While discussing the alarming ongoing rise of fascism in India, we often look for analogies with Hitler's Nazi Germany. There are of course quite a few striking similarities, but there is a fundamental difference that we cannot and must not miss. Unlike Germany, India is a former colony, and today's Indian fascists, whose predecessors collaborated with the British rulers during the colonial era, bolster their power with the authoritarianism and contempt for the people which is the colonial legacy, even as they simultaneously try to use the language of decolonization to advance their agenda. In fact, it is the US under Trump which is closest to Germany under Hitler today, offering us another classic case of the fusion of imperialism and fascism which characterized Nazi Germany. Several recent developments concerning the Trump Administration make it quite glaring.
After using tariffs and trade as a tool of aggression and backing Israel in its genocidal campaign in Gaza and assault on Iran, since the beginning of 2026 the Trump Administration has unleashed a series of overtly military threats and steps to reinforce the declining power of the US empire. In Venezuela we witnessed a novel kind of CIA operation. Following a failed coup attempt two decades ago to oust Hugo Chavez, this time the CIA abducted President Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores while Trump openly talked about 'running Venezuela' and controlling Venezuela's enormous oil resources. As many as thirty two Cuban soldiers embraced martyrdom in defending Venezuela and the Trump Administration makes no secret of the fact that a regime change in Socialist Cuba remains its ultimate objective in Latin America and the Caribbean region.
Around the same time Trump also stepped up his aggressive rhetoric about the US plan to acquire Greenland which has been an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Earlier he had even made provocative remarks about turning Canada into the 51st state of the United States of America. Most atrocious has been the launch of a so-called Board of Peace by Trump at the World Economic Forum with the cooperation and participation of twenty countries (out of sixty countries invited by the Trump Administration) intended to ensure not just permanent US-Israel control over Gaza but to virtually replace the very architecture of the United Nations. While Trump launched the Board of Peace under his own lifelong chairmanship, his son-in-law Jared Kushner unveiled a $30 billion masterplan to 'develop' Gaza by destroying the Palestinian population and culture and transforming Gaza into an artificially engineered corporate centre of tourism and entertainment. Meanwhile, the US has also indicated its readiness to intervene in Iran using the mass upheaval in the country on the issues of livelihood and democracy as a pretext.
Ironically, the western world, which remained conspicuously silent over the US aggression against Venezuela and the abduction of President Maduro and by and large also kept mum or actively colluded in the continuing US-backed Israel-led genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory, reacted quite strongly on the issue of Greenland. Canadian President Mark Carney took the lead to appeal to the ‘middle powers’ of Europe and beyond not to toe the US line with the illusion of 'buying safety', but to explore alternative options and assert strategic autonomy, and more or less the entire European Union and overwhelming majority of NATO rallied around Denmark and Greenland against the US attempt to grab Greenland by hook or by crook. The Board of Peace project and the Gaza masterplan have also not received any significant support beyond a select small group of US allies.
Alongside this imperialist expedition to reinforce America's financial and military domination, the Trump Administration has also unleashed a campaign of brutal state terror within the US to crush all dissent against Trump's anti-immigrant fascist and racist agenda. Minneapolis, the city which had been the epicenter of powerful 'Black Lives Matter' protests following the brutal killing of an African American citizen George Floyd has now been witness to a barbaric reign of state terror by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents and the Border Patrol wing of Homeland Security, including the killing of two US citizens who were taking part in peacefully defending their neighbourhoods from ICE, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in two successive cases of summary execution. America's imperialist foreign policy of financial and military aggression abroad has now found its fascist complement in its descent into a rogue police state at home. Eight decades after the defeat of Hitler, the US is now being haunted by the classic Nazi convergence of imperialism and fascism, inflected of course by America’s own unique history of white supremacy and global empire.
In many ways, the Sangh-BJP fascist project in India dovetails into the fusion of imperialism and fascism in the US under Trump. The politics of communal polarisation which for long focused on fomenting a permanent state of war hysteria vis-a-vis Pakistan now revolves around the bogey of demographic threat from alleged infiltration from Bangladesh. In the realm of foreign policy, the Modi government follows a line of total acquiescence to the US-Israel axis even as Indian goods and services face punitive US tariffs and Indian citizens are being deported from the US to India in chains and handcuffs. The words used to justify state terror and persecution are also uncannily similar – the Modi government uses terms like urban Naxals, anti-nationals and andolanjeevi to silence dissenting voices while the Trump Administration describes victims of US state terror as 'professional agitators', 'domestic terrorists' and 'Leftwing insurrectionists'. While extending full support to anti-imperialist anti-fascist and anti-racist struggles in the US and other parts of the world, we need to sharpen our own struggles within India against fascism and imperialism.
