It was one hundred years ago, to this day in October 1922, Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy by ‘Marching on Rome’ with about 30,000 men from his goon squads. Earlier, in a speech before thousands of his supporters, Mussolini had declared, “Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome.” As tens of thousands of ‘Black shirts’, the uniform of his fascist youth organisation converged on Rome, Prime Minister Luigi Facta wanted to declare a ‘State of Siege’ and advised King Victor Emmanuel III to mobilise the army. Instead, the King caved in and asked Mussolini to form the government.
Mussolini, who was supported by the military, the business class, the Church and right-wing political forces, was sworn into office on October 29, 1922. Only a year before that, in 1921, Mussolini had formed the National Fascist Party without any clear programme. In front of a crowd of 60,000 people in Milan on October 24, he had declared “Our programme is simple. We want to rule Italy.” Ambition could not have been stated in simpler terms.
Mussolini thus captured power ‘legally’, with no apparent violation of the Italian Constitution. The transition was made possible simply by the surrender of public authorities to fascist intimidation.
Inspired by Mussolini, Hitler gained power in Germany in 1933 but added the idea of an Aryan ‘master race’ to his fascist state. It would be much easier to eliminate the Jews, he figured, if the German people were made to believe that there was such a thing as the Aryan ‘master race’, and that the Jews did not belong to that race, and were therefore sub-human.
Today, variations of fascism thrive in a number of countries and ‘neo-fascist’ groups have come to power through the electoral process in several democracies. These groups typically preach ultra-nationalism and spew hatred on racial or ethnic minorities. From Hungary to Sweden to France, the trend in Europe is clear – the extreme right is on the rise, as it was in pre-Second World War Europe.
Not many are aware that a prominent Indian, the then head of the Hindu Mahasabha, was so inspired by European right-wing parties, especially Mussolini and fascism, that he travelled to the continent, and to Rome specifically, to meet the dictator personally and learn about fascism and its pre-eminent party – the National Fascist Party. He brought and implanted those ideas and fascist organisation onto Indian soil, which started bearing fruit in the 1990s. That man was B S Moonje.
Balakrishna Shivram Moonje
Moonje, born in 1872 at Bilaspur, Madhya Pradesh, was a doctor in the Bombay Municipal Corporation. He left his job to take part in the Boer War in South Africa as the King’s Commissioned Officer. Moonje was initially part of the Indian National Congress, but following the death of Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1920, moved away from Congress. He disagreed with the two main principles of Gandhi: non-violence and secularism. His association with the Hindu Mahasabha increased and he was also the mentor of K B Hedgewar, who founded the RSS in 1925.
Moonje was the president of the Hindu Mahasabha from 1927 until he handed over charge to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1937. He attended the Round Table Conferences (RTC) in London in 1930 and 1931, despite strong opposition from Congress leaders against his views.
In 1931, after attending the second RTC, Moonje travelled to Italy, where he met with Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and was given a guided tour on the militarisation of society through organisations such as Balilla, the Academia Della Farnesina and others. His most important visit was to the Italian fascist youth organisation, the Opera Nazionale Balilla.
As he himself noted in his diary, Moonje was deeply influenced by the fascist organisations, in which he saw an opportunity to militarise Hindu society to fight against both internal and external threats. After returning from Italy, he set up the Central Hindu Military Education Society in 1935 and the Bhonsala Military School in 1937, both at Nasik.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh (RSS) later appropriated this model on a larger scale and built itself up on the lines of the Balilla in recruitment and organisational setup.
Though we were under colonial boots at the time of the founding of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, the nationalism and militarisation of the Hindu youth by these organisations were not directed at the British. An internal ‘enemy’ was needed for the success of the militarisation project. And that enemy was identified in Savarkar’s book ‘Essentials of Hindutva’, published in 1923. Those who do not consider ‘Bharatvarsha’ as their ‘pitr-bhoomi’ and ‘punya-bhoomi’ are aliens in our land and have to be thrown out. Obviously, they were Muslims and Christians, for their ‘punya-bhoomi’ was in Mecca and Bethlehem, respectively, even if their ‘pitr-bhoomi’ was in India.
Giorgia Meloni
Today, Italy has come full circle as Giorgia Meloni, leader of the ‘Fratelli d Italy (FdI) or ‘Brothers of Italy’, which traces its origins to the National Fascist Party, was sworn in as Prime Minister on October 22. Meloni started as a journalist and became a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy in 2006. She has led ‘Brothers of Italy’ since 2014. Her party leader declared proudly on the day of its election victory, “We are the heirs of Il Duce.”
Meloni describes herself as a Catholic–Christian and a conservative and says she defends “God, fatherland, and family”. Opposed to the immigration of non-European migrants and multi-culturalism, she is seen as xenophobic and Islamophobic.
Despite her party’s fascist origins, Meloni is seen as distancing herself from openly aligning with the old fascist organisation. Fascism is still a dirty word in Europe, though xenophobia and Islamophobia are not. Media analysts are now saying, “She is no Mussolini but a Trump”. Hardly comforting.
What is worrying, however, is that the heirs of Moonje and the cadre that came out of his organisation and later the RSS Shakas, with all their admiration for Mussolini and Hitler, today control the levers of power in India. They don’t call themselves fascists, of course; they call themselves ‘nationalist’ and ‘Hindutva-vadi’.
Postscript: More than a decade ago, Peter Martland of Cambridge University discovered that Mussolini was paid 100 pounds a week by Britain in 1917, equal to about 6,000 pounds today. It remains to be seen, when more archival material comes out, as to who paid for Moonje’s trips to London and Rome. He was, after all, a King’s Commissioned Officer and fought for the British Empire in South Africa.
(The writer is a former Cabinet Secretariat official)