Excerpted with permission from The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India, published by Cambridge University Press.“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of TotalitarianismFrom the mid-eighties of the last century, the neoliberal economic model, devised by the anti-collectivist theorists,1 which conceptually elevates competition as a high principle, has been favoured by the ruling classes. It remains nothing but a social Darwinist contrivance for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004). Since the collapse of the Soviet system, it has become almost the default model sans alternative. The endemic crises it entails and the alienation it engenders necessitate increasingly authoritative responses and demagogic strategies from the rulers, using existing social divisions in the form of castes, religions, ethnicities, and so on, which lead to the fascization of societies.Edited by Rohit VarmanThe Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ IndiaCambridge University Press, 2025.While this trend is visible everywhere today, some countries have congenial ideological resources for the fascization of their societies. India, with a hegemonic Brahminist ideology (with its hierarchical ethos and the organizational dominance of its hegemons in the state apparatus as well as in civil society) is uniquely positioned. While fascization has been discernible since the 1990s in the overt majoritarian communalism whipped up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it was somewhat muted by the lack of political consensus and the moral scruples of constitutional decencies.The current dispensation under Narendra Modi, the conscious choice of the big business in India and global capital that have withdrawn their long-standing support of the Congress Party, lacks these constraints. Modi, with his fascist model perfected in the Hindutva laboratory of Gujarat over a decade, has nearly accomplished the fascization of the country. He is close to the ultimate goal of the ‘Hindu Rashtra’—the ultra-fascist–Brahminist paradigm that reinforces the hierarchical social structure and creates a totalitarian state under the control of upper-caste elites. The role of market and business in fascization is evident: they are the drivers as well as the beneficiaries.Communalism in historyCommunalism is a politically constructed belief that people belonging to a particular religion have common social, political, and economic interests and that they constitute separate ‘organic wholes’ or homogenous and cohesive communities (Chandra 2008). Implicit in the process of organizing such exclusive communities is hostility to one or another community. This hostility becomes intense when such communities live together and share common economic, political, and other resources—particularly, if the resources happen to be inadequate for the development of society as a whole. Hostility is further amplified and made explicit in organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Muslim League (Mukhia 1972).In India, communalism mainly refers to the hostility between Hindus and Muslims engineered by these organizations. The term was coined by the British colonial government as the strategic ‘divide-and-rule’ ploy to manage its colonies. The British constructed religious or ethnic identities with ethnographic accounts and distorted histories, and incited strife between people (Horowitz 1985) leading to serious inter-communal violence (Graff and Galonnier 2013; Horowitz 1985; Jones 1981).While certain exclusiveness of religious and sectarian outlook has always existed in Indian history as part of the tradition and economic and social life, its transformation into communalism is a modern phenomenon associated with the colonial emergence of a middle class and economic stagnation. Economic stagnation led to the collapse of traditional status systems, loss of identity, and competition for scarce resources, resulting in frustration, identity confusion, and a sense of relative deprivation. It led to a volatile climate in which minor issues like killing a cow or playing music near a mosque provoked extreme violence, eclipsing the real issues of government jobs, political positions, and educational opportunities (Hasan 1982).When the British started taking control of the subcontinent from the Mughal Empire, the Brahmins saw an opportunity to take revenge on Muslims who had kept them subdued for over six centuries. In Bengal, the seat of British rule, there had been incipient attempts at mobilizing masses through ‘Hindu Melas’ in the late 1860s with the idea of rallying Hindus, particularly the educated youth, behind the concept of reviving the glories of the Hindu past. In this, they were supported by prominent Bengalis such as the Tagore family and others of their ilk. The process generated ecumenical articulations about a Hindu identity that was further strengthened by the activities of the educated middle class, which expressed itself in discursive as well as organizational forms to disseminate the ideas about ‘Hindu-ness’ (Sengupta 1993, p. 32).The transformation of this identity into a militant one against the Muslim ‘other’ is reflected in Anandmath, an influential novel written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), a quintessential representative of the Bengali middle class. It preached cleansing of Muslims and hailed British rule, which remained the behavioural theme of the Sangh Parivar all through colonial rule (Islam 2017). The battle of the Santans (the rebel Hindu monks) in Anandmath is stated in terms of a crusade: ‘We do not want a kingdom— we only want to finish off the Muslims and their clans because they despise god.’The cult of emaciated Bharat Mata as a symbol of Hindu victimhood, which is at the root of Hindu militancy, also was started in the Hindu Mela and was propagated in the literature, such as in Anandmath, as the goddess to be worshipped (Vande mataram, or ‘I bow to thee mother’). Anandmath was so influential that militant nationalist groups like the Dacca Anushilan Samiti emulated initiation rites given in it for the Santans. The universalist dimension of this self-defining Hindu discourse was later presented on an international platform by Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) (J. Sharma 2013).These ideas for the self-definition of Hindus were paradoxically sourced from the European orientalist construction of Hinduism and what it regarded as the heritage of Hindu culture. It involved transcending from earlier segmented identities to one based on religion, which then had to be refashioned to provide an ideology which would bind the group (Thapar 1989; Thapar, Mukhia, and Chandra 1969).Negotiating an identity in terms of a common cultural heritage also served the interests of the Hindu landlords in north Bengal, by silencing the peasants and marginalizing the Muslim community. These moves precipitated the foundation of the Central National Mohammedan Association in 1878 with the avowed aim of morally reviving the Muslims by working in harmony with Western culture (Banglapedia 2021). Interestingly, neither the Hindu nor the Muslim organization had any quarrel with the British masters.Earlier, also in reaction to the conquest of India by the British and their modern ideas (liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, and justice), a movement for reforms in Hindu society had sprouted, pioneered by Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) with the founding of the discussion circle, Atmiya Sabha, in 1814. It discussed important social and political questions of the time.In 1828, it became the Brahmo Sabha, which was later renamed Brahmo Samaj. The Brahmo Samaj influenced the Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century, pioneering all religious, social, and educational advances of the Hindu community and inspiring the launch of similar reform movements outside Bengal, such as the Parmahans Mandali and the Prarthana Samaj, founded respectively in 1840 and 1867 in Bombay. The last and perhaps the most influential movement in the reformist samaj series was the Arya Samaj founded by Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) in 1875 in Bombay, which, however, gained strength in Punjab.Also read: Crisis of Neoliberalism and the Emergence of Neo-FascismThe Arya Samaj gave educated Hindus a political orientation and an impetus to carry on political work. From 1899, its members began to participate in (and finally dominate) the Punjab Congress. Though these reform movements promoted principles of reason (rationalism) and humanism, along with reliance on faith and traditional authority to support their appeal, and criticized ritualistic, superstitious, illogical, and obscurantist aspects of Indian religion, they contributed to Hindu militancy and aggravated Hindu–Muslim relations (Barrier 1967).In response, Muslims founded their own organization, the All India Muslim League, in 1906 in Dhaka. After the 1907 disturbances, however, the Arya Samaj played a crucial role in the shift from nationalist to communal organizations (ibid.). Subsequently, it gained strength and catalysed the formation of Hindu Sabhas in Punjab, which became the precursor of the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915.These reform movements reinforced the Hindu discourse and identity. However, despite their efforts to communalize Hindus, they could not overcome the segmented identities of a people divided into numerous castes,regions, sects, and languages. Even the Hindu communal organizations, the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS (founded in 1925) and its political outfit, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) (which became the BJP in 1980), remained ineffectual until the 1990s when India adopted neoliberal reforms, giving impetus to economic growth and the growing middle class.Communalism and fascizationAfter the incipient efforts in Bengal, Maharashtrian Brahmins took charge of shaping political Hindu identity, giving it a lasting ideological and organizational form by borrowing from European fascism. The motivational genesis of it lay in the defeat in the 1818 battle of Bhima Koregaon of Peshwas, the Brahmins who had usurped the Maratha kingdom of Shivaji after his death. Initially, this identity manifested as individual rebellions (by Vasudeo Balwant Phadke, Chaphekar Brothers, and others) against the British, but after realizing its futility, they settled with Hindu nationalism and trained their violence instead on Muslims. It is leaders from the Maharashtrian Brahmins who largely led and are still leading communalist movements threatening the pluralism of Indian society.Communalism and fascization are intimately related. While communalism of the minority leads to separatism, communalism of the majority leads to fascism. Communalism induced in the Muslim minority by the persistent anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Hindus during the colonial times ultimately resulted in the partition of the country. The Hindutva forces have been at work since the establishment of British sovereignty in India but were curtailed by the inclusivist societal ethos and then Nehruvian consensus, neither conducive to nurturing communalism. Nonetheless, underneath the façade of secularism, communalism was able to thrive silently in society. It would wait for an opportune time to raise its ugly head, which it did in 2014, simultaneously driving the process of fascization of state and society.Fascism is a leader-centric cult and hence the definition of his (the fascist leader is always a ‘he’) politics, ideology, and conduct decide the character of the government/state over which he presides. A short definition of fascism is ‘fascism is a cult of the leader’ (Stanley 2018). It involves the leader setting the rules about what is true and false. ‘So, any kind of expertise and even reality is a challenge to the authority of the leader’ (ibid.).Even institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history in all its complexity threaten the fascist leader. The fascist leader, observes Stanley, promises national restoration in the face of humiliation—supposed humiliation—by liberals, homosexuals, immigrants, and minorities. He also promises that he will gain revenge for this humiliation and restore a glorious previously lost order.All these attributes strongly resonate in Modi, a prototypical fascist leader. Right from his stint as the chief minister of Gujarat, he displayed fascist characteristics, which have grown to an alarming magnitude after 2014, when he took over total control of the country as the prime minister. Ashish Nandy (2002), an Indian political psychologist, recalls his encounter with Modi“when he was a small-time Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak trying to make it as a small-time Bharatiya Janata Party functionary … but it [the interaction] left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist…. Modi … met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho- analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrow emotional life, massive use of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits.”Let us test Modi out on some additional features. Stanley (2018) gave three essential features of fascism:Fascists conjure a ‘mythic past’ that has supposedly been destroyed. As Benito Mussolini had Rome, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had the Ottoman Empire, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban rewrote the country’s constitution with the aim of ‘making Hungary great again’, Modi sees glorious, mythical, ancient India not only spiritually great but also superior in sciences and technology. He celebrates an exalted status of a self-proclaimed vishvaguru (teacher of the world), which he promises his ‘new India’ will soon regain. Hindu civilization, his Sangh Parivar claims with no credible evidence, was the greatest of all the nations but was destroyed by the Muslims and thereafter by the British. Fascist leaders, as Stanley states, ‘position themselves as father figures and strongmen’, à la Modi who boasts of a ‘56-inch chest’, a ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’, who alone can restore the lost greatness of India.Fascist leaders sow division. They succeed by ‘turning groups against each other’, inflaming historical antagonisms and ancient hatreds for their own advantage. Social divisions in themselves—between castes, classes, religions, ethnic groups, and so on —are what we might call pre-existing conditions. Fascists may not invent the hatred, but they cynically instrumentalize it: demonizing outgroups, normalizing, and naturalizing bigotry, stoking violence to justify repressive law and order policies, curtailing civil rights, instituting mass imprisonment, and murdering manufactured enemies. The Sangh Parivar’s enemies, as Golwalkar declared, were Muslims, Christians, and Communists. Modi transformed the polarization of society into an art form. It is this core strategy which lies behind his spectacular rise and his becoming one of the most powerful leaders in the world.Fascists are against truths. Fascists ‘attack the truth’ with propaganda, in particular ‘a kind of anti-intellectualism’ that ‘creates a petri dish for conspiracy theories’. For fascists, truth does not matter at all. Modi’s disdain for intellectualism, reflected by his ‘Harvard versus hard work’ comment, is well known. Also, equally well known is his trait to lie with a Goebbelesque flourish. In reality, Modi fits Hannah Arendt’s description in that ‘[b]efore mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of a man who can fabricate it’ (1958, p. 358). The best testimony for this came in the form of the people who suffered most from Modi’s irrational ‘demonetization’ of 86 per cent of the currency notes with a few hours’ notice, which was justified by repeating a fraudulent line: what if one bore a little pain for the sake of the nation!The biggest force behind Modi is the Sangh Parivar and the myriad outfits it has launched in every segment of society. The fascist proclivities of its progenitors—Tilak, Moonje, Savarkar, Hedgewar, Golwalkar—have since been established (Teltumbde 2020). For almost a century, the Sangh Parivar has been concertedly working towards its aim—to establish a Hindu Rashtra—but remained ineffectual until India adopted neoliberal economic policies.Neoliberal push for HindutvaPushed to the brink of economic collapse by 1990, India adopted the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-sponsored neoliberal reforms—a euphemism for the counter-revolutionary strategy to shift the power from workers to the owners of capital by weakening the state and expanding the ideals of free market. In reality, neoliberalism shifts the orientation of the state to protecting the interests of large capital by placing markets above any social contract.Neoliberalism has decimated labour rights, denuded people of their civil liberties, imposed rigid limits on fiscal deficits, given massive tax breaks and bailouts to big capital, sacrificed local production for multinational supply chains, and privatized public sector assets at throwaway prices. Under neoliberalism, governments must obey the dictates of finance capital, lest it leave the country en masse and precipitate an acute financial crisis undermining confidence in a country. The sovereignty of the people is thus replaced by the sovereignty of global finance and the domestic corporations within it (Patnaik 2021). This abridgement of democracy is justified by political and economic elites on the grounds that neoliberal economic policies usher in higher gross domestic product (GDP) growth. However, even IMF economists have conceded that neoliberal policies are responsible for growing income inequality rather than GDP growth (ibid.).These reforms were initially sold to the public with trickle-down prospects. The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 and stagnation in the world economy disproved them. As economist Prabhat Patnaik succinctly explained, the old prop of trickle-down economics having lost its credibility had needed to be replaced by ‘an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements’ (ibid.).Although the Congress Party brought in neoliberalism, it suited the right-wing BJP better, notwithstanding the nationalistic rhetoric its sibling Swadeshi Jagran Manch fabricated to politically oppose the Congress. Neoliberal policies soon manifested in severe crises among the lower strata in the form of farmers’ suicides, rising unemployment, inflation, environmental destruction, and so on. This came in handy for the BJP as they could convert people’s vulnerability into a sense of confidence by mobilizing them to reach for the imagined glory of their heritage, symbolized in the religious– cultural supremacist icon of ‘Ram’ and demonizing Muslims as the enemy. It was politically necessary, too, to counter the potential threat of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) being lured away because of the creation of Mandal reservations for them. The television series Ramayana, broadcast on the national channel, Doordarshan, from 1987 to 1989—one blunder of the Congress regime among many—was instrumental in whipping up nationalist politics around cultural motifs of Hindutva.On the surface, Hindutva politics appears contradictory to neoliberalism, as communalism is not attuned to a ‘free’ market. But, in reality, the forces of Hindutva and neoliberalism have consolidated each other’s positions in society, politics, and the economy. Modi, unabashedly neoliberal and pro–big capital, has provided enough proof over his tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat that he could simultaneously practise his Hindutva politics of hatred and pursue a neoliberal economic agenda. After all, people hardly understand the complexity of the economy; what matters is their perception, which could be shaped by propaganda.Modi perfected propaganda following the Goebbelsque dictum of telling ‘big enough lies’ and making the media repeat it incessantly, while starving the contrary voices of resources and even smothering them. It was a perfect following of the fascist playbook. None of his claims, whether made in respect to Gujarat or now about India, have come true, but people perceive them to be true. Any statistical system that mirrors reality has thus been anathema to his government. Making people believe that the economy is doing well or that the adverse outcomes are not the result of policies tames the resentment of the poor and serves the neoliberal agenda of further concentration of wealth. Indeed, Modi provided enough proof for the complementarity of Hindutva and neoliberalism during his fascist rule in Gujarat.Similarities between neoliberalism and Hinduism abound. For instance, both neoliberalism and Hinduism place no value on liberty, equality, and fraternity, the radical principles upheld in favour of people. Liberty, like every other thing in Hinduism, is metred as per the social hierarchy: the Brahmins having it all, and the Dalits none. Neoliberalism upholds it in principle for all, but in reality it entails the negation of itself, and inequality is considered natural, divinely ordained (in the case of Hinduism), and a catalyst of human progress. Fraternity cannot be a value in neoliberalism, which privileges unbridled competition between people, and, likewise, it cannot be a value in Hinduism, which ordains brutalization through caste.These astounding ideological affinities between the two accentuate the existential orientation of people towards the occult of Hindutva and social Darwinism. This compatibility of Hindutva and neoliberalism serves business interests.Hindutva fascism and businessThe post-colonial regime, contrary to the profession of the political class and the façade of the republican constitution they created, continues to be committed to serving the interests of the capitalists and propertied classes. It, however, carried the burden of promises to the masses made during the freedom struggle and had to camouflage this with the rhetoric of welfarism. The eight big capitalists of the country, well before the actual transfer of power (in January 1944), had prepared a plan entitled A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India, which came to be known as the Bombay Plan. Its second edition (part 2) was published the following year.The key theme of the Bombay Plan was the inability of fledgling Indian industry to undertake requisite investments, and therefore government intervention in industrial development through the public sector with deficit financing was necessary to transform the society from agrarian to industrialized (Anstey 1945).Although Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, did not officially accept the plan, ‘the Nehruvian era witnessed [what was effectively] the implementation of the Bombay Plan; a substantially interventionist state and an economy with a sizeable public sector’ (Krishna 2005). The next significant policy intervention the state undertook was land reforms in the garb of fulfilling the Congress commitment made during the freedom struggle, but actually to create a class of landowners out of the most populous Shudra band of castes in vast rural areas as an ally of the Congress.Whatever little land redistribution took place under these reforms benefitted the Shudra tenants, leaving many actual cultivators of Dalit castes high and dry with an alibi that they were not found in records. The Green Revolution, a capitalist strategy to increase agricultural output, enriched this landowning class, transforming part of it into a class of rich farmers. Though not adequately noted, these two policy interventions radically changed the social relations in the countryside.While the Green Revolution brought in money, economy, and markets for input (seeds, fertilizer, pesticide, insecticide, electricity, water, and so on) and output (farm produce), credit, implements, services,and so on, characterizing capitalist relations, the rich farmers, who had taken over the social reins of power from the displaced Brahmins, would, however, not let go of the caste relations, with serious implications to Dalits, who became victims of both caste feudalism as well as of the emergent capitalist system.The tax-free accumulated agricultural surplus of the rich farmers found its way into many petty businesses (rice mills, flour mills, daal mills, contracting, transport services, and so on), bringing them face to face with the prowess of politics and thereby kindling political aspirations in them. The Congress could satiate them to some extent, but when this failed, they manifested into rival blocks or parties.Also read: How the Rise of Hindutva and the Rise of Wealth Concentration Are LinkedThe late 1960s saw a multi-stranded crisis of capitalism, just as it passed its golden period of two decades and began manifesting social conflicts predominantly characterized by popular rebellions against state militaries and bureaucracies in most parts of the globe.5 In India, this took the form of various movements, like Naxalite and Dalit Panthers. It strangely coincided with the fading of the halo of the Congress Party as the vanguard of the freedom movement and consequently made electoral politics competitive.The primordial identities of castes and communities were eyed as valuable sources of vote blocs for the electoral market, and a way to enhance the role of big money from businesses to fund casteist and communal strategies. This social unrest and political turmoil culminated in prime minister Indira Gandhi declaring an emergency in 1975, inaugurating her full-throated authoritarian rule.The RSS, the fountainhead of majority communalism and its political outfit, the BJS, donned the halo of victimhood of having suffered with other opposition parties during the emergency and skilfully exploited the opportunity by joining the united front of all opposition parties against the Congress in the form of the Janata Party, which came to power by defeating the Congress in the 1977 elections. Identified until then as an offshoot of the Brahminical RSS and treated mostly as a political pariah in an environment dominated by the ethos of socialism and secularism, the BJS successfully mainstreamed itself and even tasted power in the Janata Party government.The Janata Party collapsed under the burden of its contradictions within two years and BJS reorganized itself as the Bharatiya Janata Party. It could make no headway electorally in the next two elections even after racking up the contentious Ram Mandir issue. In the 1984 election, the party touched the trough with just two members of parliament (MPs) in Lok Sabha. It was greatly helped by the political blunders of the Congress’s prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1985–1986, when he amended the Indian Constitution and weighed in with the maulvis to overturn the reformist Supreme Court judgment in the Shah Bano case and opened the locks of the Babri Masjid to assuage Hindus, enraged by his decision to appease orthodox Muslims (Hasan 1993).Also, as mentioned earlier, the decision by his government to broadcast Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana through Doordarshan was a blunder too, as it severely dented the secular tradition of the institution and paved the way for the ambitious run of the Hindutva forces.7 When the Vishwanath Pratap Singh government, embroiled in political uncertainty, decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission report granting reservations to the OBCs, the BJP intensified the Ram Mandir movement by taking up the Rath Yatra in 1989 and catapulted itself as the challenger to the Congress party, actually grabbing the power in 1996 for sixteen days, and then in 1998 for a full term.Driven to desperation by the debacle in the 1984 election, the BJP adopted a pronounced communal stance, albeit under the control of prime minister Atal Bihari Bajpai, mainly due to the fear of alienating the BJP’s alliance partners, on whose support its political fortune was hinged. But when, in 2001, Modi, the pracharak of the RSS, turned BJP politician sans popular base and took over the chief ministership of Gujarat, he went whole hog using majority communalism as the BJP’s electoral plank. He endeared himself to the majority Hindus by exploiting the controversial Godhra incident on 27 February 2002 (in which 59 kar sevaks, or religious volunteers, including women and children, were burnt alive in a fire in a bogie of Sabarmati Express) to engineer unprecedented pogrom of Muslims in the state.Securing a firm electoral grip on the state, he assumed fascist control and embarked on neoliberal development, which, with his well-oiled propaganda machine, further tightened his grip on power. It greatly helped the entrenched social and economic classes/castes. He overcame the intrinsic contradiction between communalism and neoliberalism, in that, whereas communalism may enthuse the masses, neoliberal development appeals to the middle class upwards but not to the lower classes (who bear the burden of crises created by neoliberal development). For the first time, Modi, riding on the wave of communalism, transformed Gujarat into the most neoliberal state in India. Economist Jayati Ghosh aptly observed that the Modi government, which is now more openly declaring its Hindu majoritarian and Hindu nationalist instincts, is also unabashedly neoliberal and pro–big capital, including global capital (Ghosh 2020).The fallout of communalism was the ghettoization of Muslims in Ahmedabad and other cities. Muslims sold out their dwellings cheap and moved to Muslim areas, bringing good business opportunities to real-estate sharks. Ghettoization also helped many Hindus grab Muslim businesses. The biggest beneficiary, of course, was Modi himself who consolidated a majoritarian constituency of Hindus. Towards expansion of the market, Hindutva gave a fillip to the commoditization of many products and services, including cow dung and urine-based products and godly tourism and rituals. Likewise, while big businesses hugely supported Modi and reaped rich dividends from this munificence, some of them attracting even the charge of cronyism, small and medium businesses suffered from his policies like demonetization, goods and services tax (GST), and pandemic handling (Dharshini, Kajla, and Bhattacharya 2021).Modi ran the state like his fiefdom, ignoring the institutionalized processes. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) revealed, many years later, a number of ‘irregularities’ from this period. The CAG accused the Gujarat government of causing huge losses to the exchequer by bestowing ‘undue’ favours to large companies, including Reliance Industries, Essar, the Adani Group, Larsen & Toubro, and Ford. Land allotment was the main issue, but not the only one: ‘During the last five years, the audit reports have highlighted cases of non/short levy, non/short realisation, underassessment/ loss of revenue, incorrect exemption, concealment of turnover, application of incorrect rate of income tax, incorrect computation, etc., worth Rs 5,287.48 crore (Rs 52.8748 Billion)’ (Comptroller and Auditor General of India 2012). This indictment came after the CAG asked more than 5,000 queries and made 15,100 audit observations (Jaffrelot 2019). None of these interventions made any difference, and the aforementioned Gujarat-based companies have continued to register good results. Consider some more examples.It is said that just a simple SMS ‘welcome’ from Modi to Ratan Tata brought Tata’s Nano car project from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand in Gujarat. The terms agreed to by the government can only be called a largesse: a soft loan of INR 9,570 crores (INR 95.7 billion) at 330 per cent of the first- phase investment of INR 2,900 crores (INR 29 billion), including relocation charges, with no interest for the first twenty years; single interest on it at 0.01 per cent payable monthly after twenty years; loan amount to be disbursed on monthly basis in the form of refund of gross value added tax (VAT); originally the refund was to be calculated at 330 per cent of the VAT paid, but later it was negotiated down to 230 per cent, reducing the loan amount to INR6,669.99 crores (INR 66.6999 billion); payment for government land to be made in eight equal annual instalments with compound interest at 8 per cent per year; 1.100 acres of land allotted with all requisite permissions; exemption from stamp duty (4.9 per cent of total sale price), electricity duty, registration charges (1 per cent of the sale price), and transfer charges for conversion of land status from agriculture to non-agriculture; and 14,000 cubic meters per day water, permission to draw ground water for immediate needs (Dave and Damodar 2015). Tata was not the only one to be so favoured.Similarly, the conglomerate Larsen & Toubro was allotted 800,000 square metres of prime land in the industrial zone of Hazira, Surat, without auction, at the rate of INR 1 per square meter, thereby costing the state exchequer a few hundred crore rupees (Jaffrelot 2024). The Essar Group was allotted 208,000 square metres of disputed land for a steel plant on the CRZ (Coastal Regulation Zone) and forest land that could not be allotted as per Supreme Court guidelines (ibid.). The occupier is unauthorized, but no action has been taken by the state machinery (ibid.).In Mundra, Adani acquired up to 7,350 hectares of land on the 30-year, renewable leases ‘for as little as one U.S. cent a square meter (the rate maxed out at 45 cents a square meter). He in turn has sublet this land to other companies, including state-owned Indian Oil Co., for as much as $11 a square meter. Between 2005 and 2007 at least 1,200 hectares of grazing land was taken away from villagers’ (Bahree 2014).As a result of these doles, the market capitalization of the Adani Group has allegedly increased by 8,615 per cent between 2002 and 2012, that of Essar by 4,507 per cent, and that of Reliance Industries by 1,357 per cent. In light of these numbers, it is not surprising that the corporate ‘who’s who’ of the country had profuse praise for Modi during ‘Vibrant Gujarat’, a biannual forum to showcase Gujarat to the investor community. For example, Ratan Tata stated, ‘Narendra Modi is an extremely easy person to deal with—very informal, compatible and pleasant, and capable as well.It is very difficult not to feel comfortable with him.’ In 2007, Mukesh Ambani declared, ‘Narendrabhai is a leader with a grand vision … amazing clarity of purpose with determination… strong ethos with a modern outlook, dynamism and passion.’ In 2013, Anil Ambani, who had already projected Modi as the next prime minister of India, likened him to Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Dhirubhai Ambani (his father), and Arjuna, the hero of the Mahabharata, before calling him ‘king of kings’.Surely, Gujarat made notable progress in attracting investment, though not as much as claimed. Hundreds of companies were attracted to ‘Vibrant Gujarat’, and promises of investment worth hundreds of thousands of crores were secured. The realization of promised investments declined steadily over the years, but by the middle of the first decade of the century, investment in Gujarat had risen significantly and Modi had become one of the favourite chief ministers of Indian businessmen.Modi, who had squirmed his way to the seat of power, was greatly helped by the religious polarization of the Gujarati society and by big capitalists in successive elections and paved the way for his elevation to the highest post of prime minister of the country. His election campaign in 2014, promising achchhe din (good times) reminded one of Ronald Reagan’s now-famous 1984 presidential slogan: ‘Morning in America’. Indeed, many people likened Modi to Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who had ruthlessly furthered the neoliberal agenda in their countries.In anticipation of his victory, the stock market had surged; the foreign investors put in huge money in Indian stocks and bonds, reflecting the overall business sentiment. He continued to cheer up big business, often to the detriment of the small and medium firms. He effected changes in foreign direct investment rules, opening many sectors for foreign investment, from coal mining to space exploration and from defence production to steel and luring deep-pocketed multinational companies (MNCs) to eventually take over these crucial sectors. These changes, coupled with the ambitious programme of privatization of public sector assets, have opened huge opportunities for investors.Modi enacted the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), a system to quickly declare companies insolvent or bankrupt, allowing bigger corporate houses to buy them at low prices, while banks and other creditors (mostly public money) would lose huge amounts on their loans. One of the much- celebrated measures of Modi is the implementation of the goods and services tax (GST), which centralized virtually all taxation powers that had earlier resided with states. In his characteristic style of big-bang imposition of GST in 2017, Modi destroyed thousands of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), rendering their workforce unemployed. He sought to impose three farm laws and an amendment to the Electricity Act in 2020 in the midst of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. It was a naked attempt to deliver the country’s agricultural production and trade system into the greedy jaws of the corporate sector. The farmers had a unique demonstration of resistance, overcoming all kinds of odds created by the fascist government, and compelled Modi to eat a humble pie and take back the farm laws. Given its pro-big business stance, one cannot be sure a Modi-led government would respect peoples’ will and not bring them back surreptitiously.The Modi government scrapped twenty-nine existing labour laws and merged them into four labour codes between 2019 and 2020. These codes deal with wages, industrial relations, social security and occupational safety, and health and working conditions. Together, the codes destroy whatever meagre protection was offered by earlier labour laws against exploitation, low wages, dismissal from service, detrimental working conditions, and so on.The new codes enshrine a hire-and-fire right for employers, provide for fixed-term employment, change the way minimum wages are fixed, allow increased working hours, make it difficult to organize, and almost finish off the labour law implementation machinery. All of these were longstanding demands of the corporate sector and the Modi government fulfilled them, ignoring the concerns of the working-class movement. Even before these codes were fully defined, they have been implemented. This has led to huge insecurity in jobs, stagnant wages, deteriorating work conditions, and increased workloads. Meanwhile, profits in industrial houses and other companies have soared in the past few years as they threw workers out during the pandemic to maintain their profit margins.The Modi government has also used its full fiscal and financial powers to provide enormous largesse to the corporate sector. In 2019, it affected a cut in the corporate tax rate from 30 per cent to 22 per cent (35 per cent to 26 per cent if surcharges, and so on, are included). This amounted to a grant of INR 1,450 billion to the corporate sector. The logic that this would lead to more investment and more jobs has proved to be faulty. Between 2014–2015 and 2020–2021, the Modi government gave various rebates, concessions, and waivers worth INR 6,150 billion to corporate taxpayers, according to union budget documents. These are distinct from concessions given to non- corporate entities and individuals and do not include revenue foregone due to customs duty rebates.Since Modi came to power eight years ago, INR 10,720 billion worth of loans have been written off by banks, mostly public sector banks (PSBs), which act on the directives of the government. Most of these loan write- offs benefitted the corporate sector. The government wrote off an aggregate amount of INR 8,160 billion for PSBs and INR 11,180 billion for scheduled commercial banks (SCBs) during the last six financial years, from 2015–2016 through 2021–2022. This is largely public money, and it has gone into the coffers of big sharks who wilfully defrauded the people.Between 2014–2015 and 2021–2022, the government sold off various public sector enterprises for a whopping INR 4,860 billion to various private bidders. As these disinvestments did not go as planned, the Modi government came up with a programme of leasing out INR 60 billion worth of public assets such as railway lines and stations, telecom systems, power transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines, roads, bridges, ports, and so on, to private entities, under the National Monetisation Pipeline. These so-called leases will run for up to forty years, making them, in effect, disguised sales.Big businesses reaped benefits from their massive support to Modi. Their continued support is revealed through the controversial financial tool, electoral bonds notified by the Modi government on 2 January 2018. These bonds, issued by the State Bank of India (SBI), could be purchased by any individual or corporate entity and donated to any registered political party with at least 1 per cent of the vote share. There are nineteen such parties today, but of all the electoral bonds issued between March 2018 and 2022, the BJP received more than half of all of them. Between March 2018 and 2022, Election Commission data have shown that the BJP received INR 52.7 billion, or 57 per cent, of the total (NDTV 2023).To implement the Election Bond Scheme, major amendments were made to India’s election law, the Companies Act, and the Income Tax Act through the Finance Act of 2017. This scheme effectively legitimated corruption through bribery by the corporates and extortion by the ruling parties. It may prove to be the biggest ever scam in history. It is evidenced by the fact that the government has unleashed genocide of Adivasis (indigenous people) in the name of rooting out Maoism, but basically to hand over their lands, containing trillions of rupees worth of minerals, to corporations.The military campaign against Adivasis started in 1991 as per neoliberal dictums, but Modi’s fascist rule has stepped it up to a genocidal scale. Even those who spoke for them are not spared and are incarcerated as urban Naxals, an ingenious oxymoron.8 The campaign was also designed to send terror waves across the country so as to silence dissent. With the brute legislative majority, complete subjugation of state apparatus and media, and the saffron gangs in civil society, the playbook of fascism had completely supplanted the Constitution.The market and business are primarily propelled by profit and not by ideology. However, they would certainly favour an ideology that promises profit, as demonstrated under the present ruling dispensation in India.ConclusionCommunalism in India, in its incipient form, is birthed by the middle class belonging to the Brahminic castes, born during colonial rule and with aspirations to regain their hegemonic hold over the subcontinent, which they had largely lost under Muslim rulers for nearly 600 years. This loss was accentuated by a stagnant economy and, later, by the colonial rulers’ ‘divide-and-rule’ policy. Communalism is never natural. It needs singular identities that overcome the multitude of naturally formed identities that people have.In India, castes, tribes, sects, languages, and ethnicities were the primary identities of people, but they were forced into a neat division of two religions: Hindu and Muslim. Communalism may begin with a constructed majority—for example, Hindus—resenting the presence of people unlike them and who are perceived to be unjustly partaking what belonged to the majority. Once achieved, this resentment induces the same in the minority group. The minority’s communalism leads to separatism while the majority’s to fascism.The communal politics that played out in the context of and with the encouragement of colonial rule led to a horrific partition of the country, which benefitted only the ruling classes on both sides. It certainly did not solve any problem and rather aggravated it, providing necessarily for the fascization of both societies, at the cost of their people. The lessons, however, were never learnt because the new rulers made use of those very divisive (nationalistic) sentiments for their political sustenance.In India, the communal organization of the Hindus is uniquely represented by a hydra-headed Sangh Parivar with fascist proclivities (Islam 2018), but it could not make headway until the neoliberal reforms that needed fascist forces for their sustenance came into the country. Although the Congress Party brought in these reforms, it could not compete with the BJP, backed by its ‘parivar’, an ideological stance and a fascist infrastructure. Although the fall of the Congress may be attributable to a combination of multiple factors, the fascist resource base of the BJP has certainly been a major one.The BJP under a proven fascist leader with complete control of the entire institutional structure of the state, including media, and using India’s market muscle to manage international opinion, has moved a fascist juggernaut with full force towards its goal of Hindu Rashtra, which would be the restoration of the Brahminic hierarchical structure duly adapted for modern times. Hindutva, communalism, fascism, and neoliberalism are the complementary ideologies of the right wing that both consolidate and in turn get consolidated by the market and business.Anand Teltumbde is former CEO of PIL, professor of IIT Kharagpur, and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.