In the last 10 years of the Modi regime, it can be observed that all the constitutional bodies such as the Judiciary, Election Commission, Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate etc. are being made to do the biddings of the Hindutva forces. The ongoing elections expose the level of control that the RSS-BJP has gained over these institutions. Extortions are made with the threat of investigation from the Enforcement Directorate and used as a tool to freeze the opposition party’s bank accounts. The Judiciary has become blind to the atrocities committed on the people and is being used to imprison people under the draconian UAPA and sedition laws. Opposition party chief ministers such as Arvind Kejriwal and Hemant Soren were arrested immediately before the elections on corruption cases. However, many politicians accused of corruption have now switched over to the BJP. With BJP’s ‘washing machine’ in action, they have been cleared of all charges by these very agencies. Recently, Karnataka has been rocked by the exposure of thousands of sexual atrocities committed by Prajwal Revanna, grandson of HD Devegowda, sitting MP from JDS and current MP candidate backed by Modi. Law enforcement agencies are yet to take any concrete action against him as he roams scot-free in Germany whereas the threat of using ED still looms large over the heads of multiple leaders of the opposition showing a clear contradiction even within ruling classes whose interests most of these opposition bourgeois parties represent. This intense centralisation of power is characteristic of a fascist rule.
To polarise the electorate, hate speeches were made rampantly, all the way from the PM to the MP candidates to lower level cadres of the BJP, causing utter communal disharmony. The Election Commission turned a blind eye, even ‘declining comment’ on Modi’s inflammatory speech despite hundreds of complaints. In Surat and Indore, BJP has already won two seats in the absence of any opposition. In Surat particularly, Congress candidate Nilesh Kumbhani’s nomination was rejected by the EC on April 21 after three of his proposers submitted affidavits to the Surat district election officer claiming that the signatures on the document were not theirs. These show a glimpse of future elections in India. Instances of EVM malfunctions and removal of names of minority candidates including women are being heard in hundreds. Today the Modi Government is in such a position where it cannot even maintain the farce of these bourgeois institutions and has pushed people into disillusionment with the state machinery more than ever. Despite Modi’s tall claims of ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikaas’, people’s anger has come forth in the form of election boycotts in parts of Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka.
Any state that is bourgeois in essence oscillates in form between democratic and fascist phases depending on the crisis of capitalism. India, being an economy dependent on the Western imperialist powers, shows such character according to their economic crisis. The
difference arises in the scraps of democracy that allow the working class to organise openly, hold demonstrations, and retain some of their hard-earned rights. It is also pertinent to note that both bourgeois democracy and fascism lie within the ambit of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and thus any little right given to the broad working class will be snatched away even at the slightest threat of the working class seizing political power.
The oppression across the world that is seen today has thus become more brazen with the worsening of the crisis of US imperialism. The US is now intensifying wars to cope with this crisis and is selling more and more arms to Ukraine and Israel. The neoliberal policies are tightened in their homeground and elsewhere such as the three farm laws, the four labour codes and the National Education Policy in India. Through these laws, the Indian market is freed up for the US imperialists to contain the crisis of the imperialist countries at the cost of the super-exploitation of people in India.
The BJP serves the right amount of concoction of neoliberal forces and Hindutva majoritarianism, where imperialist neoliberal policies can be pushed onto the people of India while minorities get reduced to second-class citizens. This makes BJP-RSS, the most imperialist friendly and hence, backed by the Indian big bourgeoisie, like Ambani and Adani, enabling it to be the tool to extract cheap labour and plunder the natural resources from Ladakh to Vizhingam.
