Policies have complex lives and afterlives. They interact with contingent political and social agents and are mediated by their wider contexts, from the processes that inform their conceptualisation through their enforcement.1 Prohibition in India originated in the context of late colonialism. It took shape as an idea, became part of a mass movement and crystallised into an ideal before emerging as a policy with the Madras Prohibition Act of 1937. The ensuing interactions are best understood as constituting the long-term process of prohibitioning, wherein each phase of the policy's development simultaneously overdetermined and constrained its subsequent iterations. As we have seen, this formative experience also enabled prohibition to migrate from the colonial context to the postcolonial era, its origins illuminating crucial parallels and precedents for developments that followed the achievement of independence. Through all this, prohibition bore – indeed, has borne – the imprint of the interactions that produced it, which are discernible in its manifestations as an idea, ideal and policy. As much a history of the policy as it is a history of the Indian state, Sober State has presented a history of prohibitioning that rests on three related arguments.

First, we saw that prohibition emerged as a function of the exercise of state power by the colonial and nationalist states. The colonial state engaged with alcohol policy as a means to maintain power by achieving revenue maximisation and ensuring regulatory checks and balances at a time when said power was quickly slipping out of its hands. The nationalist leadership saw the prohibition demand as a trump card that would expose the colonial state's avarice and hypocrisy, while signifying a new and superior model of governance.

Three-Way Tango: Politics of Liquor Production

Any account of prohibitioning in the decades leading up to the Madras Prohibition Act would necessarily be incomplete without addressing the politics of alcohol production. Colonial officials and nationalist elites were interacting as much with one another and diverse segments of society as with liquor business interests to devise policies aimed at regulating drinking. The cumulative impact of the ensuing developments had a tremendous impact on prohibitioning by influencing the momentum towards the policy's introduction in 1937.

During the period in question, liquor businesses had to contend with mounting social pressure against their trade on the one hand and political manoeuvring by both the colonial government and the Congress leadership on the other. Whilst prohibition discourse cast drinkers as victims who could eventually be redeemed of their affliction and transformed into upstanding citizens, it painted the producers, distributors and retailers of alcohol unforgivingly and with a large brush stroke as traitors of the nation. ‘A number of Indian merchants, be it said to their shame,’ charged a letter that was published in The Hindu, ‘have taken up the merchandise of liquor to ruin their countrymen.’ The most spectacular anti-alcohol protests were, unsurprisingly, directed at toddy and arrack shop contractors.

The constraints imposed on liquor business interests by, first, the colonial establishment and, subsequently, the nationalist leadership were part of an overarching political contest to dictate the terms of liquor production. If the colonial government was concerned that the emergence of liquor monopolies would result in lowered revenue yields for the state, the nationalist leadership sought the right to altogether remove liquor production from the workings of the national economy.

Caste, Country Liquor and Company Raj

The year was 1710. The wardens of a European cemetery in Madras wrote to East India Company officials complaining about the nuisance they had to put up with owing to the coconut trees on the property. This was a peculiar complaint; we do not normally imagine coconut trees when we think about sources of public nuisance. The crux of the matter at hand was that the gates had to be kept open all the time so that a certain country liquor could be drawn and sold. Variously described as the homegrown beer or palm wine of the Madras Presidency, the miscreant in question was toddy, the word deriving from the Hindi tari. In this imperial account, the cemetery was rendered noisier than all the punch houses in Madras put together as basket makers, scavengers, buffalo keepers ‘and other Parriars (Paraiyars)’ converged there at night to drink toddy, whereupon inebriated ‘beggars and other vagabonds’ even proceeded to lie down in freshly dug graves. Company officials wrote to the governor recommending replanting the trees elsewhere to relieve the European community of their troubles. The offending coconut trees were promptly removed.

As Company officials increasingly found themselves thrust into the role of a governing body in the Presidency of Fort St George, they found themselves having to develop a coherent response to the issue of alcohol, which eventually became the precursor to the colonial state's alcohol policy. Observations of local drinking cultures that a broad cross-section of European society had contributed became the basis of their response, which evidenced a growing reliance on strategies constituting governmentality over time.

Civil Society and Prohibition

While politics at the national and provincial levels converged to produce prohibition as a political idea and demand, thereby influencing its policy features along the way, it was the concurrent development of a vibrant prohibition culture that imbued the policy with moral force as the demand of the Indian people. Prohibition become an ideal as it filtered through society before crystallising in the provinces as a policy. Indeed, civil society activism reinforced the Congress's demand for the policy as it took shape, bringing a distinct casteist and gendered worldview into alignment with teetotalism-as-patriotism.

Reflecting ‘a convergence of modern science with a synthesis of Victorian morality and established merchant/Bania and Brahman pious norms’, social movements across India had surfaced certain elitist values that gradually became cultural norms between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. As they often included the threat of social exclusion, movements that originated and developed within caste communities proved remarkably effective in persuading large numbers of people to turn away from drink – more so, arguably, than state-led prohibition subsequently was. However, there was a key difference between earlier movements and the distinct culture of prohibition that took root between 1920 and 1937. Although the latter was overtly political in its orientation and outlook, it was embedded in a discourse that elevated it above the domain of politics. As an influential Tamil newspaper put it, ‘the political issue need not be mixed up with this. Go to your villages and organise compacts so that there may not be any drunkard therein.’

One of the difficulties we face is how to characterize the current regime headed by Narendra Modi, which has won back-to-back victories in three elections (2014–2024). The terminology within which we understand the regime is important, as what to expect from the regime flows from its nature and how to resist it will emerge from an understanding of its character. What is apparent about the regime is its pronounced authoritarianism, with the regime increasingly unaccountable to any constitutional authority.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz called such regimes, in which the leader has arbitrary and unlimited discretion, ‘sultanist’ and a species of authoritarianism. Linz (2000, p. 259) defines an authoritarian regime as ‘ruler-centred’ where the

What ‘sultanism’ implies is captured indelibly by Girish Karnad in his play Tughlaq. Karnad captures Mohammad Bin Tughlaq, who embodied this form of arbitrary and whimsical decision-making, be it the decision to issue currency in brass or the decision to shift the capital to Daulatabad. Clearly, the Modi regime has ‘sultanist’ characteristics, based on the personalized and arbitrary decision-making which characterizes the regime.

From the mid-eighties of the last century, the neoliberal economic model, devised by the anti-collectivist theorists,1 which conceptually elevates competition as a high principle, has been favoured by the ruling classes. It remains nothing but a social Darwinist contrivance for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004). Since the collapse of the Soviet system, it has become almost the default model sans alternative. The endemic crises it entails and the alienation it engenders necessitate increasingly authoritative responses and demagogic strategies from the rulers, using existing social divisions in the form of castes, religions, ethnicities, and so on, which lead to the fascization of societies.

While this trend is visible everywhere today, some countries have congenial ideological resources for the fascization of their societies. India, with a hegemonic Brahminist ideology (with its hierarchical ethos and the organizational dominance of its hegemons in the state apparatus as well as in civil society) is uniquely positioned. While fascization has been discernible since the 1990s in the overt majoritarian communalism whipped up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it was somewhat muted by the lack of political consensus and the moral scruples of constitutional decencies.

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.