Documents of CPIML
11th Party Congress,
Vinod Mishra Nagar (Patna, Bihar),
16-20 February, 2023

1.   The Narendra Modi government has now been in power for more than eight years. If the first term of the Modi government was an early warning about the shape of things to come, the second term has been a period of rapid escalation of a concerted multi-pronged offensive. With Amit Shah as the Union Home Minister and Ajit Doval as the National Security Advisor, the state has become unprecedentedly repressive and vindictive. Constitutional democracy in India today is reeling under the combination of a rampaging state and a host of private armies and vigilante squads emboldened by the patronage and impunity granted by the regime. This combination of unmitigated state repression and all-pervasive state-supported terror and persecution directed against designated ‘internal enemies’, all in the name of nationalism, has historically been the hallmark of fascism. In India, this fascism projects itself as nationalism defined on the basis of Brahminical patriarchal Hindu supremacy or Hindutva. The imagination of India as a Hindu nation portrays Muslims and Christians whose religions originated outside of India as 'outsiders'. In particular, with regard to Muslims the Sangh-BJP discourse uses a whole set of codewords (from invaders and infiltrators to rioters and jehadis, and even demons and termites) to incite Islamophobic hate and violence. This 'otherisation' and demonisation of Muslims is extended to a broad spectrum of ideological dissenters and political opponents by dubbing them all 'anti-nationals' deserving to be deported to Pakistan.

2. The RSS has all along been ideologically fascist. Its ability to enforce its fascist agenda depends on the power it can wield, both state power and street power. It has been accumulating this power over its nearly century-long existence through its relentless campaign of hate, lies and rumour and penetration and manipulation of the entire range of key institutions. The Ram Mandir campaign marked its most aggressive phase of rise and catapulted the BJP to power in several states in North and West India. We had rightly characterised this rise of the BJP riding on the frenzy of the rath yatra as not just communalism, fundamentalism or fanaticism but precisely as communal fascism because we had seen it as an attempt to redefine India’s identity and undermine the very framework of constitutional democracy. From the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 to the enactment of the post-Godhra genocide in Gujarat in 2002, we saw the vicious spread and impact of this communal fascism.

3.  This communal fascism created periodic frenzies, but it also periodically got isolated and weakened once it reached an extreme and got majorly exposed. After Gujarat 2002, NDA lost India in 2004. The Gujarat genocide also made Narendra Modi face international indictment with the US and Europe denying visa to him. It was at this juncture that corporate India rallied around Narendra Modi under the banner of ‘Vibrant Gujarat’. The loyal backing of corporate power lent great strength and momentum and carried the Sangh brigade’s campaign for power to victory in 2014. Since then the alliance between corporate India, headed by the Ambani group and the rapidly growing Adani group (with the Tatas too coming up by recovering much of its lost ground), and the Sangh brigade has coalesced into a rampaging bulldozer with corporate India pouring in money to keep the BJP in power and the latter reciprocating by putting all resources - precious natural resources, finances as well as public sector infrastructure – at the disposal of a few corporations. Clearly, corporate plunder and fascist aggression are closely intertwined and feed on each other.

4.  We rightly saw the Babri Masjid demolition as the first definitive sign of the rise of communal fascism in India and launched a sustained ideological-political campaign against this growing threat. In the Ranchi Congress we paid due attention to the growing corporate clamour for bringing Narendra Modi to power at the Centre and how, with this corporate backing and the repackaging of Narendra Modi as a development icon and as a much-needed 'honest alternative' to corruption and dynasty politics, fascism was breaking new grounds socially and geographically. By the time we held our Tenth Congress at Mansa in March 2018, we already had nearly four years of experience of the Modi government at the Centre. Most of India’s opposition parties including certain sections of the Left were yet to acknowledge the growing power of fascism as an alarming reality that needed to be resisted by all means. Unbridled crony capitalism, increased communal polarisation and growing assault on the Constitution were acknowledged separately but that these trends and features added up to the Indian version of fascism and that its growing power and electoral expansion meant an unprecedented calamity and havoc for India were never really identified as the single biggest threat to the very idea and existence of India as a modern constitutional republic. Some Left parties refused to go beyond the term authoritarianism which failed to reflect the real degree and nature of the threat posed by the BJP government under Narendra Modi.

5.   This ideological obfuscation continued even as the BJP added crucial states like Assam, Tripura in the North East, Uttar Pradesh in the North and Karnataka in the South to its kitty, and emerged as the leading opposition in West Bengal in 2019 Lok Sabha elections and threatened to grab power in the 2021 Assembly elections. In clear and sharp contrast to this ‘business as usual’ approach treating the BJP just as another party of the ruling classes, ruling at the Centre and in some states and functioning as an opposition party in other states, the Mansa Congress of our party identified the Modi regime as a fascist regime and called for all-out resistance to this growing fascist offensive and its consolidation. We emphasised the need to step up opposition to the regime's offensive through determined mass struggles and also to explore possibilities of broad-based electoral adjustment among opposition parties to check the division of anti-BJP votes. Today, we are confronting a fascism that combines unabashed crony capitalism and subservience to imperialism with aggressive majoritarianism, dismantling of the Constitution and democracy, relentless persecution of any ideological dissent, concerted attack on the working class and privatization of violence especially against Muslims, Christians and Dalits at the hands of Hindu supremacist organisations alongside increased caste and patriarchal aggression. With continuing escalation of the fascist offensive of the Modi regime and the Sangh brigade, which is now being widely perceived as a state of undeclared but all-pervasive and permanent Emergency, the potential of mass opposition is also growing. We have to turn this potential into a powerful current of anti-fascist resistance.

6.  Fascism as a rabidly reactionary ideological-political trend and ultra-nationalist mass movement started gaining ground in early 20th century. Against the backdrop of the First World War if the world witnessed the victory of the first socialist revolution and the rise of the first socialist state in the form of USSR in November 1917, five years later it also witnessed the rise of the first fascist regime in Italy. After Italy, fascism succeeded in capturing power in Spain and Germany and across Europe it emerged as a powerful trend in opposition to the rising influence and appeal of socialism. The trend also grew in North and South America and Asia, including India where fascism found its echo in the shape of the ideology of Hindutva, rooted in the post-1857 British colonial rewriting of history as an endless conflict between Hindus and Muslim ‘invaders’, and the organisation of the RSS.

7.   The Second World War eventually became a global military showdown against fascism leading to the collapse of the fascist regimes of Italy and Germany and a massive international defeat and discrediting or delegitimisation of fascist ideology and movement. While the military defeat of fascism was the product of the specific historical circumstances and trajectory of the World War, the experiences of the international communist movement in terms of understanding and resisting fascism remain relevant reference points for our current encounter with today's Indian fascism.

8.  Discussion about fascism acquired growing urgency in the international communist movement right from the early 1920s, but it took quite some time to understand the enormity of the threat posed by fascism. Antonio Gramsci anticipated the rise of a period of acute reaction in Italy in his 1920 report on Italy to the Communist International and two years later when Mussolini actually grabbed power he did not see it as a passing phase. Yet, in his initial assessment he saw Italian fascism more as a reaction of the agrarian bourgeoisie and did not expect the industrial bourgeoisie too to join in and rally around Mussolini. The first Comintern report on fascism, presented by Clara Zetkin at the Third Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern in June 1923, drew attention to the mass social influence of fascism and made it clear that “Military means alone cannot vanquish it, … we must also wrestle it to the ground politically and ideologically.” While acknowledging different characteristics of fascism in every country based on specific circumstances the report highlighted the following two essential features of fascism: ‘a sham revolutionary programme, which links up in extremely clever fashion with the moods, interests, and demands of broad social masses; and the use of brutal and violent terror.’

9.  A comprehensive analysis and serious tactical approach emerged in the historic seventh and last Congress of the Comintern in 1935. The report presented by Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist leader who had famously defended himself in the Leipzig trial and got acquitted after being falsely accused of setting the Reichstag on fire, defined the fascist state as open terrorist dictatorship of the most imperialist, most reactionary and ultra nationalist section of finance capital. The report warned the communist movement against mistaking the coming to power of a fascist regime as a standard succession of one bourgeois government by another and also against ignoring the rise of fascist ideas and forces within a bourgeois-democratic set-up. The Dimitrov report however dealt only with the early stage of concentration of power by fascist dictatorships and focused more on the nature of the state and governance under fascism. It did not pay sufficient attention to the initial evidence of the centrality of vicious antisemitism to the Nazi project or the aspects of fascism as an aggressive mobilization and movement of the masses.

10.  After the defeat of Hitler in 1945, the world came to know about the stunning scale and horror of the Holocaust that killed no less than six million Jews. The total suppression of democracy and silencing of the opposition facilitated the execution of the horrific campaign of extermination against the targeted 'internal enemies' (Jews, nomadic communities, communists, homosexuals were among the key enemies of the state in Nazi Germany). The experience of Nazi Germany created a global awareness about the horror of fascism and across the world fascist forces were defeated, discredited and relegated to the background. In India, the RSS and other Hindutva organisations like Hindu Mahasabha who drew inspiration from Mussolini, Hitler and the Nazis, remained a marginal force during the freedom movement, and in the immediate aftermath of independence RSS could not gain much ground despite the trauma of Partition, as India moved on with its new found constitutional framework of parliamentary democracy. RSS was opposed to the Constitution and the national flag, and the assassination of Gandhi, which was a clear attempt at destabilising the fledgling republic, isolated and defamed the RSS organisationally and ideologically. It was none other than Sardar Patel, India’s first Home Minister who is today desperately sought to be appropriated by the RSS and the Modi regime, who had banned the RSS from February 1948 to July 1949 to root out 'forces of hate and evil that imperil the nation'. But looking back, we can however clearly find several junctures since that major post-independence isolation when the state and the ruling Congress, or for that matter, most non-Congress opposition parties too, treated the RSS and its political affiliates, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh followed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, with kid gloves, granting them legitimacy in spite of continuing gross violation of basic constitutional norms, and enabling them to gain strength and bounce back dramatically, especially since the days of Ayodhya agitation and Babri Masjid demolition.

11.  Like the period between the 1920s and 1940s, fascism is once again on the rise as an international trend. The rise of fascism in the first half of the previous century had happened in the aftermath of the first World War and consequently a climate of jingoism and chauvinism and the acute economic crisis and despondency in the wake of the Great Depression. The 'threat' of the spread of socialism across Europe had also driven the bourgeoisie in many countries towards fascism. Today once again global capitalism is mired in deep crisis and uncertainty and is seeking a way out of this crisis through war and fascist consolidation and thorough undermining of bourgeois democracy. But as with the twentieth century phase of fascism, fascism in different countries is bound to exhibit its national particularities in the current phase as well. The Indian case becomes particularly unique because of the central role of the RSS which has been nurturing the fascist project for nearly a century now. While the rise of fascism in India has been propelled primarily by India's own internal developments, the current international climate favours it by giving it considerable strategic support and legitimacy.

12.  The parallels between Nazi Germany and the way the Modi regime has evolved over the last two decades, first by consolidating power in Gujarat on the basis of a genocide and systematic and extensive application of extra-judicial terror and then in the name of replication of this Gujarat model on all-India level since 2014, are too obvious to miss. The similarities should be noted not just in the styles and features of the Hitler and Modi cults or the lie-driven propaganda blitzkriegs that are hallmarks of the two regimes, but more importantly in the operative framework of the two regimes in terms of ideology, politics, law and legislation. The anti-Semitic campaign of Nazi Germany which had led to the horror of the Holocaust was powered by vitriolic propaganda and targeted legislation including the notorious Nuremberg laws that stripped German Jews of much of their rights and rendered them legally and socially vulnerable and subjected them to brutal attacks and genocide carried out by the German state and vigilante squads. We see a starkly similar and systematic build-up with a slew of state and central legislations and administrative measures targeting the Muslim community over a whole range of issues from livelihood (like ban on cattle trade and meat shops), religious freedom (religious conversion, demolition of mosques, hijab ban, criminalisation of inter-faith marriages, uniform civil code and ban on offering of prayer in public places), to citizenship (the CAA expressly discriminates against Muslims) and basic security of existence (bulldozing of Muslim houses, mob-lynching, open calls of genocide amid growing incidence of localized violence).

13.  Despite the striking parallels, fascism in an ex-colony which continues to be subject to imperialist plunder, inevitably has different characteristics from the fascism of imperialist countries. In particular, the people are plundered by global capital and by homegrown billionaire capitalists who have become deeply integrated with imperialism. In contrast to the experiences of fascism in Europe therefore, there is virtually no economic reward for the majority community identified as belonging to the nation. Instead they have to be fed with the daily spectacle of ever increasing violence against those identified as the nation's internal enemies. Further, the current phase of fascism has emerged in a context of global neoliberalism where capital is on the offensive, and in face of recurrent crises, is snatching back whatever gains were made by workers’ movements and grabbing whatever resources remained in the public domain through massive campaigns of privatization, land grab and environmental destruction. This is fertile ground for fascist regimes like that of Modi which further facilitate these processes, and makes the likelihood of international opposition to Modi at the level of states unlikely. The limited censure faced by Modi as Gujarat Chief Minister after the 2002 genocide has given way to collaboration and legitimation from the international order.

14.  Fascism whips up mass frenzy against perceived internal enemies who are projected as threats to the state, nation, civilisation, culture and even notions of public order and public health. To do this, it simultaneously drums up feelings of victimhood and injury and claims of pride and supremacy. It constantly invokes the myth of a golden past and the dream of a great future. We can see this happening quite systematically in India today. The Sangh parivar constantly promotes fake ‘history’ to invoke the vedic era as the pinnacle of knowledge, projects India more as a civilisational entity than a constitutional republic and promises to transform India into 'akhand bharat' comprising not just today's India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, but also Afghanistan in the west, Sri Lanka in the south, Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan in the north and Myanmar in the east and secure a superpower status, 'viswa guru' in Modi's parlance. Hitler exploited the popular appeal of socialism to present fascism as a model of 'national socialism', the RSS and BJP are using the appeal of freedom and self-reliance to present fascism as a new level of freedom and self-reliance. The BJP rhetoric of ‘atmanirbhar Bharat’ however has no economic content of swadeshi, it just wants to rent India out to global capital in the name of ‘make in India’.

15.  Likewise, it also uses anti-colonial rhetoric, not against corporate domination or imperialism but against India’s own minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians. This paired with the current global climate of Islamophobia is used to build a false threat perception of Hindus being overtaken by Muslim population explosion, immigration and infiltration and reduced to a minority in India. The Nazi model of Germany sought to achieve a state of racial purity, a racial utopia, by carrying out a combination of ethnic cleansing through systematic genocides, mass sterilisation and euthanasia to get rid of people labelled as genetically diseased and disabled, and even eugenic engineering to supposedly bring about 'genetic improvement' of the German race. Today there are regular state-sanctioned calls for similar systematic genocides, camps and sterilisations in India and unmistakable warning signs that these may soon become a reality. Nazi Germany apart, India under Modi also draws heavily on Israel’s model. India’s national security policy closely emulates the military doctrine and surveillance techniques of Israel, and Hindutva too displays close ideological resemblance to the Israeli policy of Zionist aggression. Just as Israel invokes the bogey of anti-semitism to malign every criticism of its anti-Palestine policy, the Modi regime and the RSS have started using the term Hinduphobia and invoking allegations of anti-Hindu hate speech to suppress every opposition to the Sangh brigade’s Hindu supremacist campaign.

16.  The Sangh-BJP brigade pursues an elaborate strategy to manufacture consent around this combination of fear and hate, victimhood and supremacy. Modi has from the very beginning marketed himself as an anti-establishment crusader, invoking the sense of outrage among large sections of people against their miserable conditions of existence worsened by deprivation and oppression. He has cleverly managed to associate all the ills of the status-quo with prolonged Congress rule in India, equating it further with corruption and dynasty politics. His call for ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ tapped into this anti-establishment mood and even after assuming power at the Centre, he has kept up his tirade against what he calls Lutyen’s Delhi. While his economic promises stand increasingly exposed as a jumla or an empty rhetoric, and the character of the new establishment, marked by brazen crony capitalism and growing domination of the Sangh, becomes more obvious, considerable sections of people among all classes and strata are still in the thrall of this anti-establishment appeal.

17.  This appeal of the leader is as central to the Sangh-BJP strategy as the privatisation and outsourcing of the state's monopoly over violence to extra-judicial vigilante squads. Islamophobia, which fuels the constant fascist 'othering' of Indian Muslims as an 'internal enemy', is sought to be reinforced and cemented by the new-found Sangh strategy of social engineering whereby the Sangh masks up its Manuwadi face by cobbling together a social coalition against dominant social groups in different states, sporting a subaltern look. A PM from a backward caste and Presidents from Dalit and Adivasi backgrounds are major propaganda points for today's BJP to hide the Brahminical core of the RSS. Religious festivals are being used in a big way to involve the masses from SC/ST/OBC communities that used to be traditionally kept away from direct participation in Brahminical rituals. The Brahminical and patriarchal caste system with its deeply entrenched pattern of social regimentation, oppression and exclusion serves as a tailor-made template for fascism in India. This was precisely the reason that had prompted Dr. Ambedkar to describe actualization of Hindu Raj as the greatest calamity for the country.

The Sangh-BJP discourse targets the Constitution, Supreme Court, the institutional framework of modern India and critical streams within the intelligentsia, especially in academic and cultural spheres, as being Western-inspired and elitist and projects Narendra Modi and his regime as an anti-establishment challenger. While most opposition parties are sought to be discredited as dynastic and family-run enterprises, the Modi government’s lavish spending is being modelled on the pattern of the empires of the pre-colonial era, with a new parliament building and a whole set of monuments, statues and temples to mark his stint in power.

18.  Indian fascism also draws its strength from the colonial legacy of India's model of governance and the weakness of India's democratic institutions and culture. Bhagat Singh had popularly emphasised the need for a complete rupture with the colonial era when he said that freedom must not mean power passing from the hands of white Englishmen to brown sahibs. The prolonged rule of the Congress prior to the BJP's spectacular rise from the late 1980s onward did not address the issue of the weakness of India's democratic institutions, on the contrary Indira Gandhi used the constitutional provision of promulgation of Internal Emergency to suspend democratic rights in 1975.

19.   The Emergency provided a template of dictatorial governance that has been perfected by the Modi regime in its fascist pursuit. It exposed the weakness of India’s judiciary, its propensity to capitulate to a domineering executive. Following this lead, the Modi government has systematically tightened its grip over the judiciary securing judicial approval for almost all its arbitrary measures and gross violations of the Constitution. During the Emergency, the press still reflected considerable spirit of freedom and the autocratic Emergency dispensation had to impose press censorship to secure the compliance of the press. This however only added to the popular discontent. With the full backing of the regime’s loyal corporate cronies who also control much of today’s mainstream media, the television channels in particular, the Modi government and the RSS have managed to transform the very nature of the media, reducing it to what has come to be popularly known as ‘godi media’ or lapdog/embedded media. Meanwhile journalists who actually do their job are facing systematic persecution and even assassination.

20.  The Emergency was proclaimed by invoking the bogey of external and internal threat to the country. The declaration of Indira Gandhi’s 1971 election as null and void by the Allahabad High Court, which was upheld by the Supreme Court, was treated as the most concrete example of this threat. The logic of equating the country with the government of the day, and hence dubbing opposition to the government an anti-national act, had been central to the Emergency. With the promulgation of Emergency, almost all prominent opposition leaders were thus sent to jail and political liberties were suspended to give the government a free hand to make and enforce policies and run the country as it pleased. The Modi government has expanded this logic and template of governance with the added weapon of communal polarization and Islamophobia. Opposition to the Modi government is interpreted as both anti-India and anti-Hindu, and armed with draconian laws, false cases, troll armies and lynch squads, the Sangh brigade has developed a full-scale machinery to silence every opposition to the government. Digital technologies facilitate a massive expansion of surveillance and are used to frame and falsely incriminate dissenters and human rights defenders as well as to exclude the poor and the marginalised from access to resources.

21.  The post-Emergency period witnessed some expansion of social inclusion and democratic decentralisation through partial implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations and institutionalisation of the panchayati raj system. But with the adoption of the neo-liberal policy framework since early 1990s social and economic inequality has been again on the rise and democratic rights have been subjected to a steady erosion. Forcible acquisition of land and other natural resources and displacement of Adivasis and farmers and persecution of protesters as Maoists became routine in resource-rich areas of Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand. The Modi regime has taken this neo-liberal policy offensive to a new plane of aggression resulting in massive displacement and dispossession, and unprecedented levels of unemployment. Labour laws and recruitment policies are being redesigned to fragment the organised working class and erode its fighting power and historically achieved rights. But even as people are enraged by this growing economic misery and uncertainty, the Sangh brigade weaponises the desperation of the people and misleads their anger by subsuming it in their overwhelming hate campaign. The Sangh propaganda invokes the well-entrenched notions of fatalism and obscurantism to make the people blame anybody or anything but the government of the day for all their ailments and projects the assertion of the supremacy of the Hindu identity and the act of saving the Hindu identity from imagined threats as the biggest achievement of the Modi government before which every other issue should pale into insignificance.

22.  Saving India from this vortex of fascist disaster and destruction is the most urgent challenge before revolutionary communists today. This of course calls for the broadest possible unity and cooperation among all democratic forces and ideological streams. In India this unity has come to be popularly expressed as defence of the Constitution and the legacy of the freedom movement and saving the country and its resources and infrastructure from outright corporate takeover. Powerful movements have emerged in defence of the Constitution and against privatisation which reflect an unprecedented scale of unity and resolve as witnessed in the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act and most strikingly in the historic farmers' movement against the Modi government's bid to promote corporate takeover of India's agrarian economy. Revolutionary communists will have to combine the courage with which civil society activists have been braving the persecution of the fascist regime with the unity and tenacity displayed by the ongoing movements to energise the opposition and intensify resistance on all fronts. In contrast to the civil society and people's movements, the bourgeois opposition has generally speaking proven to be vulnerable to the fascist onslaught, especially to the lure of money and fear of blackmail and vendetta. The diversity and complexity of India's political landscape, the continuing decline of the Congress and the absence of any other powerful party with all-India presence has made the current juncture rather tailormade for the BJP at the all-India plane. But even though the BJP today is the most predominant party in the present phase, it is certainly not electorally invincible or irresistible as has been seen in quite a few states. The forging of a dynamic and determined united opposition on all-India level and in major states will be crucial to weaken the BJP and oust the Modi regime in the upcoming electoral battle.

23.  We must however note that the opposition unity currently building up in India is not yet informed by a common anti-fascist consciousness or commitment. While the regime draws its core strength from the RSS network, many opposition parties are not ready to oppose the RSS and challenge its vicious campaign of hate, lies and terror. There is also a broad consensus among most opposition parties around the basic direction of neoliberal economic policies and pro-US foreign policy. The question of draconian laws, state repression and persecution, directed systematically against dissenting citizens and people’s movements, also remains conspicuously neglected in the opposition agenda. While welcoming, facilitating and joining the broadest possible unity of opposition parties and forces, communists must therefore retain and exercise their full political and ideological independence to wage a comprehensive and effective resistance against fascism.

24.   We must keep it in mind that fascism cannot be decisively defeated by just voting out the Modi government. The Sangh brigade has accumulated enough strength to withstand a defeat or two. What is needed is an emphatic rejection of its ideology and politics that can relegate it back to the margins of Indian politics and society. While Narendra Modi clearly plays a central role in spearheading this fascist offensive and securing the kind of vote share the BJP currently enjoys on the all-India plane, and the Modi personality cult has dwarfed other leaders in the Sangh stable, historically the Sangh has continued to produce a long chain of leadership in every phase. As champions of consistent democracy and radical social transformation, communists must therefore be ready to wage a protracted and thorough-going resistance to give a fitting rebuff to the fascist offensive. Ambedkar had described the Constitution as the top dressing of democracy on an undemocratic soil. He had identified caste as the biggest impediment to modern India and called for its complete annihilation to ensure social equality and liberty. The most regressive ideas, attitudes and practices rooted in India’s oppressive social structure, especially the well-entrenched Brahminical caste system and patriarchy, feed into the fascist offensive and gain fresh strength and legitimacy in this anti-democratic environment. To defeat fascism, communists, while basing on the might of ongoing struggles of various classes and sections of the people, must champion every progressive and transformative strand of Indian history and culture, especially powerful anti-caste and anti-patriarchal struggles and quests for equality, rationality and plurality in Indian society and history.

25.  If fascism is seen as a huge disaster to have befallen India, the goal of anti-fascist resistance has to be both rescuing and rebuilding India to overcome the disaster and the damage and devastation in its trail. The weaknesses and inconsistencies of India's nation-building process and the compromises and collusion of India's bourgeois democracy with feudal survivals, colonial hangover and imperialist designs have enabled the fascist forces to grab power and unleash the ongoing redefining of Indian nationalism and remodelling of India's governance on the basis of Hindutva. The basics of rule of law have already taken a big blow and the prolongation and entrenchment of this fascist rule will derail the very constitutional vision and framework of modern India. Revolutionary communists must therefore get ready for a protracted, comprehensive and determined resistance to rescue India from the clutches of fascism and rebuild India on the basis of robust and thorough-going democracy ensuring full social freedom, political liberty and cultural diversity for all sections of Indian people. Saving the Constitution should not be seen as a defensive slogan and an endorsement of the status quo. It means realizing the commitments made in the Preamble where India is defined as a sovereign, democratic, socialist, secular republic and all citizens are promised liberty, equality, fraternity and comprehensive justice, social, economic and political. It also means intensification of the quest for a more humane and equitable international order overcoming the growing capitalist decadence and unsustainability.  While fascism threatens to destroy democracy in India and push us back, victorious anti-fascist resistance will reclaim the republic, release the people’s energy and initiative and transform India into a bastion of consistent democracy and comprehensive people’s rights.