite in its rhetoric. It is similar to the popular appeal of the Nazi Party that was based on their calls to overthrow the traditional German elite. As in other contexts, particularly the United States, the far-right movements funded by billionaires use the term ‘elite’ detached from economic status to label those fractions of the elite who oppose fascist imaginations. Hindutva’s popularity, similarly, hinges on its disavowal of a section of the elite constituted by liberal intellectual classes, including international non-governmental organizations and progressive media (derisively referred to as ‘Lutyens’ Delhi’), while maintaining cosy relationships with indigenous plutocrats and corporations. Thus, the rise of Hindutva is situated in its appeal to both the elite and lower classes. While the current Hindutva regime furthers the class interests of the more organized elite, it garners lower-class support through propaganda and doles such as free ration.Arendt (1966) has argued that popular support for a fascist regime shows that people overlook their rights and material interests. We offer a more careful reading of such a formulation. In our interpretation of the dominance of Hindutva, we do not see lower classes overlooking their material conditions. Instead, abject poverty, caste inequities, patriarchy, and the absence of grassroots democracy limit the lower classes’ expectations of material gains to the minimal benefits doled out by the state (for example, the current offering of five kilograms of free food grain). The masses are, as J. Banaji (2016, p. 222) describes, in a state of ‘manipulated seriality’. Seriality is passive, inert, and dispersed people, not the behaviour of a cohesive group. Fascists work on serialities to produce desired outcomes. Thus, dispersed masses of people are susceptible to manipulations by organized groups. The control over the state apparatus furthers the dominance of the Sangh Parivar over disorganized masses reduced to individuals.Edited by Rohit VarmanThe Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ IndiaCambridge University Press, 2025The politics of the RSS is fundamentally casteist, patriarchal, and anti-democratic (Kasbe 2019). The control over state apparatuses helps Hindutva reinforce the stranglehold of the highly organized big capital whose interests coincide with those of the upper classes and upper castes in society (Poruthiyil 2021). Modi’s record both as a chief minister of Gujarat and as the country’s prime minister suggests his governments have enabled the upper castes and classes to control Indian politics and have widened inequality (Jaffrelot 2021). The current regime has strengthened the stranglehold of the elite, and the new rulers are part of the Hindutva establishment elite that is structured and sustained by the cruel inequalities of power that Sangh’s anti-elite rhetoric rails against (S. Roy 2022). The ongoing control of the old elite reminds us that while fascist politics is monstrous and violent in newer ways, there is much that is unexceptional and routinized as well (Patnaik 2023b).In sustaining the Hindutva propaganda, corporate media houses have played a crucial role (Naqvi 2019). The current Hindutva propaganda makes use of modern tools and deploys the tactics and vocabularies of anti-terrorism, anti-imperialism, digitization, and development, along with the older tropes of Hinduism present in paintings, calendar art, folk theatre, and cinema (S. Banaji 2018). Through a series of policies, this government has systematically constructed digital surveillance mechanisms by bringing streaming services into the ambit of censorship (Chisti 2023). These policies were supplemented by the vigilante mechanism of cyber and street activists and indiscriminate uses of penal provisions to criminalise content creators in the digital sphere (S. Banaji 2018). Control over these techniques of communication has turned Hindu rituals into muscular public–political spectacles that are used to threaten the other in the name of religion and nationalism. For instance, Hindutva forces make strategic use of popular music to spread their message (Purohit 2023).Hindutva also uses monuments to further its messaging by repurposing the existing sites of cultural imagery and constructing new ones. The construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on a site where a mosque existed for centuries is a prime example of such messaging. Another example is the Central Vista project that houses the Rashtrapati Bhawan, the parliament building, and other historically significant monuments. Activists and writers have noted that the execution of the Central Vista project is an attempt to re-sculpt Delhi along the contours of majoritarian Hindutva historiography (Appadurai 2021; A. Roy 2021). Such symbolism also includes the sphere of popular culture, and a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad has been renamed as Narendra Modi Stadium. A similar trend is visible in the renaming of cities and railway stations (for example, Allahabad to Prayagraj, Gurgaon to Gurugram, Mughalsarai Junction to Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction) as attempts to erase India’s Muslim heritage.‘[F]ascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers’ (Paxton 2005, p. 17). In this, Hindutva’s othering of Muslims resembles the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party. Hindutva is particularly insidious because it has been effective in deploying violent othering under the facade of nationalism, modernization, and democracy (J. Banaji 2016), and it does so by appropriating past prejudices and combining them with new ones ‘skilfully dressed up as old verities, and broadcasting the resultant compound through the most up-to-date media techniques’ (S. Sarkar 2016, p. 143). These conditions and strategies have helped the Sangh Parivar to recruit an army of stormtroopers, with Muslims being their prime targets (Jha 2017). The recent enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is a prime example of a framing of Muslims that reduces them to second-class citizens. The act identifies Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Sikh, and Zoroastrian as ‘persecuted minorities’, who arrived by 2014 from its Muslim-majority neighbours Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and are entitled to apply for citizenship. It omits Muslims, Jews, Bahais, and atheists from its purview, introducing a religious filter that violates the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution (I. Roy 2022).Hindutva tries to occlude the transfer of wealth to the elite and rising inequality by manufacturing a phantasmagoria of right-wing nationalism in which Muslims are framed as enemies from the past—a parade of ghosts that distracts from the real monstrosity of neoliberalism (see Varman and Vijay 2022). While the masses are kept busy with such symbolic contests and spectacles, the governmental Hindutva has ensured that its corporate sponsors are duly rewarded. After 2004, the Congress regime operated as a regulator state to support big business, the BJP government has made the state into a broker-state cutting deals and furthering the interests of corporations (Azad et al. 2019). After 2014, several labour laws have been changed to help businesses (Subramanian 2022). For instance, in July 2017, an amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, reduced the number of companies identified as hazardous from eighty-three to only those listed in the Factories Act that pertain to mining and explosives. In September 2020, the Lok Sabha passed three labour bills—the Industrial Relations Code, the Code on Social Security, and the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code Bills. The bills increase the vulnerability of the informal labour force by granting extended discretion to employers to provide social security and to terminate workers’ employment. This change in Indian labour laws has certain historical parallels with Nazi Germany:Most remarkable is the fact that wages declined while profits were rising sharply, as we have already seen. Those two phenomena were related; they had a common origin. The Nazis deliberately chose to maintain wages at low levels in order to make it easier for the profits of their friends in big business, the corporations and banks, to skyrocket. Thanks to the services of the Nazis, German capital was able to grab a bigger share of the “pie” of the social product at the expense of labour. (Pauwels 2017, p. 77)In addition, several other laws have been altered by the BJP government to support corporations in the mining sector. In March 2015, the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act was introduced, which opened India’s nationalized coal mining sector to private players and set terms for the auction and sale of coal mines/blocks. Similarly, in May 2016, the Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill was passed in Parliament, allowing the transfer of mining leases granted in auction to private individuals, pending approval by state governments.Within the first three months of assuming office in 2014, the Modi government issued environmental clearance to 33 out of 41 proposals, diverting more than 7,000 hectares of forestland for the purpose of mining, construction, and special economic zones. A major share of the diverted land was allocated to private corporations. (Dutta and Nielsen 2021, pp. 72–73)A slew of other bills advanced the interests of corporations (Subramanian 2022). For instance, in July 2016, the Compensatory Afforestation Funds Act, 2016, was passed by Parliament. The act bypasses consent from village councils and other forest dwellers and allows plantation activities on protected forest lands. The Draft National Policy was released in March 2018 by the Ministry of Environment proposing the use of ‘degraded forest areas’ (less than 40 per cent tree canopy density) for private plantations and projects under public–private partnerships to cover over 34 million hectares of forest land. In a similar vein, the finance minister, Nirmala Seetharaman, announced the privatization or disinvestment target of INR 105 billion in July 2019, with the government seeking to reduce its stake in public enterprises to below 51 per cent. These include undertakings such as Air India, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), and Life Insurance Corporation (LIC), among others. The government passed the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification 2019 in December 2019 to open up India’s coastline for enhanced commercial activities. It allows for construction on the previously protected 200-metre no-development zone in rural coastal areas. In 2019, the BJP government lowered the base corporate tax rate from 30 per cent to 22 per cent, which significantly lowered the corporate tax to GDP ratio in India (Chowdhury 2023, p. 155). Furthermore, the government identified in December 2019 a hundred railway routes for private carriers to operate 150 passenger trains every year. In January 2020, the Indian Railways announced that its production units will be privatized and private companies will be allowed to manage 750 railway stations across the country. Another form of benefit doled out to the big business was in the form of the three infamous farm bills in 2020: the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, the Farmers’ (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance Act, and the Farm Services and Essential Commodities (Amendment). The bills were eventually withdrawn before the crucial Uttar Pradesh assembly elections because of farmers’ protests.On 12 December 2023, the union government introduced in Parliament three bills that have replaced the existing codes: the Indian Penal Code, 1860, with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS-II); the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973, with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS-II); and the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, with the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill (BSB-II). These bills equip the government with adequate power to hollow out democracy. The new laws enable the government to dramatically scale up the arrest, detention, prosecution, and imprisonment of democratic opponents, dissidents, and activists (Gopal 2023). India is on a fast track to expand state control, both by over-criminalizing and by awarding more police powers; these bills, instead of decolonizing the legal system, actually codify it by giving the state heightened control over its citizens (Surendranath and Sikora 2023).While the BJP has enacted new laws to support corporations, in a very specific way, it has advanced the interests of the new monopoly houses of Adani and Ambanis, who have also been very proactive in their support of the Modi regime (Patnaik 2023c). For example, the adjudicating authority of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), K. V. S. Singh, passed an order striking down all proceedings launched by the DRI against the Adani Group firms. The firms were accused of allegedly inflating the total declared value of goods imported under power and infrastructure heads, which attracts 0 or less than 5 per cent duty to the extent of INR 39.74 billion (Narayan 2017). In October 2018, out of the 126 contracts made available to private firms to set up piped natural gas networks and fuel stations across the country, the Adani Group secured 25—the largest number awarded to a single player through the bidding process (Subramanian 2022). The Adani Group was granted (in March 2019) all six contracts for the modernizing of airports in Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Jaipur, Lucknow, Mangaluru, and Thiruvananthapuram (ibid.).These favours should not be, however, read as crony capitalism. It misses the specificity of the connection between monopoly capital and fascism. All capitalism is crony capitalism because discretion is always exercised in how contracts are awarded to corporations and in the framing of laws to support them (Patnaik 2023c). The term ‘crony capitalism’ assumes that there can be a version of capitalism that does not favour specific businesses. Moreover, crony capitalism becomes a trajectory of capitalism that is a deviation from its otherwise benign path. This ignores the monopoly tendency that is central to capitalism (Baran and Sweezy 1966) and which plays a key role in supporting and benefitting from fascism. Under monopoly capitalism, the relationship between monopoly capitalists and the state becomes far closer, as is evident in the corporate–Hindutva nexus.As a result of the corporate–Hindutva nexus, lower classes have suffered greater losses, and their lives are marked by increasing poverty and hunger (Chowdhury and Keane 2021; Varman and Vijay 2022). Data show that between 2011–2012 and 2017–2018, per capita consumption expenditure on all items in real terms has fallen by 9 per cent in rural India. Nothing of this sort had ever happened in normal times in independent India (Chowdhury 2023; Patnaik 2021a). While the poor have either stagnated or become poorer, the rich are making bigger gains than ever before. According to a recent Oxfam (2023, p. 7) report,The wealthiest 10 percent own more than 72 percent of the total wealth; the top 5 percent own nearly 62 percent of the total wealth, and the top 1 percent own nearly 40.6 percent of the total wealth. The country still has the world’s highest number of poor at 228.9 million. On the other hand, the total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 billionaires in 2022.Fascism thrives when high inequality coincides with deep and easily evocable social divisions (Hacker and Pierson 2020) as in the case of India.Rohit Varman is Professor of Marketing and Consumption at Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham.