 "Sitaram Yechury")
The Narendra Modi government was till now not a fascist regime but was using fascist methods ruthlessly to achieve the RSS goal of a "totally intolerant Hindu Rashtra", CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said.
Yechury said state power was being used to further the Hindu Rashtra agenda, with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party combine trying for social engineering to expand its base and indulging in an extreme chauvinistic "braggadocio to carry forward their fascist-like ideology".
"In such a scenario, there is no need to split hair over whether the Modi government is fascist or not. What needs to be stressed is that if not prevented in time, the Modi government will move towards creating a Hindu Rashtra according to the RSS diktats. This has to be stopped.
"Though what we see around us is not fascism, we see a ruthless and terrifying use of fascist processes."
Yechury's views in a writeup in the autumnal festival number of Communist Party of India-Marxist's Bengali mouthpiece 'Ganashakti' closely followed his predecessor Prakash Karat's comments that the Modi government was "not fascist but authoritarian" and the fight against it cannot be conducted in alliance with other major party of the ruling classes (Congress).
Karat's comments, which appeared in a leading English daily a month ago, pertained to the CPI-M alliance with the Congress in the West Bengal assembly polls during April-May this year.
The CPI-M leader said the Narendra Modi government was only following the RSS diktats, which has generated a nationwide debate on whether it was moving to establish fascism.
Referring to Marxist theoretician and former Bulgarian Communist Party General Secretary Georgi Dimitrov, who had analysed the nature and ascendancy of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century, Yechury said though there were a lot of similarities in the current Indian situation, "it is being said this government was till now not fascist".
"Despite the rapidly increasing dictatorial tendencies, as reflected in the curbing of democratic institutions, the bourgeois-zamindar class rule has not reached the stage where its immediate programme is to bid goodbye to parliamentary democracy," he said.
"So just because the RSS-led BJP has come to power, it doesn't mean that fascism has ben established in the classical European sense. But if the RSS is able to set up a Hindu Rashtra, then a qualitatively different situation will arise."
"The Hindu Rashtra can be formed only on the ruins of the present constitutional democracy. So the duty of all communist, progressive, democratic and patriotic Indians is to resist and defeat the efforts to tread the path of fascism," Yechury said.
