This text is adapted from the 2025 Raosaheb Kasabe Distinguished Lecture on History organised by the Paine Phule Foundation.
INDIA HAS BEEN central to my work on fascism. Both my books on fascism, How Fascism Works and Erasing History, use India as a primary example.
India, the structure of India, is somewhat different. No two fascist situations are the same. In India, you have a long-time structure of a caste system.
Fascism in Western societies is based on race. There is of course now a lengthy 20th-century and 21st-century literature on the relationship between caste and race. But in a classic example of scapegoating, India has used its Muslim minority as a way to bind together the different castes in support of what looks to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing that is either starting now or at least threatened. The theorist René Girard argued that a political community is created by a scapegoat, that you need to make an innocent scapegoat to bind together otherwise different groups. So this is a different structure than in European fascism.