I am deeply honoured by the invitation to deliver the Nikhil Chakravartty Memorial Lecture this year. Some of the most distinguished scholars of the world have delivered these lectures in previous years. I feel humbled to follow them. Sitting here, I also recall the only occasion when I met Nikhil Chakravartty. It was in June 1977, in the heady days after the fall of Indira Gandhi’s regime. I was in Delhi as part of a committee campaigning for the release of political prisoners in West Bengal. Our meeting with the Union Home Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh was not too encouraging. We then held a press conference at the Press Club of India where Chakravartty, sitting in the front row, asked me a series of searching questions. He then published our entire memorandum to the Home Minister in Mainstream and followed it up three weeks later with an editorial admonishing the new Janata Government with the warning, ‘Not by populism’.
Fascism was a phenomenon with which people of Chakravartty’s generation were very familiar. I don’t think he encountered the word ‘populism’ in the way it is now used. He would certainly have known of the Russian populists of the nineteenth century, some of whom corresponded with Karl Marx, and on whose economic and political programmes Lenin wrote some searing criticisms. Chakravartty must have regarded populism as a set of superficial slogans that tried to assuage the grievances of rural people without tackling the basic issues of social transformation. But populism as we now know it in India or in Europe, the United States and Latin America has become a very different phenomenon. Let me deal with that first.
Populism in the West
To understand the recent wave of populism in Europe and the United States, we need to remind ourselves of the situation there in the years following the Second World War. In Western Europe, the welfare state was established to provide universal healthcare, unemployment and old age insurance, access to housing and free secondary and higher education to all citizens. Alongside, the post-war labour shortage had to be met by immigration from the former European colonies. In the United States, even though there was no full-fledged welfare state, unemployment and old age benefits were introduced by the New Deal in the 1930s, while there was a huge expansion of higher education in the 1950s and 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement achieved a significant equalization of formal entitlements across races, and immigration laws were redefined to eliminate racial discrimination. By the early 1970s, the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic began to enjoy the living standards and lifestyles of the middle class. At the same time, there began to emerge criticisms of the welfare state. Free medical service for all, for instance, was faulted for having created a costly, wasteful and inefficient public health system in which those who could easily afford to pay were being served for free while others had to wait for months to get an appointment; in the meantime, the tax burden got heavier for all. Government benefits, it was argued, should instead focus only on those who genuinely needed them. The criticisms soon coalesced into a comprehensive political-economic agenda, theorized by, for instance, economists like Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, and propagated by politicians like Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Now called ‘Neo-liberalism’, this redesigned ideology of the Capitalist state called for a general shrinking of government and greater reliance on the market for the allocation of resources.
A further development in the 1980s transformed American and British Capitalism in particular. Aided by the digital technology, investors increasingly turned to the burgeoning financial markets for quick profits while major companies found it more lucrative to shift their manufacturing units to Mexico, Southeast Asia and especially China—where labour and land were cheaper. The shift was celebrated as the triumph of globalization—an epithet that seemed to capture the jubilant mood of the decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though jobs in the manufacturing sector were lost, living standards were maintained up by the import of cheap consumer goods, especially from China, and the expansion of the service sector.
The collapse of the financial markets in 2008-09 marked yet another turning point. The crisis was, of course, tided over by the quick injection of government funds into major private companies such as General Motors, as well as by the United States coming to the rescue of the European monetary system, prompted by the collective appeals of a globalized Capitalist class suddenly unified by the menace of looming calamity. Yet the same crisis also brought into the open glaring social inequalities. While ordinary working families suddenly found the value of their properties decimated by the collapse of the housing market, the metropolitan elite continued to prosper. Mounting college fees meant that the traditional avenue of social mobility was no longer available to most of the population; higher education became the preserve of the educated elite.
The reaction took two forms. One was the Occupy Movement—the string of spontaneous protests that broke out in many American cities in 2011-12 on behalf of—it was claimed—the oppressed 99 per cent against the exploiter 1 per cent. It was a leaderless movement, driven by the energy of assembled crowds, which fed into the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in shaking the entrenched structure of the Democratic Party. The other was a movement that chose to recall the historic Boston Tea Party in demanding a smaller government and the reduction of taxes and the public debt. The movement morphed into a raucous Right-Wing faction of the Republican Party to become over time a permanent support base for Donald Trump.
Europe saw even more dramatic eruptions of populist fervour. A popular referendum in Britain in 2016 on whether the country should stay in the European Union or leave witnessed a bitter campaign that left both Conservative and Labour parties split down the middle. A little-known maverick by the name of Nigel Farage swept into the limelight by drumming up a virulent campaign against immigration, high taxes, and calling for the restoration of British sovereignty. Even though the two main parties have managed to hold on to power, albeit with a bewildering succession of short-terms of Prime Ministers, the anti-immigrant sentiment has now become thoroughly mainstream; Nigel Farage, with his new Reform UK Party, is making a serious bid for 10 Downing Street. In France, the election of the centrist Emmanuel Macron in 2016 came along with the eclipse of the traditional Gaullist and Socialist parties that had ruled the country for decades. The challenge to Macron is now coming from the far-Right anti-immigrant party led by Marine le Pen. Anti-immigrant populism swept across several other countries of Western Europe, with far-Right leaders making a bid for the highest positions in government in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark.
There are strong similarities in the social background of those joining the populist upsurge in recent years in Western Europe and the United States. They tend to come from dilapidated industrial regions and the countryside marked by high unemployment and low incomes, where people do not have the education to move into well-paying service sector jobs. The protesters invariably voice a deep resentment against the disparity in incomes, opportunities and future expectations between those who bask in the metropolitan islands of affluence and others like them rotting in the peripheries. They are angered by the presence of new immigrants who, they believe, have taken away their jobs and destroyed the familiar cohesion of their traditional cultures. They hanker for a return to the days of Fordist prosperity and imperial glory. At the level of social organization, the populist upsurge has thoroughly disrupted the hitherto stable system of alternating power between conservative and socialist parties, destroyed the mass trade unions and propelled the meteoric rise of new parties and leaders. There is little doubt that populism has thoroughly shaken the foundations of post-war liberal democracy in Europe and the United States.
For analytical purposes, populism has been elegantly theorized by the Argentine-British scholar, Ernesto Laclau. Neo-liberal reforms have fragmented organized mass social formations into small groups that are the targets of government policy. These groups make a variety of demands on government, some of which are met and others not, in accordance with calculations of economic costs and political benefits. Laclau calls this the democratic logic of difference. Now, if it so happens that a leader or movement is able to string together these varied demands of different groups into a single theme and argue that, although their miseries appear in different forms, they are all in fact equally exploited by the same enemy, there emerges a new political logic. Laclau calls this the populist logic of equivalence. An empty signifier called ‘the people’ is created that can be filled by a variety of equivalent, unfulfilled demands denied by the powerful elite. Populism, in other words, emerges within the democratic space by the rhetorical construction of an internal border between the true people united by their grievances on one side and an enemy of the people—the exploiter elite—on the other.
An important point made by Laclau is that the need to include a wide array of grievances within the same equivalent signifier makes populist demands as well as promises, vague and non-specific. This is not a weakness of populist movements but in fact their strength since it enables the coming together of a heterogeneous population into the cohesive sense of a people. Some populist movements also show an ability to change the composition of demands into a floating signifier such that the definition of the people and its enemy might change with the passage of time. Laclau also argues that a populist movement need not adhere to any particular ideological brand but is free to mix Left-Wing and Right-Wing demands at will in eclectic combinations within its proclaimed chain of equivalence.
To summarize, contemporary populism in Europe and North America follows from a contraction of the state, the dwindling of the old working class, the fragmentation of the old middle class, growing antagonism towards immigrants and the channelling of popular anger against a metropolitan elite. Most such populist movements have worn the cloak of Right-Wing nationalism, often seeking a revival of past imperial grandeur. But in their social policies, they can combine Leftist and Rightist prescriptions with ease. There are Left-Wing populists too, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, who are not anti-immigrant and seek to restore some features of the welfare state. But all these populist movements disrupt or reject the established political parties that have dominated democratic politics in the West since the end of the Second World War.
Before we move on, we should also note the recent rise of Right-Wing populist movements in Eastern Europe. The dismantling of the socialist state has left significant sections of the population, mostly elderly and living in small towns and the countryside, without their earlier protection against illness and old age. While there is much enthusiasm in big cities and among the young about joining Europe and seeking new opportunities in the West, there is a strong cultural and even political attraction elsewhere about the Russian connection. Many do not like the prospect of free migration into the country that may result from joining Europe. The populist movement in Hungary led by Victor Orbán is the most prominent example of Right-Wing populism in Eastern Europe, but there are similar movements of considerable strength in Slovakia, Croatia and other countries.
Finally, I must make a brief mention here of populism in Latin America. The most widely discussed case is, of course, of Peronism in Argentina whose leader Juan Perón was a former military officer who, in the 1950s, led a regime built on the support of syndicalist trade unions and the charismatic image of his wife Eva as a saviour of the poor. Subsequently, Peronism was revived as a Left-Wing populist party under Néstor and Cristina Kirschner, and came to power in the early 2000s. The other well-known Left-Wing populist regime led by a former military officer was in Venezuela where Hugo Chávez was in power from 1998 to his death in 2013. In the same period, Lula da Silva and Evo Morales also led Left-Wing populist regimes in Brazil and Bolivia, respectively. More recent years have witnessed Right-Wing populist movements such as those led by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina.
Populism in India
Populism has emerged in India under very different circumstances. After Congress dominance all across the country ended in 1967, followed by a period of instability, Indira Gandhi re-established Congress supremacy in 1971 with a tightly centralized party under her own control and a direct approach to the people as their leader who would raise them out of poverty with government benefits that would not be purloined by the local elite. Her populism, characterized by a rhetoric of state socialism and rule through a politicized bureaucracy, reached its peak during the Emergency of 1975-77. She set a few trends that were picked up by the many populist regimes which followed in several Indian States in subsequent decades. First, populism in India arose in a context of the expansion, rather than contraction, of the state where governmental activities of law enforcement, economic development, social welfare and surveillance rapidly spread to include virtually the entire population of the country. Second, populist power flowed from a single leader with no alternative leadership allowed to emerge within the ruling party. Third, the leader was projected as a benevolent protector of the poor and the underprivileged. Fourth, while benefit schemes were administered by a politicized bureaucracy, there was no strict adherence to either Leftist or Rightist economic policies since businessmen, landowners and the middle class could not be alienated. Fifth, populist rule had to be legitimized by periodic ratification by the people, as shown by Indira Gandhi having to call for elections at the end of the Emergency in March 1977. Her populism also demonstrated how the enemy of the people could be identified with the leader’s enemies, making it a floating signifier that could change over the years from the Congress old guard to Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement to Khalistani separatists.
The analysis of Indira Gandhi’s populism also allows us to distinguish between the governmental and ideological dimensions of populism. The technique of announcing special benefit programmes for particular groups of voters defined by caste, gender, age, income, occupation, etc., especially as election promises, has now become so ubiquitous that they are no longer distinct features of any regime that can be meaningfully called populist. Indeed, competitive announcements of such benefit schemes are such an inseparable part of Indian elections today that no party can afford to ignore them. Since these involve payments out of government funds which in turn often include money borrowed from institutions as well as the market, they must conform to standards of legality, budgetary constraints and accountability and hence are subject to interventions by financial institutions and the courts. At the same time, the widespread practice of clothing such schemes as election promises has introduced a transactional quality to the vote, involving considerations of whether such promises have been kept or whether one party can match the promises made by the others. This in turn has led to the charge of India’s electoral democracy being reduced to mass clientelism where voters remain in bondage to the political regime on which they depend for government benefits. No major party is exempt from this trend.
Hence, if we are looking for features that distinguish populist politics in India today, we must find them not in governmental policies but in its distinctive ideological orientation. This involves, as explained in Laclau’s theoretical argument, the drawing of an internal border between the people and their enemy by rhetorically establishing an equivalence among all unfulfilled demands of the population as the consequence of the unjust actions of a common oppressor. This rhetorical equivalence could be constructed around an existing solidarity such as a linguistic, caste, ethnic or religious identity. It could also be an imagined entity such as the conflict between the wealthy few and the exploited many, or domiciles and immigrants, or a party long established in power and those left out.
The second key feature of contemporary populist politics in India is the role of the leader who acquires the status of a benevolent sovereign chosen by the people who can wield power, if necessary, by cutting through legal and bureaucratic procedures, to defend the authentic people, promote their well-being and fight their enemies. There have been several such populist regimes in the Indian States, most notably the two Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu, the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, the Rashtriya Janata Dal of Laloo Prasad Yadav and Janata Dal (United) of Nitish Kumar in Bihar, the Telugu Desam Party of NT Rama Rao in Andhra Pradesh, the Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, the Aam Aadmi Party of Arvind Kejriwal in Delhi and others. In a few cases, most notably with the DMK, the populist party has even managed to carry out generational transition from one leader to the next without losing its ability to win elections.
The third feature of these populist movements is that their sole objective is to win the next election and prove their popularity; they have no long-term agenda of social transformation. To this end, they can adopt any policy regardless of its ideological pedigree. It is true, of course, that the DMK as the political wing of the Dravidian movement, with its vigorous anti-Brahmin, anti-Aryan and anti-Hindi campaigns, once even demanded secession from India. Over the years, however, the two Dravidian parties have modified their tactics to fit into the constraints of India’s electoral democracy. Social change in Tamil Nadu has been affected gradually through the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the spread of education and the upward mobility of lower castes.
Populist politics and populist ruling parties are visible in India mainly in the States, largely because of the greater opportunity of establishing solidarities around linguistic and caste identities. Following Indira Gandhi’s death, there was no populist party in power at the Centre. Indeed, the period from 1989 to 2014 saw a succession of coalition governments. Since then, the BJP has ruled with a populist leader as well as the transformative ideology of Hindutva. I will deal with the significance of that interesting combination later in my lecture. But before I do that, I must discuss the contemporary relevance of Fascism.
Fascism
In trying to identify the features and prospects of fascism in our present-day world, it is difficult to avoid the trap of analogical thinking. Alberto Toscano begins his recent book, Late Fascism by reminding his readers of the fallacy of trying to study Fascism today by tallying the points of convergence and divergence with events in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. It is not as if knowledge of those events is irrelevant for our task. After all, that is the set of events that first acquired the name of a political phenomenon called ‘Fascism’ that was larger than a political party of that name which emerged in Italy in 1920. The problem lies in what Sudipta Kaviraj has called ‘the norm of the first instance’, seen most graphically in the Comintern variety of Marxist theory which ‘continuously, unremittingly, obsessively’ built up the normativity of the Bolshevik Revolution ‘with an orchestrated, bureaucratic, exceptionlessness’. As a result, ‘Marxists all over the world looked for their February and their October, their Duma and their Soviets’. The question of Fascism too has been entangled in Marxist circles with the applicability of united front tactics as debated in the Comintern a hundred years ago, as though the first instance must have a decisive role for all time to come.
In order to properly set up a comparison between Fascism and populism, which is our task here, we must first clarify the distinction between the two terms at a conceptual level such that we can evaluate various historical details for their relevance to our exercise. Let me offer here what I think are the relevant features of Fascism, some of which may indeed be shared with populism, but others that make it quite distinct.
First of all, we must dispense with the argument made by Marxists since the 1930s, repeated ad infinitum to this day, that Fascism is a desperate response to some fundamental crisis of Capital accumulation. Even if this may have been true of the Fascist and Nazi regimes in pre-war Europe, it is not true of the USA under Trump or the Right-Wing nationalist surge in Western Europe today. If we spread our net further, there is no particular Capitalist crisis that underlies similar Right-Wing movements in India, the Philippines or Latin America. There is most certainly a relation between Capitalists and Fascism but that relation is more complex, contextual and variable. We will deal with that question in a moment.
An important point to consider is the fact that both the Fascist Party in Italy and the Nazi Party in Germany came to power through a parliamentary process and not by means of armed insurrection or military coup. Should we consider this a necessary feature of Fascism for our analytical exercise? I think so. In 1922, when Leftists and Conservatives were evenly divided in the Italian Parliament with no clear majority on either side, King Victor Emmanuel III, shaken by the precocious antics of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’, installed him as Prime Minister even though only thirty-five out of the 535 members of Parliament belonged to the Fascist Party. The conservatives agreed to join the coalition as the best option to keep the Socialists out of power. Once in power, however, Mussolini proceeded to ban opposition parties, imprison their leaders, smash their organizations and establish a Fascist dictatorship. Similarly, in Germany, the National Socialists were the second largest party in parliament in 1933. President Hindenburg, desperate to keep the Left out of the government, engineered an alliance between the Nazis and the Conservatives and appointed Hitler as Chancellor. Soon enough, Hitler used his position in government to outlaw the opposition and consolidate total power for his party. The historian Robert Paxton points out that ‘the fascist route to power has always passed through cooperation with conservative elites, at least in the cases so far known.’ The ground for alliance was provided by instability or deadlock in coalition formation within the parliamentary system and the willingness of the Fascists to use violence to thwart the Left.
This historical fact allows us to propose that a necessary feature of a Fascist regime is its role as a preventive counter-movement against an apprehended liberal or Leftist capture of the state. This condition rules out any conflation of Fascism with repressive or dictatorial Left-Wing regimes. There are very good reasons to discuss authoritarianism in North Korea or Cuba or Venezuela, or indeed in China, and there may well be similarities with specific features of Fascism such as the banning of the opposition or the intrusive social role of the party. But to insert Socialist dictatorships into the conceptual category of Fascism renders meaningless the historical character of Fascist regimes as we have known them. Fascism is always a Right-Wing ultra-nationalist movement.
In its path to power, the Fascists in Italy offered their services to big landowners in the Po Valley by attacking striking farm labourers and destroying the offices of their Socialist organizers, killing many of them. But businessmen were wary of funding Mussolini until he was installed at the head of the government. In Germany, Capitalists clearly preferred a trustworthy conservative such as Franz von Papen to the erratic Hitler. But after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, they began to contribute generously to the Nazi party. They were amply rewarded by government contracts and, of course, the decimation of the trade unions and the Socialist and Communist parties. Support from Capitalists came after, not before, the political ascendancy of the Fascists. Indeed, the early acts of Fascist violence against Leftist agitators were intended to send a message to Conservative politicians and Capitalists that the Fascists were the only political force with the necessary strength and resolve to deal with disruptive elements in the country. Fascists have sometimes gestured towards Socialism, as with ‘national socialism’ in Germany, but specific steps were taken only against Jewish and foreign businesses.
Ernst Fraenkel spoke many years ago of the dual structure of the state under Fascism. He pointed out that legally constituted authorities such as the civil service and the judiciary continued as before to enforce and adjudicate the laws; recruitment and promotions were carried out according to prescribed rules. But parallel to this ‘normative’ sector, there emerged a ‘prerogative’ sector where there were no rules except the wishes of party leaders and the enthusiasm of party militants. The two sectors coexisted uneasily, with differences having to be papered over by the top leadership, giving Fascist rule a quality of exaggerated legalism blended with massive arbitrary violence. Similarly, Nicos Poulantzas has argued that Fascist regimes were divided into bureaucratic, political and economic power blocs representing different classes and groups.
Disagreements were resolved by the leader. Indeed, it is striking that the Nazi regime never had any designated bodies of collective decision-making. Not just that, no more than three district chiefs of the party were allowed to confer without the Führer’s permission. Further, Toscano points out that even though violence in the prerogative sector was directed against enemies identified as such by the regime, the militant groups themselves remained dispersed, without a single command structure. The decentralized form of Fascist violence gave Fascist militants a sense of participating in the exercise of sovereign power, exhibited their devotion to the cause and boosted their loyalty to the regime.
The role of the leader in a Fascist regime is usually described as charismatic. This is so not simply because the leader’s image is blown up to exaggerated dimensions but because his or her powers are believed to be instinctive, derived from sources beyond the reach of ordinary humans. When differences emerge between sections of the leadership or there is criticism of particular policies, the leader is carefully shielded from those controversies. The leader always represents the unity of the regime with the people, standing above all divisions. In this sense, the Fascist leader is similar to the populist leader. Both are endowed with extraordinary powers that justify the faith people repose in them to deal with problems that other politicians are incapable of solving.
But the comparison also raises an interesting question about the limits of historical analogy. We have seen that a key claim made on behalf of the populist leader is that he or she has been chosen by the people and that choice is periodically ratified through popular elections, even though those elections may not be free or fair. Fascism in Italy and Germany, on the other hand, while it arose within a parliamentary process, dispensed with electoral democracy and established dictatorships. There were other brutal military dictators in the twentieth century such as Franco in Spain, Suharto in Indonesia, Idi Amin in Uganda and Pinochet in Chile whose regimes have been characterized by some as fascist which also did away with parliamentary democracy. Should we hold this feature as an invariant attribute of Fascism? Or is it possible to argue that in more recent times, when even military regimes find it necessary to validate their popular legitimacy by holding elections, whether fair or sham, Fascism need not always become a dictatorship? We will consider this question at length when discussing Trump’s America.
A distinctive feature of Fascist ideology is its celebration of the national culture which it proclaims to be superior to all others. Myths are cultivated depicting a lost golden age when the nation was at the pinnacle of glory. The Nazis spoke nostalgically of the Nordic past as did the Fascists of the Roman Empire. George Mosse has described how the retelling of these mythical pasts fed into the Nazi call for rebirth and recovery, heralding a cultural revolution that would create a bold and dynamic ‘new man’ to replace the materialist, pragmatic and cautious liberal citizen. Mussolini was projected as a revolutionary hero—a project in which several leading poets, philosophers and historians played a part—with a mission to create a new and great nation. In recent times too, we see the invocation of a mythical virile and muscular Ram Rajya in Right-Wing Hindu nationalism in India. In Trump’s America, there is nostalgia for the Fordist era of national prosperity maintained by an accord between big Capital and the working class. But I will soon speak at greater length on current developments.
Speaking of national myths, Alberto Toscano has emphasized the role played by the history of European settler colonialism, slavery and imperial conquests in giving a distinctly racialized tone to Right-Wing nationalism in Europe and the United States today. It nurtured a belief in the inherent racial superiority of white people, even attributing it to a divine dispensation, and hitched it to a civilizational mission that justified European domination over the others. The institution of slavery, especially in the Americas, inculcated the belief that Blacks constituted a sub-human species. European colonialism also gave rise to governance techniques such as racial segregation, everyday racial violence and collective punishment that are now demanded and practised by several Western regimes on their minority and immigrant populations. Many of these themes recur in Right-Wing populist movements in Europe and the United States today.
Populism and Fascism Compared Generally
Let me summarize the main findings in our comparison of populism and Fascism.
First, both emerge within the field of mass electoral politics. While Fascism comes to power with the assistance of traditional conservative politicians, populism disrupts established parties across the spectrum to create mass support for itself. Second, both populism and Fascism create an internal border between the supposedly authentic people and its enemy. Third, both require a charismatic leader chosen by the people. Fourth, in its phase of ascendancy, the Fascist regime allows the existing bureaucratic and judicial institutions to function while creating a parallel authority of arbitrary power. But these parallel authorities, as well as the militant groups that carry out violent acts against the designated enemy, remain dispersed, without any central command structure except the ultimate authority of the leader. Populist regimes often follow the same pattern.
Fifth, populism can be either Left-Wing or Right-Wing, but Fascism is a Right-Wing movement aimed against Leftist and liberal groups. Corporate Capital may coexist with, even profit from, both populist and Fascist regimes, the relation being tactical and contextual. However, Left-Wing populist regimes may impose additional burdens on the corporate sector to finance its welfare programmes, while Right-Wing populism promises general prosperity through rapid economic growth in active collaboration with Capitalists.
Sixth, populism does not have a strategic vision of social transformation. Its politics is largely tactical, aimed at winning the next election. Fascism seeks to replace the liberal constitutional state with the imagined ideal state it believes to be the nation’s destiny. Finally, although elections under a populist regime are not always free and fair, they are nonetheless held periodically because the regime needs to demonstrate its continued popular legitimacy. When electorally defeated, it usually retreats into the opposition, waiting to fight another day. Fascist regimes have in the past turned themselves into full-fledged dictatorships. It is possible that such a regime today or in the future may not altogether dispense with popular elections. But it is unlikely to relinquish power without an armed confrontation.
With these signposts in place, let me turn to a detailed discussion of two contemporary cases–the USA under Trump and India under Modi.
Trump’s USA
During the presidential campaign of 2016, many senior leaders of the Republican Party recognized Trump’s popularity and decided to support him as the candidate likeliest to win the election. Once in office, Trump focused primarily on stopping illegal immigration by building a wall along the border with Mexico. On other matters, the Republican establishment largely managed to restrain him within the bounds of accepted Conservative policies and bureaucratic procedures. The crux came with the 2020 election. When Trump refused to accept the result, alleging widespread fraud, the Republican leaders had to make a choice.
On 6 January 2021, when Vice-President Mike Pence was to formally declare the election result, a large mob consisting of hard-Right Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill, fought the security guards, broke through doorways and windows, and spread mayhem in a bid to prevent Joe Biden from being declared the next President. As it happened, Pence and members of the legislature managed to hide in a safe place. Hundreds of violent agitators were arrested. Pence finally did declare the result. But large sections of the Republican leadership, endorsing the claim that the election had been stolen, refused to condemn the mob violence. It was a watershed moment that marked the decisive capitulation of the Republican Party to the far-Right populist movement led by Trump.
This was demonstrated in the next four years by the ineffective challenges within the Party to Trump’s re-election bid and the falling into line of most of the leadership. In his second term, Trump has been free to choose a team of loyalists totally beholden to him. He no longer feels bound by rules or precedents. It is tempting to characterize his rule today as despotic and idiosyncratic, marked by personal vanity and predispositions. If that were so, we would be justified in believing that Trump’s populism is unsupported by any larger vision of national transformation. The fact is that there are organized forces on the far right of American politics that have worked over the years to construct and articulate various plans to bring down and replace the liberal democratic system. These forces have now come together as the strategic intellectual resource behind the Trump regime.
Laura Field, in her recent study of the MAGA movement, has identified four groups, each of which has contributed a distinct segment to Trump’s agenda for his second term. They constitute the New Right, replacing the Conservatism of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley which stood for social Conservatism, free market economics and anti-Communism. The New Right upholds social Conservatism but demands economic nationalism rather than laissez faire, an isolationist rather than interventionist foreign policy and a robust anti-immigration campaign. It is populist because it claims to be against all elites and stands solely for the true American people. It is against multiracial pluralism.
The first group within the New Right comprises faculty from the Claremont Institute in California and Hillsdale College in Michigan. This group, inspired by the writings of the Conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss and his disciple Harry Jaffa, appeals not to the US Constitution but the first principles of the Declaration of Independence. The most celebrated intervention from this cluster of academics came in the form of Michael Anton’s 2016 essay, ‘The Flight 93 Election’.
Referring to the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on 11 September 2001, in which passengers resisted the hijackers and forced the plane to crash into an open field, it called upon voters to look upon the upcoming Presidential election as a Flight 93 moment: ‘Charge the cockpit or you die.…There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.’ Following the 2020 election, Michael Anton and John Eastman led a group from Claremont in a concerted campaign to delegitimize the result by disputing the vote count in as many polling stations as possible. Eastman also prepared alternative slates of electors who would presumably vote against Biden in the electoral college even if he was the declared winner from their respective States.
The second group consists of political philosophers in the communitarian tradition, some of whom explicitly subscribe to traditional Catholic doctrine. The most influential figure in the group is Patrick Deneen whose book, Why Liberalism Failed (2018) combines social Conservatism and Republicanism with strident anti-liberal and anti-elitist rage, calling the American elite ‘one of the worst of its kind produced in history’. Traditional Conservatives, he says, should stop being polite and accommodative, conquer the public square and defeat the liberal enemy. Deneen has had an important influence on JD Vance. The other important figure is Adrian Vermeule, a Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard immersed in Catholic theology, whose book Common Good Constitutionalism (2022), argues for a strong executive in a strong administrative state. Invoking Carl Schmitt as the visionary of executive power, Vermeule suggests that a strong administrative state discourages the rise of dictators in a democracy. He also advocates the integration rather than separation of the church and state: the government, he says, must secure both earthly and spiritual ends. Common good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy because it sees the law as a paternal and wise teacher who inculcates good habits. Truant subjects must be transformed by the law, against their will if needed. Vermeule’s influence stretches beyond the American New Right and includes Nigel Farage in Britain, Victor Orbán in Hungary and the Polish far-Right Law and Justice Party.
The third gathering of New Right intellectuals is the National Conservatism Conference organized since 2019 by the Edmund Burke Institute set up by Yoram Hazony and Christopher DeMuth. Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), argues that contrary to liberal assumptions, true nationalism seeking an anti-imperialist order of free and independent nations would be a very great good. All universalism and internationalism is imperialist and must be rejected. The European Union, according to him, is German imperialism sustained by the United States. He is also a fervent supporter of Israeli nationalism in its most bellicose form. DeMuth, a traditional Conservative lawyer who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations and was head of the American Enterprise Institute, proclaimed himself a true nationalist to become director of the National Conservatism Conference and bring to it the support of several Conservative think tanks and funding agencies. He declared that liberalism had been replaced in the US by a woke neo-Marxism as the ideology of the elites which must be uprooted.
Finally, there is the hard Right consisting of men like Stephen Bannon, Steven Miller and Richard Spencer. Bannon has an Irish Catholic working-class background, describes himself as an economic nationalist and was chief strategist to Trump in 2016-17. Miller has been a part of Trump’s team since his first term and is the brain behind his anti-immigration policy supposedly designed to stop the carnage caused by criminal gangs and drug dealers posing as refugees. Bannon and Miller authored the law to ban immigration from select Muslim countries in Trump’s first term. Spencer is a white nationalist who wants to establish white European cultural and racial supremacy, and has a deep contempt for democracy.
Although each of these groups brings its own distinct emphasis, they have cohered most effectively in the period leading up to Trump’s re-election bid in 2024 and are now the dominant force in the Republican Party. They have succeeded in turning the debate on the usual conservative issues of small government, traditional family values, crime or immigration into an assault on institutions such as the universities, large corporate houses and the media. A favourite target was critical race theory which, according to Christopher Rufo, author of America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023), ‘has become the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is being weaponized against the American people’.
When the New York Times Magazine published a special issue called ‘The 1619 Project’, taking its name from the year the first African slaves arrived in Virginia, and followed it up with an educational curriculum focusing on the effects of slavery on American society, it became a lightning rod for the New Right. The historian Allen Guelzo said the project reflected the insufficient gratitude of Black people who were now occupying positions of the highest authority: ‘…in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such prestige, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers.’ A day before the elections of 2020, Trump launched the 1776 Convention, declaring critical race theory and the 1619 Project ‘toxic propaganda, ideological poison and a crusade against American history’. The eighteen Conservative academics constituting the 1776 Convention produced its report in two months, calling the new identity politics ‘reverse racism’ and identifying school busing, affirmative action and same-sex marriage as producing ‘new hierarchies’ that were ‘as unjust as the old hierarchies of the antebellum South’.
The battle was then launched against universities, school boards and giant corporate houses. In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference where he announced: ‘The Universities are the Enemy.’ Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, took the lead in outlawing any mention of sexuality in schools. Other States soon followed suit. DeSantis also claimed that American corporations had been taken over by ‘woke capitalism’ spread by the radical Left elite through universities and the media. He targeted in particular Disney World in Florida by changing its tax status. Apparently reversing the earlier Conservative position that political campaign contributions by companies were an inseparable part of freedom of speech, the New Right was now insisting that big business not speak out at all on political matters. Attacking liberal policies of diversity, equity and inclusion in recruitment and promotion policies in universities and corporations, it began to insist on strict adherence to merit-based equality.
In 2022, Kevin Roberts, President of the prestigious Heritage Foundation, pledged allegiance to the National Conservatism Conference. The following year, the Foundation published a document called ‘Project 2025’ with a detailed plan for a thorough overhaul of state and public institutions under a new Republican President. ‘We have two years and one chance to get it right’, announced Roberts. The plan called for the entire executive branch to be placed under direct control of the President, ending the independence of the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission, and replacing career civil servants by Conservative political appointees. It recommended the abolition of the Federal Reserve and a return to the gold standard as well as the replacement of the income tax by a consumption tax. The foreign aid agencies were to be abolished and a suitable tariff policy had to be brought in to achieve balanced trade with major countries. The Environmental Protection Agency must be downsized and regulations on carbon emissions eliminated. On foreign policy, the plan warned against foreign interventions and recommended bilateral rather than multilateral agreements and the pursuit of a foreign policy strictly to protect US national interests. It also proposed the mass deportation of illegal workers, further curtailing birth control and abortion, and maintaining a biblical definition of marriage and family. The Project 2025 plan is clearly being implemented now in Trump’s second term.
Trump’s populist regime has succeeded in winning the support of the Conservative establishment in the United States. Big business may be wary of Trump’s tariff policies and the doctrine of economic nationalism but most corporate leaders have rushed to pledge their allegiance. Unlike other populist regimes, the Trump administration is not merely focused on winning the next election but has a well-laid-out plan to overhaul what it regards as a failed liberal state machinery. It is reinterpreting the US Constitution to claim full Presidential control over the executive branch, dismantling parts of it and replacing the others with its own loyalists. It is also filling up the federal judiciary with Conservative judges. While it has not unleashed an auxiliary force of Party militants to spread violence, it has deployed the regular armed forces in unprecedented ways to coerce and intimidate all domestic opposition. The policy has apparently succeeded in reducing the flow of illegal migrants. As I have pointed out earlier, unlike Fascist regimes of the mid-twentieth century, populist rulers today do need to periodically demonstrate their continued popular support through elections. The evidence so far indicates that while the Trump administration is prepared to make temporary tactical adjustments to its larger strategic objectives in response to public opinion, it is quite unlikely to abandon its transformative plan. By sticking to his tariffs policy despite an unfavourable ruling by the Supreme Court and launching foreign military operations such as the war against Iran without consulting Congress, Trump has shown his willingness to pursue his objectives no matter what the obstacles. The question is: if faced with electoral defeat, will the Trump regime attempt to bend and distort the process to secure a fabricated result? We already have evidence from 2020 that it will not flinch from violence when asked to relinquish power. That is the test that will confirm the Fascist character of Trump’s populism.
Modi’s India
The nationalist movement in India was long divided into a socially conservative Right-Wing located within the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, and a Left-Wing spanning the Congress Left and the Socialist and Communist parties. The initial years after Independence saw a tussle between Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel which ended with the latter’s death in 1950 and Nehru gaining full control of the Congress Party the following year. Nehru inaugurated an official ideology of planned economic development and pluralist secularism. Hindu nationalist opinion then began to cohere around the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and its affiliated organizations. The Hindutva agenda got a massive boost in the 1990s with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Hindu nationalist opinion spread rapidly in northern and western India.
Narendra Modi’s first term in office began with an expectation of pro-business economic reforms to boost large-scale industrial production along the lines of the much-touted Gujarat model. But there was limited success. There were also few signs of an official pursuit of the Hindutva agenda. This changed with the second term. Key elements of the imagined Hindu Rashtra were now sought to be put in place by revising the character of Indian citizenship, reshaping the federal structure, redefining the forms of political representation, changing the legal code, overhauling the structure and content of education and encouraging close ties between the state and Hindu religious institutions. There was a huge surge in the renaming of places, institutions and statutes to remove traces of Muslim and British rule, and stamp them with the insignia of Sanskritized Hindi.
Specifically, the basis of Indian citizenship was decisively shifted from birth as defined in the Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955 to descent from Indian parents or grandparents. An attempt was made in Assam to officially identify illegal migrants from Bangladesh and put them in detention camps pending deportation. It was found that a sizeable part of those illegal migrants were Hindus. The Citizenship Act was then changed in 2019 to declare only non-Muslims from neighbouring countries eligible for refugee status and expedited recognition as citizens. That is to say, religion was introduced for the first time into the definition of Indian citizenship. At the same time, a major blow was delivered on the existing federal structure by annulling Article 370 under which Jammu and Kashmir had been granted a measure of autonomy from the time of its joining the Indian Union. Further, Buddhist-dominated Ladakh was separated and both parts of the erstwhile State were reduced to the rank of Union Territories. On the political front, a campaign was kept up for the so-called ‘double-engine sarkar’, i.e., the same Party in power in both the State and the Centre, which, it was claimed, would ensure better development for the States. What was not mentioned was that it would also reduce political diversity within the federal system. The other campaign was for simultaneous elections at the Centre and the States, ostensibly to reduce the dislocation and expenses caused by frequent elections but effectively to ensure the subordination of local electoral issues to national ones.
In 2023, the century-and-a-half old Penal Code, Criminal (Procedure) Code and Evidence Act were replaced by new ones bearing sonorous Sanskrit names but retaining most of the controversial colonial provisions such as sedition and preventive detention, indeed in some cases making them even more stringent. Recognizing the difficulties in replacing the present religion-based personal laws with a uniform civil code for the whole country, the attempt is now on to legislate such codes at the State level: several BJP-ruled States have taken the lead in this effort. In the field of education, there is a massive push for the privatization of higher education along with an emphasis on so-called Indian knowledge systems at every level and in every field, including science and mathematics. All gestures towards the separation of the state from religion have been abandoned. Indeed, there is state support and promotion of Hindu religious establishments and observances on an unprecedented scale. A significant presence is that of the Mahant of the Gorakhnath Math, an outspoken defender of Sanatan Dharma, as the all-powerful Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Another evocative event was the much-publicized ground-breaking ceremony in 2020, repeated at the inauguration in 2024, of the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya by Narendra Modi, much like a Hindu monarch of the past. In general, the thrust of social policy is towards an emphasis on Hindu unity, minimizing caste and sectarian differences and discouraging criticism of the Hindu social system as hierarchical or unequal.
In pursuing its broader strategic vision of establishing Hindu Rashtra, the BJP under Modi has taken a lesson from Indira Gandhi’s ultimately futile use of Emergency powers. It has chosen to keep the existing constitutional institutions intact but push their practices towards a centralized Presidential-type system, fill them with its loyal personnel, use central law enforcement and tax agencies to harass the regime’s critics and guarantee continued electoral success. As a result, it has forced the opposition into competitive populism in which it is compelled to choose between soft and hard Hindutva, effectively burying the older idea of pluralist secularism. The BJP has deployed its auxiliary forces to act violently against minorities and the opposition without fear of legal punishment. These groups remain dispersed, act without apparent coordination and seek praise from their leaders for their violent acts. The ruse of ‘causing hurt to Hindu sentiments’ is used indiscriminately to prohibit Muslims and Christians from performing their rituals, observing their festivals and selling and eating the food of their choice. Left-liberals, Marxists and so-called ‘urban Naxals’ are targeted as the principal intellectual force behind all opposition to Hindutva. Even though the promised pro-business reforms have come in dribs and drabs and there is no let-up in populist spending, Capitalist support for the Modi regime has not wavered. There have been accusations of certain crony Capitalists being specially favoured over others but this does not appear to have resulted in any cracks in class solidarity.
The question is: if faced with an election defeat at the Centre, will the Modi regime relinquish power without a fight that stretches beyond constitutional rules? We know that when the BJP under Modi and Amit Shah has lost power in the States, it has often resorted to splitting other parties, engineering defections, dishing out massive quantities of money and encouraging partisan interventions by the governor. When it lost its majority in the Parliament in 2024, it took in new coalition partners but continued with its earlier policies as if nothing had changed. What will it do if it loses once more and retaining power with coalition partners is not possible? The weakness and disunity of the opposition forces have not managed to pose that decisive question. While the BJP under Modi is clearly following a strategic vision of political transformation that goes well beyond populism, its Fascist component has not yet been put to the test.
Conclusion
Before I end, I wish to remember Nikhil Chakravartty once more. As I wrote this lecture in the last few weeks, I often imagined what he might have said about what’s going on today in the world and in this country. I am sure he would have shuddered at the many similarities with the Fascism he had himself witnessed in his youth. The barbarity of the violence unleashed on the people of Gaza would have reminded him of the horrors of the Second World War. He would have been shocked at the unfolding of a lawless world where naked power rules and might is right. I also recall that the occasion of my only meeting with him was a campaign for the release of political prisoners. I know what he would have said about the sixteen activists arrested on trumped-up charges in the Bhima Koregaon case, one of whom—the ailing Stan Swamy—dying in prison for lack of medical treatment. He would have reacted equally angrily at the cowardice of the members of the judiciary who dare not apply their own avowed principle of bail as the rule and not the exception because the Government has declared, without a shred of evidence, that Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam are terrorist masterminds out to overthrow the Indian state. Chakravartty, I dare say, did not have an exaggerated opinion about the power of the pen: he had seen too much of the perversion and obtuseness of state machinery. But, nonetheless, he did believe in the duty of the conscientious observer of politics to speak truth to power. That, I suggest, is what we must resolve to do in these dark times.
Partha Chatterjee is Indian political theorist, renowned for his work on nationalism, postcolonial theory, and the critique of modern state formations. He is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and a founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective. He also serves as an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS Kolkata).