Former general secretary and CPM's interim coordinator Prakash Karat on Thursday, March 6, gave a new spin to the CPM central leadership's assertion that the Narendra Modi-led BJP dispensation has still not metamorphosed into a neo-fascist regime. 

While delivering the inaugural address at the CPM State Conference that began in Kollam, Karat said that the CPM had never called the BJP regime fascist. 

Apparently, it was Opposition Leader V D Satheesan's charge that the CPM was going soft on the BJP that prompted Karat's additional clarification on neo-fascism, a term the CPM is using for the first time in relation to the RSS-BJP combine. "I am amused to find that the Congress leaders in Kerala, who seem to be experts on fascism, are critiquing our use of the term neo-fascist and our reasoning that the BJP government is displaying neo-fascistic tendencies," Karat said with a tinge of sarcasm. "I saw today's paper in which V D Satheesan has said that earlier the CPM had used the term fascism and now they have given up the term because they don't want to fight the BJP, because they have gone soft on the BJP. He also claims that our early resolutions had called the Modi government fascist," Karat said, and added: "I don't think he had read our earlier resolutions."

Karat said Satheesan only had to read the CPM's 2018 Hyderabad resolution to realise that he was wrong. He said the 2018 Hyderabad resolution spoke of "emerging fascistic trends". Here is what the Hyderabad resolution says about the Modi government: "This regime is characterised by an intensified pursuit of neo-liberal policies, resulting in all-round attacks on the working people; the concerted effort to implement the RSS’s Hindutva agenda which threatens the secular democratic framework of the State, attacks on minorities and Dalits and the emergence of fascistic trends."

This is how Karat's reasoning goes. "In that (the 2018 resolution) we recognised that there are emerging fascistic trends. Today, seven years later, we are saying they are displaying fascistic characteristics. It is no more emerging." 

Here's that "displaying" portion in the latest 2025 resolution: "The push to impose a reactionary Hindutva agenda and the authoritarian drive to suppress the opposition and democracy displays neo-fascist characteristics."

It is hard to spot the difference between 'emerge' and 'display'. If at all there is, it is only a matter of an insignificant degree. 

The moot point, therefore, is: Between 2018 and 2025 has the CPM not discerned even a slight sharpening of neo-fascist tendencies within the BJP regime? 

The central leadership has already said no, notwithstanding Karat's semantic balancing act at the state conference. 

When the wordings in the Draft Political Resolution sowed confusion, the CPM had issued a clarificatory note. 

The note recalls that the draft resolution states that the power mechanism under the BJP-RSS combine "displays neo-fascist characteristics". "However, we have not said that the Modi government is fascistic or neo-fascistic," it says.

The note further recalls that the resolution has also stated that "eleven years of the Modi government’s rule have resulted in the consolidation of the rightwing, communal, authoritarian forces with neo-fascist characteristics". "By 'characteristics' we mean tendencies or symptoms. It (the Modi dispensation) has not yet become a fascist government. We were only warning that if the BJP-RSS combine was not stopped in its tracks, the excessive powers in the hands of Hindutva-corporate elements could lead to neo-fascism," it says.

Read along with the CPM's first clarification, Karat's additional clarification seems to suggest that the right-wing, communal and authoritarian tendencies displayed is still in a nascent or inchoate stage to really call the BJP regime neo-fascist.

By introducing the term neo-fascist, the CPM, basically, wants to differentiate neo-fascism from the classical fascism that existed during the interwar period, the kind exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler. Original fascist forces like Hitler and Mussolini had dumped democracy the moment they captured power. Not so with the neo-fascists. Neo-fascists don't abandon elections once in power, instead they use it to carry forward their political project. But at the same time, the CPM says, they use authoritarian power to stifle the opposition and to achieve their ends. They work within the democratic system and subverts it from within. 

The BJP, by Karat's own admission, has still not achieved this project.