the rise of Hindutva is situated in its appeal to both the elite and lower classes. While the current Hindutva regime furthers the class interests of the more organized elite, it garners lower-class support through propaganda and doles such as free ration.
How the Rise of Hindutva and the Rise of Wealth Concentration Are Linked - The Wire
Arendt (1966) has argued that popular support for a fascist regime shows that people overlook their rights and material interests. We offer a more careful reading of such a formulation. In our interpretation of the dominance of Hindutva, we do not see lower classes overlooking their material conditions. Instead, abject poverty, caste inequities, patriarchy, and the absence of grassroots democracy limit the lower classes’ expectations of material gains to the minimal benefits doled out by the state (for example, the current offering of five kilograms of free food grain). The masses are, as J. Banaji (2016, p. 222) describes, in a state of ‘manipulated seriality’. Seriality is passive, inert, and dispersed people, not the behaviour of a cohesive group. Fascists work on serialities to produce desired outcomes. Thus, dispersed masses of people are susceptible to manipulations by organized groups. The control over the state apparatus furthers the dominance of the Sangh Parivar over disorganized masses reduced to individuals.
As a result of the corporate–Hindutva nexus, lower classes have suffered greater losses, and their lives are marked by increasing poverty and hunger (Chowdhury and Keane 2021; Varman and Vijay 2022). Data show that between 2011–2012 and 2017–2018, per capita consumption expenditure on all items in real terms has fallen by 9 per cent in rural India. Nothing of this sort had ever happened in normal times in independent India (Chowdhury 2023; Patnaik 2021a). While the poor have either stagnated or become poorer, the rich are making bigger gains than ever before.
Fascism thrives when high inequality coincides with deep and easily evocable social divisions (Hacker and Pierson 2020) as in the case of India.
Edited by Rohit Varman
The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India
Cambridge University Press, 2025
by Rohit Varman
13/01/2026