The incipient, creeping fascism that results has been groomed by our "democratic" institutions. Everything flirts with it -- parliament, the press, the police and the administration. If any institution (including the Supreme Court) exercises unfettered, unaccountable power, the erosion of civil liberties, the spread of day-to-day injustices and fascism will not be far behind. Fighting religious fascism means winning back minds and hearts. It means demanding accountability from public institutions and listening to the powerless. It means fighting dispossession and the everyday violence of poverty. It means not allowing newspapers and TV to be hijacked by spurious passions and staged theatrics designed to divert attention from everything else. It does not mean banning communally minded madrassas, but rather working toward the day when they are voluntarily abandoned.
Like termites, India's Hindu fascists have weakened the foundations of our constitution, parliament and the courts -- the backbone of every democracy. But it's futile to blame politicians and demand from them a morality of which they are incapable. If India's politicians let us down, it is because we allowed it.
Our fascists didn't create today's grievances. Every strategy for real social change and greater social justice -- land reform, education, public health, equitable distribution of natural resources -- was cunningly scuttled by those castes and people with a stranglehold on politics. Fascist Hindus seized upon these grievances, mobilizing people by using the lowest common denominator -- religion. People who lost control of their lives, people uprooted from home and community, stripped of culture and language, are made to feel proud of something. Not of something they achieved, but of something they happen to be. Or, more accurately, something they happen not to be.
Unfortunately, no quick fix exists. Fascism can be defeated only if those outraged by it commit themselves to social justice with an intensity that equals their indignation. If we do not, we ordinary Indians will find ourselves -- like the ordinary citizens of Hitler's Germany -- unable to look our children in the eye because of our shame of what we allowed to happen.
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, lives in New Delhi.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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