Is the govt authoritarian or fascist? Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat choose their own words

If the present situation is allowed to progress, “it can lead up” to the establishment of fascism, he said.

Yechury’s comments came days after his predecessor Prakash Karat, in an article in The Indian Express, argued that conditions are not present in India for a fascist regime to be established. He had contended that the Narendra Modi government is exhibiting “authoritarianism” and not “fascism”.

“In India today, neither has fascism been established, nor are the conditions present — in political, economic and class terms – for a fascist regime to be established,” Karat had argued. India, he had said, confronts the advance of an authoritarianism that is fuelled by a potent mix of neo-liberalism and communalism.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club Thursday, Yechury differed slightly. While he agreed that India is not witnessing fascism of the Adolf Hitler variety, he argued, “but if this situation is allowed to progress, then it can lead up to that”.

Referring to the attacks on Dalits and minorities and rise in cow vigilantism, he said, “The whole social atmosphere in the country is being very sharply polarised and divided. That is completely the antithesis of the entire concept of the idea of India… where it was not Indian nationalism but Indian nationhood. You can have a Bengali nationalism, you can have a Telugu nationalism, you can have a Malayali nationalism, all of them converging into a nationhood that is India. And that consciousness is actually getting dissipated.”

Asked about Karat’s analysis, he said, “Most of these issues are already settled in the party. The point is that as far as fascism is concerned, we are very clear what we have in India today is not fascism of the variety of what we had seen in the Germany of the 1930s.

But if this situation is allowed to progress, then it can lead up to that. The point is to stop that from happening, for the sake of India and its people.”