The Prime Ministers of India and Australia embraced in front of 20,000 people at Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium on 9 July. Some might interpret this as a moving statement of inclusivity in a time of rising anti-immigrant hate. Except Narendra Modi is a fascist and the crowd greeting him were Hindu nationalists. Albanese, between them, stood as a hypocrite.
India is leveraging new-found clout on the world stage through these splashy international spectacles. The West has extensively courted India to join the US-led imperial camp against China. India is a formidable naval presence in the Asia-Pacific and therefore would be an important military ally if the US and China ever came to blows.
It was not guaranteed that India would pick a side, given that the country led the “non-aligned nations” during the Cold War and still maintains deep military relations with Russia. But since Modi’s 2023 Australia visit, it has become clear that India has definitively bet on the West. One expression of this new connection is that India has signed a flurry of free trade agreements with Western countries, most significantly with the USA and the UK, but also Australia.
During Modi’s Melbourne visit, it was announced that Albanese has agreed to extend uranium sales to India to help power, among other things, artificial intelligence data centres, introducing yet another circle of hell to the country.
Celebrating this trade deal, Albanese told the crowd gathered at Docklands that “the Indo-Pacific is not just the confluence of two oceans. It also symbolises the shared aspirations of like-minded democracies like India and Australia”. This statement is not just puerile; it is also a lie. Modi is a Hindu supremacist. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party) is the parliamentary wing of a Hindu nationalist movement.
India is hugely diverse in religion, language and ethnicity. The modern conception of Hinduism as a unified religion with an unchanging lineage stretching back to ancient times is driven by far-right ideologues. Although this has taken root in common sense in the West, historians of India such as Romila Thapar insist that India has never been a “Hindu nation”; that no such singular “Hinduism” has even existed, and instead a multitude of intermingling religious strands have coexisted in India, borrowing and sharing from each other. Yet the BJP claims that India is rightfully a Hindu nation; that this Hinduness was stolen and corrupted by Muslims (and to a lesser extent the British during colonisation). Their goal is to recapture India for Hindus and expunge so-called outsiders.
If Pauline Hanson were Indian, the BJP would be her party. It shares the politics and principles of the international far right: in particular, anti-immigrant hatred and authoritarianism. Since taking power in 2014, the BJP has built fascist politics in the state and on the streets. At a parliamentary level, the Indian state has stripped citizenship from millions of people and forced the deportation of hundreds. In recent elections in the state of West Bengal, the BJP excluded up to 9 million people from voting on the basis of questioning their citizenship; the majority were Muslims in areas unlikely to vote for the BJP.
Large Hindu nationalist outfits operate throughout civil society; the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) coordinates militias modelled on the brownshirts of twentieth-century Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. It is possible that more than a million people are organised in these violent bodies, and millions more participate in women’s organisations, a trade union network, indigenous people’s groups, charities and schools, spreading Hindu nationalist ideology throughout Indian society.
Billionaires have bankrolled the BJP’s rise. Modi could not have come to power, and held it, without the support of India’s capitalist class. After Modi proved his business acumen as chief minister of Gujarat in the early 2000s, and despite the anti-Muslim pogroms for which he was responsible in that state, important sections of capital shifted their political allegiances from the Indian National Congress towards the BJP. Today the heavyweights of Indian business support the BJP, bar none.
This is the project that Western capitalism is assisting and Albanese is embracing. The international free trade deals, including the one signed by Australia, are part of a vicious class war Modi has launched against Indian farmers and workers. In 2025, Modi changed labour laws to supercharge industrialisation, for which he is soliciting international investment. If Modi succeeds, this process will benefit big capitalists, and could force millions of low wage workers and small vendors into destitution.
India’s free trade deal with the USA has given the green light to privatisation in agriculture, which still employs most of India’s labour force and is seen to be an unproductive sector. If the USA’s agricultural capitalists get a foothold into India, they will wipe the floor with India’s farmers, who already face a crisis of poverty.
The BJP has broad popular support and deep social roots. Nonetheless, there are cracks in its reign. Five years ago, a militant and prolonged farmers’ protest defeated a series of laws aimed at agricultural privatisation. In recent months workers have formed new trade unions in a wildcat strike wave. A satirical political party, the Cockroach Janata Party, has become wildly popular on social media, protesting youth unemployment and the brutal competitiveness of India’s education system.
Albanese told the media that people should “chill out a bit” and he wouldn’t “pass comment on some of the internal politics of India”. The truth is that Labor is willing to ignore the brutal politics emanating from India in the interests of profit or military alliances. If Labor had any integrity, it would condemn Modi and the BJP. Instead it is normalising India’s particular brand of fascist politics.
