What is Fascist Communalism?
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Answer:
The struggle against fascism can be successful only as we understand how it presses into service the past to serve the aims of present-day reaction. Recent events in India show how a failure to do so results in either of two equally dangerous errors on the part of the left. One wing, sometimes in a straightforward way, sometimes decked out with currently fashionable “post-Marxian” theories, attempts to analyse the fascists as a “New Right” that can be combatted only by creating an alternative indigenous discourse, shifting away from “class” to progressive nationalism, liberal trends in Hinduism and Islam, subalternity, etc. The other wing, in the name of a supposed leftist purity, classifies all rightwing or bourgeois currents as authoritarian, fascist, etc., in a totally indiscriminate way, thereby obscuring the specific nature of the fascist movement.
Communalism is the descularisation of both public order and society. From birth, it has been a political current. Though it was promoted by the British colonial rulers due to their own reasons, they were not its sole creators, as Indians took it up consciously as a political programme.