'Opposing Extremist Ideologies use similar tactics to retain power': Understanding Maharashtra Politics

 

NDA v UPA: Close encounters with facts

Minhaz Merchant in Times of India

Which government – UPA or NDA – has been better for India’s economic and social indicators? Dismiss the rhetoric and stick to the facts. In this analysis, I’ve chosen 10 key parameters. They cover both economic and social criteria.

1.GDP growth: Average GDP growth in 1998-2004 (NDA) was 6% a year. Average annual GDP growth in 2004-13 (UPA), up to June 30, 2013, was 7.9%.

Caveat 1: The Vajpayee-led NDA battled US-led economic sanctions following the Pokhran-II nuclear test in May 1998. It faced a short but expensive Kargil war in 1999 and the dotcom bust in 2000. When it took office, it had the lag effect of the East Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 to contend with.

Caveat 2: The UPA government, in contrast, benefitted from the economic momentum of the high (8.1%) GDP growth rate of 2003-04 – the NDA government’s final year – and rode that wave. The global liquidity bubble in 2004-08 bouyed foreign mflows, helping UPA-I achieve a high GDP growth rate in its first term. The Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008 did hurt the Indian economy but the ensuing US Federal Reserve asset buying programme attracted a steady flow of near-zero interest dollars into India from 2009.

Despite these caveats, the UPA government’s average annual GDP growth rate of 7.9% in 2004-13 clearly scores over the NDA government’s average annual growth rate of 6% (though high inflation boosted the former significantly). First strike to UPA.

2. Current Account Deficit:

2004:  (+) $7.36 billion (surplus).

2013: (-) $80 billion.

The winner here is clearly NDA. It ran a current account surplus in 2002, 2003 and 2004. Under UPA this dipped into deficit from 2006 and has spun downwards since.

3. Trade deficit:

2004: (-) $13.16 billion.

2013: (-) $180 billion.

Again, advantage NDA.

4. Fiscal deficit:

2004: 4.7% of GDP.

2013: 4.8% of GDP.

Not much to choose between the two.

Caveat: This extract from the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) report, published in 2010, explains why and when the UPA government’s fiscal defict began to spiral out of control.

“The central budget in 2008–2009, announced in February 2008, seemed to continue the progress towards FRBM targets by showing a low fiscal deficit of 2.5% of GDP. However, the 2008–2009 budget quite clearly made inadequate allowances for rural schemes like the farm loan waiver and the expansion of social security schemes under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), the Sixth Pay Commission award and subsidies for food, fertilizer, and petroleum.”

“These together pushed up the fiscal deficit sharply to higher levels. There were also off-budget items like the issue of oil and fertilizer bonds, which should be added to give a true picture of fiscal deficit in 2008–2009. The fiscal deficit shot up to 8.9% of GDP (10.7% including off-budget bonds) against 5.0% in 2007–2008 and the primary surplus turned into a deficit of 3.5% of GDP.

“The huge increase in public expenditure in 2008–2009 of 31.2% that followed a 27.4% increase in 2007–2008 was driven by the electoral cycle with parliamentary elections scheduled within a year of the announcement of the budget.”

The recent announcement of the Seventh Pay Commission comes again, not unexpectedly, at the end of an electoral cycle.

5. Inflation:

1998-2004: 5%.

2004-2013: 9% (Both figures are averaged out over their respective tenures).

Advantage again to NDA. Inflation under NDA was on average half that under UPA, leading to the RBI’s controversial tight money policy, high interest rates and rising EMIs.

6. External Debt:

March 2004: $111.6 billion.

March 2013: $390 billion.

The UPA suffers badly in this comparision, a result of lack of confidence in India’s economy and currency following retrospective tax legislation and other regressive policies, especially during UPA-2.

7. Jobs:

1999-2004:  60 million new jobs created.

2004-11: 14.6 million jobs created.

Clearly, the UPA’s big failure has been jobless growth – a bad electoral omen.

8. Rupee:

1998-2004: Variation: Rs. 39 to 49 per $.

2004-13: Variation: Rs. 39 to 68 per $.

(Rupee rose from 40-plus to 39 between October 2007 and April 2008.)

The NDA government’s economic and fiscal policies, despite the various crises of 1998-2000 pointed out earlier, evoked more  global confidence, leading to a relatively stable rupee (Rs. 10 variation) compared to the Rs. 29 variation during UPA’s tenure.

9. HDI:

2004: India was ranked 123^rd globally on the human development index (HDI) in 2004, with a score of 0.453.

2013: India has slipped 13 places to 136^th globally on the HDI in 2013 with a score of 0.554.

10. Subsidies:

2004: Rs. 44,327 crore.

2013: Rs. 2,31,584 crore.

Here again, profligate welfarism, as the ADBI report quoted earlier shows, has led to a rising subsidy bill. Worse, a significant amount is siphoned off by a corrupt nexus of politicians, officials and middlemen.

Conclusion: UPA scores above NDA on one of the 10 parameters (GDP growth), is level on one other parameter (fiscal deficit) while NDA does better than UPA on the remaining eight parameters.

The next time Finance Minister P. Chidambaram wishes to stage an encounter with facts, he would do well to be aware of those facts.

Sources: Economic Survey of India, UNDP, IMF, Planning Commission of India.

---------------------

Gujarat vs Bihar: settling the development debate

Minhaz Merchant in Times of India
02 August 2013,

A rational analysis of the “Gujarat and Bihar models” of development must not mix apples with oranges. Critics put India’s 35 states and union territories – big and tiny – in the same empirical basket. 

But comparing, for example, Goa’s indices with Uttar Pradesh’s is misleading on account of size, population and demographics.    

A more logical way to address the Gujarat vs. Bihar development model debate is to compare the indices of India’s 10 largest states (by population) and rank them accordingly.   

All data is from the Planning Commission of India except population data which is from the 2011 census, education data which is collated from published sources, and city GDP data which is drawn from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). 

In this study, I have chosen the following indices:

1. Per capita income;
2. Human Development Index (HDI);
3. Poverty levels;
4. Education.  

Taken together, ranking India’s 10 largest states by population across these four parameters will give us a good idea of where each state stands on income, malnutrition and social infrastructure.   

Start with the 10 largest states in descending order of population: 

State               Population (2011 census)

1. Uttar Pradesh: 199 million
2. Maharashtra: 112 million
3. Bihar: 104 million
4. West Bengal: 91 million
5. Andhra Pradesh: 85 million
6. Madhya Pradesh: 73 million
7. Tamil Nadu: 72 million
8. Rajasthan: 69 million
9. Karnataka: 61 million
10. Gujarat: 60 million 

Now rank these 10 states by per capita income – a critical indicator of prosperity.  

State            Per capita income (FY 2012)

1. Maharashtra: Rs. 1,01,314
2. Gujarat: Rs. 89,668
3. Tamil Nadu: Rs. 84,496
4. Karnataka: Rs. 69,055
5. Andhra Pradesh: Rs. 68,970
6. West Bengal: Rs. 55,222
7. Rajasthan: Rs. 53,735
8. Madhya Pradesh: Rs. 37,994
9. Uttar Pradesh: Rs. 30,051
10. Bihar: Rs. 22,691

All-India: Rs. 61,564  

Maharashtra ranks no. 1, Gujarat no. 2 and Tamil Nadu no. 3. But Maharashtra has an unfair advantage because Mumbai, India’s wealthiest city, increases its average per capita income significantly. Let’s compute the precise impact.  

The GDPs of India’s richest cities are: 

City GDPs (PPP)                                  

1. Mumbai: $209 billion                          
2. Delhi: $167 billion
3. Kolkata: $150 billion                           
4. Bangalore: $84 billion
5. Hyderabad: $74 billion                                   
6. Chennai: $66 billion
7. Ahmedabad: $52 billion                      
8. Pune: $47 billion                         

 (PPP: Purchasing Power Parity)  

If we exclude Mumbai’s $209 billion GDP from Maharashtra’s GDP (adjusting PPP GDP for exchange rate nominal GDP to align with Planning Commission figures) but keep Pune (whose $47-billion GDP is not dissimilar to the GDP of the capitals of other key states), Maharashtra’s per capita income falls from Rs. 1,01,314 to around Rs. 78,000.  

So without Mumbai (but including Pune), Maharashtra would slip to no. 3 in our per capita income chart. Gujarat would move up to no. 1, Tamil Nadu to no. 2. Bihar, with per capita income of Rs. 22,691, would stay at no. 10.  

As Rahul Sachitanand wrote in The Economic Times on August 1, 2013: “In the five years before Modi took charge, (Gujarat's) average growth in GDP was 2.8%. Under him, between 2002-03 and 2011-12, it was 10.3%. Only three small states – Sikkim, Uttarakhand  and Delhi – have grown faster. Gujarat is ahead of the national average (7.9%), as well as the two states it is pitted against in today’s discourse, Bihar (8.4%) and Madhya Pradesh (7.1%). It has leapfrogged Maharashtra to lead in factory output, grown well in agriculture, and been a leader in electricity reform and the spread of irrigation.”  

Sachitanand goes on to point out, rightly, that Gujarat "has struggled to engineer similar breakouts in its social indicators – women, health, education, poverty, wages." 

Turn now, therefore, to our second criterion – Human Development Index (HDI). 

State             HDI (2011)

1. Maharashtra: .572
2. Tamil Nadu: .570
3. Gujarat: .527
4. Karnataka: .519
5. West Bengal: .492
6. Andhra Pradesh: .473 
7. Rajasthan: .434
8. Uttar Pradesh: .380
9. Madhya Pradesh: .375
10. Bihar: .367

All-India HDI: .467 

HDI is a composite of life expectancy, education and income indices. It was created in 1990 by Amartya Sen and Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq. Life expectancy is correlated to social indicators such as healthcare, malnutrition, infant mortality, etc.  

Maharashtra emerges as no. 1, Tamil Nadu no. 2 and Gujarat no. 3. HDI is also correlated (though not linearly) to prosperity. Not surprisingly, therefore, these three states top the per capita income charts as well. Clearly, however, despite being ranked third among India’s 10 largest states on HDI, Gujarat needs to improve further. Bihar though is ranked last again and needs to do a lot more.

                                                          * * *

Gujarat also needs to increase its expenditure on education. It currently spends only 13.9% of total expenditure on education and is ranked a low eighth among India’s 10 largest states. In comparison, Bihar spends a higher proportion (18%) of its overall expenditure on education. Of course, Gujarat’s outlays are larger in absolute terms because of its larger overall budget but it hasn’t paid enough attention to education – and that could hurt growth in the long term unless corrected quickly.  

Education expense as a ratio of total expenditure  

1. Maharashtra: 21.0%
2. Rajasthan: 19.1%
3. West Bengal: 18.3%
4. Bihar: 18.0%
5. Uttar Pradesh: 15.9%
6. Karnataka: 15.6%
7. Tamil Nadu: 14.7%
8. Gujarat: 13.9%
9. Madhya Pradesh: 13.1%
10. Andhra Pradesh: 11.5%  

Gujarat has also been criticised for neglecting healthcare and malnutrition. While HDI, where Gujarat is ranked no. 3, captures some social indicators like infant mortality, healthcare and malnutrition, poverty levels are another important pointer to the overall quality of social infrastructure.  

Here Gujarat, while better than the all-India average, fares poorly in comparison with a state like Rajasthan. Bihar though continues to suffer twice the level of poverty of Gujarat.  

Poverty ratio (2011-12)

1. Bihar: 33.5%
2. Madhya Pradesh: 31.7%
3. Uttar Pradesh: 29.4%
4. Gujarat: 16.6%%
5. Rajasthan: 14.7% 

All-India: 21.9%

                                                                        * * *

The overall verdict:

1. Gujarat has the highest per capita income among India’s 10 largest states (when Mumbai is excluded from Maharashtra).
2. It has the third best HDI score among these large states. This is contrary to the popular belief that Gujarat favours manufacturing, industry and infrastructure at the cost of the social sector.
3. Bihar does abysmally on all criteria – per capita income, HDI, poverty levels – except education where it spends more as a ratio of its small overall expenditure than Gujarat. 

Going forward, Gujarat needs to focus on education and healthcare and further improve its HDI score. And it must focus on more equable income distribution to bring poverty levels down even faster from 16.6%, even though this is significantly better than the all-India level of 21.9% and half Bihar’s poverty level of 33.5%.  

Gujarat’s annual agricultural growth over the past decade has averaged more than 10% – triple India’s average – and it still has the country’s highest manufacturing/industry ratio-to-GDP.  

Bihar’s task is tougher. It needs to improve on all fronts. Its per capita income is one-fourth Gujarat’s and its poverty levels twice Gujarat’s. Though its annual GDP growth rate is roughly similar to Gujarat's, its low base will make it hard for it to bridge the gap for decades. It is ranked last on HDI. Its only silver lining is education – but here too, as the Chapra midday meal tragedy demonstrated, much more needs to be done to improve school infrastructure despite eight years of Nitish Kumar’s chief ministership.  

In conclusion, the Gujarat vs Bihar development model debate is a sterile one. Both states should be aiming at meeting absolute standards on economic and social criteria, not engaging in political one-upmanship.  

To fix whistleblower, bank moves from verse to worse

ALOK DESHPANDE in The Hindu

  

The HinduEmbarrassed by revelations about its curious dealings with corporate clients, the Bank of Maharashtra has declared war on whistleblowers. File photo

 

Union leader Devidas Tuljapurkar faces victimisation and possible dismissal by the Bank of Maharashtra, as it suspects him of being the whistleblower behind a story in “The Hindu” on July 7, 2012.

For one unfortunate whistleblower, things have gone from verse to worse. Embarrassed by revelations about its curious dealings with corporate clients, the Bank of Maharashtra has declared war on whistleblowers. And since it can’t pinpoint them, the bank has gone after internal critics on novel grounds. It has chargesheeted a Union leader and ex-Director of the BoM for acts “prejudicial to the interests of the Bank.” That is, for publishing 19 years ago, a poem it calls ‘vulgar and obscene,’ in the Union’s in-house magazine, ‘Bulletin.’ That poem is the basis of the Bank’s charge sheet against a worker with an impeccable service record.

In 1984, the Marathi poet Vasant Dattatraya Gurjar wrote a satirical poem titledGandhi Mala Bhetla Hota (Gandhi met me) which shook the literary world with its polemical content. In 2013, Devidas Tuljapurkar, General Secretary of the All-India Bank of Maharashtra Employees Federation, faces victimisation and possible dismissal by the bank, ostensibly because the Bulletin, of which he was editor, carried that poem in 1994!

The real reasons for going after Mr. Tuljapurkar appear to have little to do with poetry and seem far more prosaic. He has been a thorn in the flesh of his management. Both, as an alert employee and, for a while, as Workman Director on the bank’s Board. He has also drawn the RBI’s attention to the BoM’s odd handling of some corporate accounts and advances which, he charges, are being favoured at the expense of BoM’s main depositors — lakhs of small farmers, working people and retired employees. But the BoM leadership has something more against him. They suspect him — with no basis or proof — of being the whistleblower behind a story in The Hindu, July 7, 2012. That story exposed how the bank had granted a Rs. 150-crore loan to a defaulter owing BoM Rs. 40 crore by greatly weakening the terms of the original sanction letter. The defaulter company was a part of the United Breweries (UB) group headed by Vijay Mallya. The expose embarrassed Bank Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) Narendra Singh, sparking a whistleblower witch-hunt.

But no whistleblower was found. And after several transfers of senior officers within the bank, the search hit a dead-end. Ironically, it was an unthinking action of the Reserve Bank of India that handed the BoM management a scapegoat: Devidas Tuljapurkar.

Mr. Tuljapurkar told The Hindu, “Last October, I wrote a letter to RBI Governor D. Subba Rao highlighting questionable corporate advances and imprudent banking decisions of BoM at the instance of CMD Narendra Singh.” The letter, written in his capacity as a Union leader, was backed up with facts and documents. Having served as a Director on the Board of BoM from 2004 to 2009, he was very familiar with the rules and procedures.

However, the RBI failed to protect his identity as a whistleblower. In one of those unthinking acts of bureaucracy, the RBI routinely forwarded Mr. Tuljapurkar’s letter to the very BoM management that it exposed, for their comments. The bank had found its scapegoat and Mr. Tuljapurkar’s ordeal began. “Since I had written a letter to RBI, the management assumed that it was also I who had leaked that story about gifting a Rs. 150-crore loan to Mallya’s company. They wanted to corner me, so they started scanning my history,” he says.

And all they could come up with was a poem from 1984. Vasant Gurjar’s poem is a political satire that is scathing about the followers of Mahatma Gandhi who, in the poet’s view, were merely serving their own interests. In 1994, the poem was published in the ‘Bulletin’ the house magazine of the Union. In March 1995, an organisation called the ‘Patit Pavan Sanghatana’ filed a complaint against the Bulletin for publishing the ‘obscene’ and ‘vulgar’ poem. As editor of the Bulletin, Mr. Tuljapurkar was made an accused in the case.

This May 3, 19 years later, the BoM management issued an internal charge sheet against Mr. Tuljapurkar. It accuses him of ‘publishing such an inflammatory, vulgar, obscene and objectionable material in the magazine “Bulletin” meant for bank employees …” And claims that circulating that issue of the Bulletin on the BoM’s premises (in 1994) was “prejudicial to the interests of the Bank.”

Interestingly, the ‘State Performances Scrutiny Board, Government of Maharashtra’, headed by well-known Marathi poet F.M. Shinde, has a very different take on the poem. In January 2011 the Scrutiny Board made it clear that the poem is neither obscene nor vulgar. “What Gandhi had envisioned about Swarajya is nowhere to be seen. The poet has expressed this in satirical form,” Mr. Shinde had said.

Apart from ignoring the Board’s view, the BoM seems to take no notice of the Supreme Court’s order in the case against Mr. Tuljapurkar. “After the FIR in 1995, we approached both the sessions court and the High Court to discharge me from the case. But that was rejected and our appeal is pending in the Supreme Court,” he says. “The apex court, in its order dated July 7, 2010, stayed all proceedings in lower courts in this case and the actual trial has not even started in any court.”

The charge sheet accuses Mr. Tuljapurkar of not disclosing this pending litigation against him while serving as the Workman Director of the bank and for knowingly making ‘false statements’ in the forms of the bank. BoM CMD Narendra Singh took personal interest in the entire matter, says Mr. Tuljapurkar. The CMD placed the 19-year old case before the board meeting in January this year, recommending action against the union leader.

All this sidesteps the truth that Mr. Tuljapurkar’s name was mentioned in the FIR as editor of the Bulletin and not in any ‘personal capacity.’ It also ignores the fact that even charges in the case are yet to be framed. Calls, faxes and emails from The Hindu to Mr. Singh have so far drawn no response.

Meanwhile, an outraged All India Bank Employees’ Association (AIBEA), to which Mr. Tuljapurkar’s union is affiliated, has called for an agitation across the entire BoM on June 17. “We demand immediate withdrawal of the charge sheet slapped against him and thorough investigation of loans sanctioned by the bank to various corporates ever since the present chairman took charge,” CH. Venkatachalam, General Secretary, AIBEA, told The Hindu. He added that the BoM being a public sector bank, every citizen had a right to express concern about its financial health. “We shall fight back any attempt at victimisation.”

If the departmental inquiry against Mr. Tuljapurkar proceeds the way bank management wants, it could result in his dismissal. A whistleblower exposing the questionable actions of a public sector bank could be dismissed for publishing a poem in 1994. He is also a man who, while a director of the bank, transferred all the money he received as sitting charges for Board meetings to the Union’s account via cheque, accepting no monetary benefits as a director.

“I wrote to RBI because I found Mr. Singh’s financial moves unhealthy for the bank’s future. Hence I’m being targeted and victimised. They aim to make an example of me so nobody in future will dare raise his voice. It has to be stopped,” he said.

An authentic Indian fascism

PRAVEEN SWAMI

  

PTIThackeray offered violence as liberation to educated young men without prospects.

TOPICS

politics

The Shiv Sena chief gave voice to a Nazi impulse in Indian politics — one that poses an ever-growing threat to our Republic

“Fascism”, wrote the great Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, in a treatise Balasaheb Keshav Thackeray likely never read but demonstrated a robust grasp of through his lifetime, “has presented itself as the anti-party; has opened its gates to all applicants; has with its promise of impunity enabled a formless multitude to cover over the savage outpourings of passions, hatreds and desires with a varnish of vague and nebulous political ideals. Fascism has thus become a question of social mores: it has become identified with the barbaric and anti-social psychology of certain strata of the Italian people which have not yet been modified by a new tradition, by education, by living together in a well-ordered and well-administered state”.

Ever since Thackeray’s passing, many of India’s most influential voices have joined in the kind of lamentation normally reserved for saints and movie stars. Ajay Devgn described him as “a man of vision”; Ram Gopal Varma as “the true epitome of power”. Amitabh Bachchan “admired his grit”; Lata Mangeshkar felt “orphaned”. Even President Pranab Mukherjee felt compelled to describe Thackeray’s death as an “irreparable loss”. The harshest word grovelling television reporters seemed able to summon was “divisive”.

It is tempting to attribute this nauseous chorus to fear or obsequiousness. Yet, there is a deeper pathology at work. In 1967, Thackeray told the newspaper Navakal: “It is a Hitler that is needed in India today”. This is the legacy India’s reliably anti-republican elite has joined in mourning.

Thackeray will be remembered for many things, including the savage communal violence of 1992-1993. He was not, however, the inventor of such mass killing, nor its most able practitioner. Instead, Thackeray’s genius was giving shape to an authentically Indian Fascism.

His fascism was a utopian enterprise — but not in the commonly-understood sense. The Left, a powerful force in the world where Thackeray’s project was born, held out the prospect of a new, egalitarian world. The Congress held the keys to a more mundane, but perhaps more real, earthly paradise: the small-time municipal racket; even the greater ones that led to apartments on Marine Drive. Thackeray’s Shiv Sena wore many veneers: in its time, it was anti-south Indian, anti-north Indian, anti-Muslim. It offered no kind of paradise, though. It seduced mainly by promising the opportunity to kick someone’s head in.

Nostalgic accounts of Mumbai in the 1960s and 1970s represent it as a cultural melting pot; a place of opportunity. It was also a living hell. Half of Mumbai’s population, S. Geetha and Madhura Swaminathan recorded in 1995, is packed into slums that occupy only 6 per cent of its land-area. Three-quarters of girls, and more than two-thirds of boys, are undernourished. Three-quarters of the city’s formal housing stock, Mike Davies has noted, consisted of one-room tenements where households of six people or more were crammed “in 15 square meters; the latrine is usually shared with six other families”.

From the 1970s, Girangaon — Mumbai’s “village of factories” — entered a state of terminal decline, further aiding the Sena project. In 1982, when trade union leader Datta Samant led the great textile strike, over 240,000 people worked in Girangaon. Inside of a decade, few of them had jobs. The land on which the mills stood had become fabulously expensive, and owners simply allowed their enterprises to turn terminally ill until the government allowed them to sell.

Thackeray mined gold in these sewers — building a politics that gave voice to the rage of educated young men without prospects, and offering violence as liberation. It mattered little to the rank and file Shiv Sena cadre precisely who the targets of their rage were: south Indian and Gujarati small-business owners; Left-wing trade union activists; Muslims; north Indian economic migrants.

The intimate relationship between Mr. Bachchan and Thackeray is thus no surprise. In the 1975 Yash Chopra-directed hit Deewar, Mr. Bachchan rejects his trade-union heritage, and rebels by turning to crime. He is killed, in the end, by his good-cop brother. The Shiv Sena was a product of precisely this zeitgeist; its recruits cheered, like so many other young Indians, for the Bad Mr. Bachchan.

Like the mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar — which, it ought to be remembered, flourished in the same Mumbai — the Sena offered patronage, profit and power. Its core business, though, was the provision of masculinity. There are no great Sena-run schools, hospitals or charities; good works were not part of its language.

The fascist threat

Fascism, Gramsci understood, was the excrement of a dysfunctional polity: its consequence, not its cause. Liberal India’s great failure has been its effort to seek accommodation with fascism: neither Thackeray’s movie-industry fans, nor Mr. Mukherjee are, after all, ideological reactionaries. The Congress, the epicentre of liberal Indian political culture, has consistently compromised with communalism; indeed, it is no coincidence that it benignly presided over Thackeray’s rise, all the way to carnage in 1992-1993 and after.

This historic failure has been mitigated by the country’s enormous diversity. The fascisms of Thackeray, of Kashmiri Islamists, of Khalistanis, of Bihar’s Ranvir Sena: all these remained provincial, or municipal. Even the great rise of Hindutva fascism in 1992-1993 eventually crashed in the face of Indian electoral diversity.

Yet, we cannot take this success for granted. Fascism is a politics of the young: it is no coincidence that Thackeray, until almost the end, dyed his hair and wore make-up to conceal his wrinkles. From now until 2026, youth populations will continue to rise in some of India’s most fragile polities — among them, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Jammu & Kashmir.

In a path-breaking 1968 essay, Herbert Moller noted how the emergence of children born between 1900 and 1914 on the job market — “a cohort”, he noted, “more numerous than any earlier ones” — helped propel the Nazi rise in Germany. Historian Paul Madden, in a 1983 study of the early membership of the Nazi party, found that it “was a young, overwhelmingly masculine movement which drew a disproportionately large percentage of its membership from the lower middle class and from the Mittelstand [small businesses]”.

For years now, as economic change has made it ever-harder for masses of people to build lives of dignity and civic participation, we have seen the inexorable rise of an as-yet inchoate youth reaction. From the gangs of violent predators who have raped women in Haryana, to the young Hindu and Muslim bigots who have spearheaded the recent waves of communal violence, street politics is ever more driven by a dysfunctional masculinity. Thackeray’s successes in tapping this generation’s rage will, without doubt, be drawn on in years to come by other purveyors of violence.

India desperately needs a political project that makes possible another, progressive masculinity, built around new visions for everything from culture, the family and economic justice. No vanguard for such a project, though, is yet in sight.