In August 1914, when the First World War broke out in Europe, the Indian Branch of the St. John Ambulance Association (ISJAA) immediately started to organise relief provisions for the British Indian Army troops. With the sizable expansion of its pre-war ambulance and first aid agenda during the war, this non-state organisation ventured into various fields of humanitarian war work in the following four years; these fields were usually linked to, or seen as, ‘Red Cross work’. In colonial India, where until 1920 no ‘national’ Red Cross society formally existed, the ISJAA strikingly decided to fill the void. In 1914, it identified itself as the Red Cross representative in India.

This chapter shifts the focus to the humanitarian work undertaken by the ISJAA, calling for a more nuanced examination of the historical contexts surrounding the so-called Red Cross humanitarianism. Existing research has emphasised the global reach and significant impact of the Red Cross movement during the First World War, while often failing to acknowledge the contributions of other humanitarian actors who played a crucial role in providing relief.1 Historian Rebecca Gill has powerfully reminded us to ‘acknowledge the relevance of a multi-levelled history of the local, national, imperial, and international’ when it comes to understanding humanitarianism. However, she erroneously refers to the war participation of a Red Cross society in India when she actually means the ISJAA.2 By focusing on the latter's relief work, the chapter illustrates the existence of alternative humanitarian actors of significance in the provision of relief to soldiers during wartime in the British Empire.

With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in India in 2014, and over the following years, questions around the nature of this regime and its increasingly close links to large Indian corporates have drawn attention. That these links exist is beyond dispute. However, their specific nature and what they can tell us about the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)–BJP combine, the Sangh Parivar (the family of organizations led by the RSS, including the BJP), is less clear, as in what they might mean for its future trajectory and for the future trajectory of Indian politics.

This chapter, a preliminary exploration of these questions, is largely confined to specific aspects of this government's economic policies. In this context, it will argue that these links are embedded within a specific political trajectory and that this trajectory may lead to eventual possibilities that are neither easy to predict nor necessarily in line with intuitive expectations. Indeed, I will argue that, instead of the apparent stability and supposed strength of the corporate–BJP–state nexus that currently exists, the years to come are likely to see more challenges to this nexus than are usually expected— and a key reason for this is the dynamic produced by this nexus itself.

The historical relationship between the Sangh Parivar and Indian big capital

The relationship between Indian big business and the Sangh Parivar is not a recent one, but arguably such a relationship also did not characterize the RSS's history for most of its existence.

State of the Art

The global Second World War caused major humanitarian catastrophes that necessitated relief for soldiers, military and civilian prisoners of war, as well as for other victims of the war, including refugees and displaced persons in Europe and in non-European war zones, particularly in Asia. To assist the ever-increasing needs of these diverse groups became a major task for established humanitarian actors, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), various national Red Cross Societies, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Quakers. They could resort to organisational knowledge and experienced staff, and professionalised more and more their war-related relief work in the course of the ongoing conflict. However, just like during, and in the aftermath of, the First World War, the present global conflagration also saw the emergence of new humanitarian organisations, such as Oxfam and the Catholic Relief Service, that mobilised for special concerns or helped to facilitate potential political alliances. Regardless of whether the humanitarian organisation was an established or a new one, non-state relief agencies entered into close, often co-dependent relationships with states during the war. States understood aid as significant due to moral concerns, but also to safeguard their political, economic and strategic interests, and hence strove to control, guide and coordinate humanitarian activities during and in the aftermath of the war

In 1984, after her Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indira Gandhi, a revenge pogrom took the lives of over 3,000 Sikhs on the streets of Delhi. Congress Party members led many killer mobs, but some were led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well. This is a fact forgotten by history but recorded in newspaper headlines of the day. It was this massacre that set me on the road to fight communalism with my camera. For the next decade, I recorded different examples of the rise of the religious right, as seen in diverse movements from the Khalistani upsurge in Punjab to the glorification of sati in Rajasthan and the movement to replace the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya with a temple to the Hindu god Ram. The material I filmed was very complex and if I had tried to encompass it all into a single film, it would have been too long and confusing. Eventually, three distinct films emerged from the footage shot between 1984 and 1994, all broadly describing the rise of religious fundamentalism and the resistance offered by secular forces in the country. Una Mitran Di Yaad Pyaari (In Memory of Friends), the first film to get completed, spoke of the situation in the Punjab of the 1980s where Khalistanis as well as the Indian government were claiming Bhagat Singh as their hero, but only people from the left remembered the Bhagat Singh who, from his death cell, wrote the booklet Why I Am an Atheist.

Several scholars have researched religious violence in India (for example, Brass 1997; Engineer 1994; Varshney 2002) and have offered insights into the role of the state in furthering pogroms (I. Ahmad 2022; Brass 2006; Khalidi 2003; Vanaik 2009; Varshney and Gubler 2012). Many writers have also emphasized the role of electoral politics in triggering pogroms (for example, Wilkinson 2006). Yet the role of violence remains under-examined from the perspective of a capitalist political economy. Put differently, past studies have paid less attention to how pogroms are used as political tools to advance the economic interests of big capital by mobilizing lower classes under the guise of distributed sovereignty. This is a significant oversight, particularly when mass violence against Muslims is systematically deployed to shape fascist politics that advances the interests of big capital (Desai 2014, 2016).

This chapter addresses the aforementioned lacuna by examining the 2020 pogrom in north-east Delhi, which began on February 23 and lasted six days. Without being economistic in my reading of fascism, as Kershaw (1989) warns against, and acknowledging some autonomy of the Sangh Parivar, I draw attention to the political economy of fascist violence. The pogrom in which Muslim lives and property were disproportionately harmed witnessed fifty-three deaths, and thousands of businesses and homes were destroyed (Gowda et al. 2020).

After almost three months of providing medical relief work, shortly before their departure from the country in August 1946, Rajabali Jumabhoy (1898–1998), a prominent businessperson and philanthropist of Indian origin, praised the Congress Medical Mission at a tea party in Singapore for being a promoter of Indo-Asian unity. One year later, a book titled Congress Mission to Malaya was published by C. Siva Rama Sastry, one of the mission's members. The Indian National Congress (INC) politician and mission organiser Bidhan Chandra Roy (1882–1962) provided the foreword. Roy stated, ‘We the people of India, feel proud of their [the mission members’] achievement and appreciate with gratitude the services they rendered in the name of the Congress.’ In both instances, the work of the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was presented as successful; this success was based partly, but not exclusively, on the mission's effective promotion of domestic and foreign policy objectives of the INC.

In the history of humanitarianism, the Congress Medical Mission to Malaya has been forgotten. It does not figure in the research on the transitional period between the end of the global Second World War, late colonial rule, and early decolonisation in South Asia, nor does it figure in the standard accounts of Indian nationalism, although it is at times mentioned in passing in the histories of Malaysia. Nevertheless, examining the humanitarian undertaking of the INC, the anticolonial organisation that would soon become the party leading India's postcolonial government, is crucial, as the mission represents the last instance of Indian non-state nationalist humanitarian aid provided to civilians in need outside the South Asian subcontinent during the period of colonial rule.

While Donald Trump's ruthless, reckless, aggressive, multi-pronged assaults are threatening American democracy in unprecedented ways, India nevertheless stands out when viewed against broader trends of democratic backsliding (Haggard and Kaufman 2021). Since 2014, liberal democracy in India has come under increasing pressure from Hindu nationalism. Commentators and scholars who are sympathetic to liberal democracy express grave concern, if not alarm, about the state of Indian democracy: ‘The blaze is at our door’ (A. Roy 2022) and ‘The Hindu Rashtra [Hindu Nation] is … indeed underway’ (Jaffrelot 2019a, p. 64). One writes that ‘India's Democracy Is Dying’ and notes that democracy watch organizations now classify India as a ‘hybrid regime’, an ‘electoral autocracy’ or a ‘flawed democracy’ (Tudor 2023).

Electoral democracy remains intact in India, but civil freedoms, minority rights, and institutional constraints on executive power have been substantially weakened (Varshney 2022), and ‘India's standing as an inclusive, diverse nation with an independent judiciary, rule of law and free media was degraded’ (Patel 2021, p. 460).

During the past decade, prime minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has ‘tethered religious nationalism to right-wing populism’ (Basu 2021, p. 278) and prioritized Hindu nationalism over the Indian constitution, as ‘an ideology that promotes the idea that Hinduism is the authentic religious and cultural identity of the Indian people’ (Yilmaz and Morieson 2023, p. 185). ‘The BJP has thus moved Hindutva beyond right-wing nationalism and toward a civilisational struggle between Hindus and “others”’ (ibid., p. 198).

Hindu–Muslim antagonism is one of the main, if not the main, features of the Sangh Parivar's politics. For a long time, this antagonism was considered merely in religious terms. Despite the presence of extensive literature on the economic features and implications of contemporary Hindutva (Bobbio 2017; Chacko 2019; Desai 2011; Gopalakrishnan 2009, 2006; Iwanek 2014; Karat 2014; Kaul 2017; Kumar 2018; Nanda 2011; Patnaik 2019; Saxena and Sharma 1998; Siddiqui 2017; Sinha and Nayak 2021; Spodek 2010), there is a widespread tendency among scholars to consider the Hindu–Muslim rivalry as connected to identity, religious, or communal factors. This chapter aims to prove that an intimate connection between communal and economic factors existed from the colonial period and that communal strife was not determined by religious but by economic causes. It adds to Gyanendra Pandey's (1999) masterly demonstration of how the British constructed communalism by leveraging economic forces. However, Pandey examines only the economic and social transformations brought about by colonization, but does not consider the interrelation between economic and identity factors as part of the colonial game that I foreground in this chapter.

The chapter explains how the British colonizers deliberately targeted Muslim rulers, who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the main political and economic competitors of the East India Company (EIC), and that, in order to undermine the powers of the Muslim rulers, they implemented both economic and cultural devices, as well as military and political ones.

The Congress Medical Mission to Malaya was the last Indian non-state relief initiative that was sent abroad to provide humanitarian aid during late colonial rule and in the early postcolonial years. Whereas South Asian humanitarian initiatives had provided comprehensive aid for Indian and Allied soldiers at various fronts during the world wars and had given assistance to war victims in China and Malaya, the summer of 1946 became a turning point for their work when in mid-August, Calcutta was ravaged by the communal violence that broke out between Hindus and Muslims. Trapped in the riotous city for a few days was Dr C. Siva Rama Sastry, who was part of the Congress Medical Mission that had just returned from Malaya. When Sastry was finally able to return home to south India, he had to leave all his belongings behind.

After the so-called Great Calcutta Killings, the violence spread throughout British India, leading to riots and massacres in East Bengal, Bihar, Bombay, the United Provinces, Punjab and in other places before reaching its climax with partition. The end of colonial rule with the formation of two new nation states, India and Pakistan, in August 1947, was accompanied by large-scale violence that may have caused up to 1 million deaths and led to the displacement of approximately 12 million people.3 The unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in South Asia, however, did evoke a mixed international response. Several non-state humanitarian organisations from around the globe forwarded aid in cash and kind; some also sent relief workers to South Asia or already had volunteers on-site.

That the decade of untrammelled power Narendra Modi enjoyed before losing his majority in his 2024 victory so humiliatingly represented a new phase in the ruinous advance of Hindutva is clear. What is less clear is where the novelty lies. For some, it lies in the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) parliamentary majority, the first for any party since 1984; the centrality of Modi's personality; and the combination of populism, nationalism, majoritarianism, and authoritarianism (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot 2019, p. 1). For others, it lies in the Modi regime being a ‘governmental formation with considerable institutional heft that converges with wider global currents and enjoys an unprecedented level of mainstream acceptance’ (Hansen and Roy 2022, p. 1).

These assessments appear staggeringly placid. Under the Modi regime, minorities—Muslims throughout India, Christians in the north-east and Adivasi lands—and dissident intellectuals are systematically persecuted, often to death; working people are assailed by wilfully brutish experiments—demonetization and draconian COVID-19 lockdowns to take the most egregious—leaving lasting damage. Meanwhile, the topmost corporate capitalist class rejoices in sympathetic legislation, light oversight (if any), and aid in foreign operations. To get power and keep it, the government displays ‘unprecedented’ and ‘sweeping disregard for the constitution’, particularly its federalism (Savera 2019), and razes political institutions—the Supreme Court, the Central Vigilance Commission, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)—with the bulldozer of its parliamentary majority.