Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics (though this week, it intersects quite a bit with global politics).

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On February 21, the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni speaking via video link at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC on February 21, launched a broad attack at the left, arguing that the rise of the global right has frustrated them.

As she did so, she mentioned Modi as part of the global right that was resisting the left:

“When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created the global leftist liberal network in the 90s, they were called statesmen. Today, when [Donald] Trump, Meloni, [Javier] Milei, or maybe [Narendra] Modi talk, they are called a threat to democracy. This is the left’s double standard, but we are used to it. And the good news is people no longer believe in their lies. Despite all the mud they throw at us, citizens keep voting for us.”

The fact that a Western politician praised Modi and included him in the pantheon of the global right would please many supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its Hindutva ideology. For some time now, Hindutva ideologues in India have clamoured for exactly this sort of recognition, as they looked to the right in the West for inspiration, tactics and vocabulary.

Taking notes

Take George Soros, for example. Last year in December, BJP MPs plunged the Lok Sabha into chaos with allegations that the Congress party was in cahoots with the Hungarian-American billionaire-philanthropist. “Congress ka haath Soros ke saath,” as BJP MP Nishikant Dubey put it in Hindi rhyme. The Congress is hand-in-hand with Soros

For some time now, the BJP has invoked Soros as a way to attack the Congress. This is remarkable given the fact that Soros is relatively unknown in India. But he is a major figure in the United States, where the right attacks him for funding liberal causes. Al Jazeera describes Soros as the “ultimate villain in [American] conservative circles”. Even Donald Trump has attacked the billionire.

The BJP is so tuned into US right-wing politics that it simply imported Soros conspiracy theories from the West ock, stock and barrel.

More evidence of this inspiration can be found in the very vocabulary of Hindutva in India. In 2023, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat launched an attack on “woke” people: a term so unfamiliar to his listeners that he had to go on to comically describe “woke” as “jage huye” [people who are awake] in Hindi.

Several BJP politicians have launched attacks on purported attempts to “bring in Sharia law into India”. The phrasing is aalso direct import from the American right, surreally ignoring the fact that sharia or Islamic law is actually law in India as part of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937.

The BJP has enthusiastically capitalised on the rise of Islamophobia in the West in the wake of the War on Terror to advance its anti-minority politics at home.

This fascination with the Western right peaked with the rise of Donald Trump and his unabashed Islamophobia. In a zany turn of events, Hindutva supporters in India even conducted public prayers for Trump. Modi, in an unusual move for an Indian prime minister, endorsed Trump for president in 2019.

A global alliance

What is driving this sudden urge to create a global rightist coalition? Part of the reason is, as Meloni herself put in, the fact that leftists and liberals have been doing something similar for some time now. Communists have explicit international organisational links and liberals often create networks via institutions such as think tanks.

The right has lagged behind, until now.

This urge to catch up has driven close cooperation between elements of the Western right. Trump, for example, both backed and benefited from the UK’s Brexit decision. Right-wing American billionaire Elon Musk has explicitly supported far-right politics in the United Kingdom and Germany. On a much smaller scale, there is also some coordination between White nationalists in the West and Hindutva supporters in India. In a ground report I did from the United Kingdom, I found the far right in the UK often feeding off Hindutva platforms such as OpIndia.

Speed bumps

Unfortunately, for the right, there is a fundamental contradiction in creating international linkages given that almost all right-wing ideologies have parochialism as a core feature. This, in fact, has sharply come to fore with respect to Hindutva in India after Trump assumed office as American president in January. As part of his “America First” ideology, Trump has humiliated Indian undocumented migrants, sending them back in chains. He has also threatened India with high tariffs, singling it out for criticism as the “king of tariffs”.

A passive Modi has swallowed these insults, being wary of American power but also faced by the fact that the BJP lacks a language to attack a person that it has for so long admired.

A 2024 tweet by the Washington DC-based National Conservatism Conference put this faultline in focus. The post featured a photo of the BJP’s Ram Madhav joining his hands in a namaste gesture with the text asking if the next convention should be held in India. This simple exchange saw an ugly racist backlash from the organisation’s supporters.

“The millions of Indians flooding western countries do not care about our culture, they are an invasive species,” said a reply from a White nationalist.

Many Hindutva supporters might look to the Western right for inspiration, but given that White nationalism often drives the latter, these warm feelings are often not reciprocated. The intrinsic insular nature of the right means international cooperation is difficult if not impossible.

That said, while Hindutva supporters may be enamoured by Western rightists, it is unclear whether it really needs them. Hindutva is a movement with deep roots in India. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s parent organisation, was founded a century ago. The Jana Sangh, the first iteration of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was born in 1951. Modi’s politics has decades of ideological and organisational work behind it. The Western right has little to do with Hindutva’s success – and even if it were to embrace India’s largest party, it would hardly benefit from this in any concrete way.

In the end, there is little to link right-wing politics in the West and in India. The only place they do intersect, it seems, is on Islamophobia. It is from this area that Hindutva has borrowed narratives from the right in the West which, due to the War on Terror, has demonised Muslims for more than two decades now.

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