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.

Introduction

In an essay written some twenty-five years ago, Indian thinker Ashis Nandy describes popular Indian cinema as ‘the slum's point of view of Indian politics and society and, for that matter, the world’ (Nandy 1998, p. 2). The slum, a term for the urban lower-class settlements that constitute a significant portion of the landscape of every major Indian city, embodies the complexities of Indian society. It both aspires to and contrasts with the genteel urbanity of the upper-middle classes who are physically proximate to but separate from their slum-dwelling compatriots. The slum carries in it something of the rural and village worlds of migrants who make their home in it. It represents the profound social dislocation and alienation wrought by Indian modernity upon large sections of its population as well as new kinds of social relations that emerge as a result of these shifts and disruption. A physical space inhabited by Indian lower-middle classes and emerging middle classes but also a symbol of their aspirations, the slum is the beating heart of Indian political life. Nandy argues that the ‘passions of, and the self-expressions identified with, the lower-middle class—for that matter, the middle class as a whole—now constitute the ideological locus of Indian politics’ (ibid., p. 6). Inasmuch as it is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the universe of the slum, Indian popular cinema, then, far from being an escapist fantasy or irrelevant lowbrow art, is an essential cultural form encapsulating the central concerns of Indian political and social life.

Writing over a century ago, Vladimir Lenin had talked of finance capital as the ‘coalescence of bank and industrial capital’ and of a financial oligarchy presiding over this capital that sat on the boards of directors of both banks and industrial establishments. But Lenin's concepts were located in the context of an inter-imperialist rivalry, where the finance capitals and financial oligarchies of different advanced capitalist countries were both country-based and engaged in conflict with their counterparts in other advanced capitalist countries over the acquisition of ‘economic territory’ (Lenin 1976).

Contemporary capitalism, however, is characterized by a muting of inter-imperialist rivalry. This muting is rooted, not in any agreement among capitalist powers to divide the world peacefully (as Karl Kautsky had visualized in what is called ‘ultra-imperialism’) but in the formation of an international finance capital, which is not essentially country-based and which, far from wanting to divide the world into different spheres of influence, actually wants to remove all such divisions so that it can move freely across the globe. Contemporary finance capital, therefore, is globalized (that is, international); it is not part of any national imperialist strategy, as it had been in Lenin's time; and it is employed not just in industrial production but also in rampant speculation that has given rise to several asset-price bubbles.

State of the Art

Eurocentrism has long dominated historical scholarship on the First World War. Apart from the literature that explores the entry of the United States (US) into the conflict in 1917, research on the First World War has ignored, as Oliver Janz has pointed out, the war's global dimension(s). During the last years, however, research into the history of the First World War has witnessed a global turn. Fuelled by the war's 100-year commemoration, First World War studies have been expanded both spatially and content-wise. The entanglement of the world war with non-European conflicts, the war's transition into a worldwide economic battle, and the complex ramifications it has had on all world regions have since then become topics explored by historians of the First World War. This research has developed such that the First World War is now understood as a moment of global mobility that caused mass movements of people across national borders, including soldiers, prisoners of war, labour forces, refugees and displaced people. Humanitarian initiatives and organisations, which tried to alleviate the war-caused suffering of the people, are part of the history of these mass movements.

In response to the circulation of news items and publicity campaigns that depicted the suffering of people in other parts of the globe, a myriad of local, regional and national aid committees were established from the outset of the conflict in Europe in August 1914. The activities of these committees often became integrated into border-transcending support networks of global reach.

In his powerful poem titled ‘Shema’, Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, urges the world to pay attention to the victims of the Holocaust and to never lose sight of the human monstrosity that unfolded under fascism. Despite Levi's warning, there is a global resurgence of fascism (Mason 2021; Patnaik 2024; Stanley 2020). India seems to be in a similar situation with its embrace of fascism in the form of Hindutva. Fascism is a state of capitalism that arises because of a crisis or its possibility in which the traditional elite cannot dominate the political sphere and serve the interests of large corporations through liberal institutions (Poulantzas 2018). It is an authoritarian reaction (Desai 2016; Patnaik 2024) and a capitalist counter-revolution wearing a popular mask (Parenti 1997; Rosenberg 2016).

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014 marked a significant transformation in India's sociopolitical landscape. The BJP, as the political wing of the Sangh Parivar, a network of Hindu supremacist organizations, strategically utilized the full spectrum of politico-legal systems and socio-economic institutions in its attempt to shape India into a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). This effort has gained remarkable momentum, particularly following the BJP and its alliances’ successive electoral victories and firm control over the Indian parliament. For building Hindutva (Hindu nationhood) politics, the BJP adopts a primordial perspective, defining a nation through socio-biological links or socially constructed cultural connectivity, such as language, religion, territory, and kinship (de Souza 2022; Kumbamu 2020; Shani 2021). Deeply immersed in such primordialism, the Sangh Parivar defines the nation based on the idea of oneness (one law, one culture, one religion, and one language), which aims to promote Hindu supremacy, stigmatizing and labelling those who diverge from its definition as ‘enemies’ or ‘anti-nationals’ (Banaji 2018; Chacko 2023; Frykenberg 2008; Siddiqui 2017). As a result, there is an increasing criminalization of various forms of political dissent. This includes actions ranging from targeted ‘legal’ assaults on opposition political parties and ideologies to overt threats and ‘conspiracy’ cases against activists, academics, journalists, writers, and artists.

In this political context, deep-seated concerns have emerged regarding the state of democracy, civil liberties, and the functioning of constitutional institutions.

Since 1931, the two powers China and Japan had fought intermittently in localised engagements. In 1937, however, these conflicts turned into a full-scale war between the Empire of Japan and the Republic of China governed by Chiang Kai-shek's (1887–1975) Guomindang, which entered into an alliance with the Chinese communists. The Second Sino-Japanese War which had begun with a local conflict near Beijing (the Marco Polo Bridge incident) ushered in four years of Chinese resistance against an expanding enemy before it became part of the global Second World War, following Japan's simultaneous attacks on Pearl Harbor and European colonies in Southeast Asia in 1941. The conflict in East Asia evoked various responses from humanitarian organisations and actors abroad. However, some relief initiatives decided not to take up this new cause and to continue to concentrate on the ongoing Spanish Civil War. In other cases, offers to help were declined by Japan. The international humanitarian system that emerged during the first four years of the war in support of China was majorly sustained by non-state initiatives, both established and newly founded ones. The latter especially were hardly impartial in their aid giving and often also had political motives in addition to altruistic ones. They came from strong left-leaning backgrounds and/or were rooted in diasporic Chinese, missionary or philanthropic communities.

In India, political and social actors and organisations and the press had, for a long time, followed the developments in East Asia. The outbreak of the war brought forward the question of humanitarian relief for the belligerent parties.

The High Commissioner for India, Sir S. E. Runganadhan (1877–1966), extolled the work of the Indian Comforts Fund (ICF) in the foreword to the fund's War Record as ‘a remarkable piece of humanitarian work carried out during the war largely by British women for the benefit of India's fighting men and merchant seamen’. After providing a short overview of the fund's work between 1939 and 1945, the High Commissioner expressed his and his country's gratitude by writing, ‘India will ever remain deeply indebted to them [the members of the fund's executive committee and the host of unseen helpers throughout Great Britain] for this practical expression of their sympathy and goodwill towards her.’ Although the imperial tone of this message, coming from the High Commissioner appointed by the colonial government in Delhi, might not come as a surprise, the used framing of India's indebtedness for British humanitarian assistance to Indian soldiers and merchant seamen (lascars) who had done their share to contribute to Britain's and the empire's war effort must have been puzzling for many contemporaries on the subcontinent. Next to doubting the underlying idea of the voluntariness of India's war contribution, they might also have raised questions about who should be indebted to whom.

Early in the war, the fund's public appeals for support in the form of knitted comforts and donations had struck a different note. Back in the spring of 1940, the fund had justified its appeal by emphasising that Indian soldiers had ‘come so far across the sea to help in our [the British] war effort’.