The two sides had clashed recently in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the proposed removal of the statue of a Confederate General, who was on the side of the slave owners.

In India, too, many of the supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been gladdened by his muted criticism of the outgoing vice-president Hamid Ansari for having said that the Muslims are feeling insecure.

In his farewell speech, Modi implied that Ansari’s postings as a diplomat in the Islamic West Asian countries and his association with the minority commission and Aligarh Muslim university had conditioned his mind in such a way as to make him incapable of taking a non-partisan view. But now that Ansari was no longer bound by official duties, the prime minister said that he could air his thoughts more freely.

Just as the white neo-Nazis in America have been emboldened by Trump’s victory since they consider him to be one of their own, the Hindu Right has been encouraged by the BJP’s success since they equate it with the end of 1,200 years of darkness under the Mughal and British rule and the beginning of Hindu raj.

However, since constitutional governance gets in the ways of both the groups to be more proactive, they have to take recourse mainly to occasional acts of violence, such as the attacks on non-whites, including Indians, in the US and on Muslims in India on the suspicion of eating beef as well on those who refuse to chant the slogans chosen by the Hindu Right as emblems of patriotism like Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata ki Jai.

The essence of both the Hindu extremists and the white supremacists is the central tenet of fascism, theocracy and Zionism, which is to designate the majority as the Chosen People whose rights and sentiments should have precedence over those of the minorities. The modern concept, therefore, that the law of land is equally applicable to all is not acceptable to the Chosen People.

Needless to say, in India these People are the Hindus and in America, the whites. An additional feature of the argument for granting a special status to the Hindus is the claim by their champions that they are the original inhabitants of India and are not outsiders, the so-called Vedic Aryans, who came into India from Iran and southern Russia in 1500 B.C. Moreover, according to this view, the supposedly non-Aryan Indus Valley Civilization of city-dwellers of 3000 B.C. was also associated with the pastoral and nomadic Vedic Aryans.

The need for this emphasis on being the sons of the soil is to set the native Hindus against the invading Muslims. Hence, the saffron icon, V.D.Savarkar’s categorization of Hindus being the only “true” Indians because both their pitribhu (fatherland) and punyabhu (holy land) are in India unlike the Muslims and Christians who may be born in India, but their holy lands are in Mecca or Rome.

To establish the credentials of Hindus as the true Indians, the Hindutva camp describes the Adivasis – the word means original inhabitants – as vanavasis or forest dwellers so that there is no confusion about the status of the Chosen People.

It is a view, however, which is not accepted by a large section of people, including the Adivasis, one of whose representatives, Jaipal Singh Munda, told the Constituent Assembly on December 16, 1946, “I rise to speak on behalf of millions of unknown hordes – yet very important – of unrecognized warriors of freedom, the original people of India who have variously been known as backward tribes, primitive tribes, criminal tribes and everything else. Sir, I am proud to be a Jungli, that is the name by which we are known … “

Sixteen years later, the Tamil leader, C.N. Annadurai, spoke in a similar vein in the Rajya Sabha: “I claim, sir, to come from a country, a part of India now, but which I think is of a different stock, not necessarily antagonistic. I belong to the Dravidian stock. I am proud to call myself a Dravidian”.

As is obvious, Indian diversity has been a roadblock to the proponents of a Hindu rashtra. In America, too, constitutionalism and liberal beliefs have kept the white supremacists at bay. The latter are also at a disadvantage because they cannot claim, like the Hindu Right, that they are America’s original inhabitants since they are all immigrants from Europe who have displaced the Native Americans.

But that hasn’t stopped the white fascists from voicing their wish to “take” their country back from the liberals, as they said in Charlottesville. For both the white Christians in the US and the brown Hindus in India, it is a losing battle because the forces of modernism which emphasize the rule of law are too strong to be overthrown. (IPA Service)