An interesting segment from Al Jazeera TV about the “Internet Hindus.” The Internet Hindus are the Hindutvadi Hindu nationalist fascist Indians who have flooded the Internet in the past few years. Let us think for a minute about who these people are. Only 6% of Indians even has a computer. And how many of those are on the Net. As you can see, almost all Indians on the Net will be the upper class and the upper middle class, the richest of India, the bourgeois and ruling class sector. Hence, these folks are not representative of India as a whole.
The top 6% of Indians are obviously almost all high caste Hindus. So it follows that if almost all Internet Indians are Hindutvadis in one form or another, this shows that Hindutvadi is an ideology of the Hindu ruling class and bourgeois, of the Hindu ruling class and upper middle class. It is also apparently an ideology which has extremely high support among high caste Hindus. Is it mostly a high caste movement? This is hard to say, as surveys are hard to come by. But almost all Hindutvadis on the Net are high caste Hindus for sure.
Hence, this is no populist or working class movement of the people. It’s an elite movement of the bourgeois. Bourgeois revolutionary nationalist movements that attack minorities and are predicated on volkisch nationalism are properly seen as fascist movements. Note how Hindutvadis hate “internationalists,” “international movements,” and how they call all of their opponents Communists and Marxists. They also accuse their “Marxist” opponents of being anti-national or opposed to the country. Ringing any bells now? Sounds like fascism, right? Even sounds like Nazism.
Really, most ethnic nationalist movements are fascist, quasi-fascist or nearly fascist in some sense. The Nazis were nothing special. They were just a typical ethnic nationalist fascist movement, though granted they were quite a bit more bloodthirsty, genocidal and imperialist than most of them.
The lesson of the Nazis is that the Nazi germ is in all fascist movements. All fascist movements are potentially genocidal against the “enemies of the nation,” the internal enemies, usually coded as citizens who are not really members of the nation and the “anti-national” Left which seeks to promote solidarity with other nations and sanity in international relations and offers a critique of society, the state and even the nation. These are the “traitors” in any fascist movement, and their fate in any fascist country is tenuous at best.
That the vast majority of the Hindu upper class and upper middle class and large segments of the Hindu middle class has gone over to an overtly fascist ideology is very troubling.
