Modi’s India Has Now Entered a New Stage

It represents a moment of panic and anxiety in the BJP-RSS combine

Arjun Appadurai

The recent calls by members of the BJP-RSS combine, in Haridwar and in Delhi, for the large-scale elimination of Muslims, indicate that the dog whistle of Islamophobia has now become a foghorn. The silence of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah about these unprecedented calls for full-scale armed war against Muslims can be read in one of two ways: as signs of their sense of impunity and confidence, or as signs of their sense of precarity and insecurity. I make a case here for the latter argument.

My argument is not the familiar instrumentalist argument about the Uttar- Pradesh elections and the BJP’s concern about being humiliated in its sacred heartland. I believe we are witnessing what I call genocidalism, which stems from a deeper logic which afflicts all xenophobic nationalisms. This logic is connected to the relationship between nationalism and violence, and to what Marx and many Marxists identify as “the treadmill effect”.I have argued elsewhere that the relationship between nationalism andviolence is both intimate and two-way. We are accustomed to thinking thatnationalism can lead people to kill and die in the name of the nation. When nationalism becomes extreme, its believers also become extreme in theirreadiness to kill or die for the nation.

With the arrival of the modern formula of the nation-state, group violence takes on a new function, which is to provide the fuel for the very idea of attachment to the nation. The main place in which we can see this is in the formation of modern militaries, which use training, rehearsals and actual warfare to produce the sense of attachment to the fiction and abstraction of the nation. Loyalty to the nation is hard to produce, since the nation is, for most people, abstract, fictive and remote. Dying and killing for the nation are sure ways to produce loyalty for such an abstraction. These acts often draw on the vocabulary of honour, sacrifice and purity which are deeply woven into all nationalisms.

The recent theatrical displays by Modi and his acolytes in sites such as Varanasi, are also ways of renewing the always finite supply of sacred fuel for the machinery of nationalism. So too is the effort to rebuild central Delhi, to rewrite history in textbooks, social media and official propaganda, and to brutally subordinate subaltern populations, such as those of Kashmir. In all the places in which the Indian armed forces are involved in violence against Indian populations (in the tribal belt, in Maoist areas, in the North-East, in every single border state), violence has a utilitarian function (the imposition of statesponsored order) but it also has a spectacular or theatrical function, which is to ensure that nationalism is not forced to go on life-support.

We can look at what I call genocidalism in the same way as these thinkers, especially Marx, looked at the treadmill effect in capitalism. Genocidalism is that moment in the history of genocide inwhich the production of violence has to be massively ratcheted up to keep up the minimal required level of nationalism. Genocidalism, like capitalism, is systemic, totalising and extractive. It demands total attention, commitment and participation from the largest possible number of people. Like capitalism, genocidalism mobilises and exploits a large number of workers who are tasked to keep up the daily production of violence, and benefits a small class of entrepreneurs and managers who envision, design and benefit from the treadmill of violence and can

The Haridwar Sansad of December, in this regard, offers a strong parallel with the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when the Final Solution was made into official Nazi policy. The fact that this and subsequent calls to general war against Muslims were organised by men and women in saffron makes a good deal of sense, since the sadhu-akhada side of the BJP-RSS machine has been steadily playing the role of outfits like the Waffen- SS under the Nazis, and has emerged as the tip of the spear consisting of various thugs, mobs and militias seeking a centralised leadership. Though some FIRs have recently been filed against the key figures in these events, the fact that both Modi and Shah have been silent about these remarkable public statements is a sobering index of the official legitimacy of genocidalism in India today.

If I am right that the new genocidaxism represent a moment of panic and anxiety at the highest levels of the BJP-RSS machine, and not a moment of complacency or gloating, it also reminds us that the Indian drama today has two major elements which are not defined or exhausted by the aim of militant Hindutva to turn Muslims into India’s social dead. The anxiety comes from two other major forces which have shown that they are not part of the Hindutva consensus: