Nazi imagination and practices of grotesque brutality are formative to Hindu nationalism. “Volksgemeinschaft” or national community was, for Nazis, the ideal society to be achieved through mass movement, statecraft, thieving, violence, race experiments, and Holocaust. The “Other” was its target.

M.S. Golwalkar, an early ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), professed deep admiration for the Nazis. An inspiration to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Golwalkar, noted: “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.” Golwalkar continued that non-Hindus in India “may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges… not even citizen’s rights”.

Since their second electoral victory in 2019, the Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party-led national government has prioritised the actualisation of Akhand Bharat (“undivided India”), the mythologised once-future homeland of Hindu nationalists. Across India, experiments to forge the “Hindu national community” are predicated on the breakage of minoritised Muslims and Christians, and Adivasis and Dalits. Across the historically fraught political construct termed the “northeast”, the Hindutva movement attacks Muslim citizenship while igniting the decimation of indigeneity and the Christian community. In Kashmir, it furthers coloniality through land occupation to potentially reconstitute demographics.

Since 2022, racist discourse and monstrous violence by Hindu nationalists have spun out of control. Swarms of Hindu militias are storming village after town, supported by Hindu nationalist leaders and central and state governments, the silence of upper class-caste Hindus, and the complicity of various courts, institutions, and state forces. In 2023, the savagery reached a crescendo. UAPA. Mobs. Bombs. Bulldozers… Haryana. Uttar Pradesh. Delhi. Rajasthan. Jharkhand. Assam. Kashmir. Manipur…

This story was originally published in progressive.internationa.com. Read the full story here