Letters: A return to fascism

Apropos Mihir S Sharma's piece, "Like frogs in warm water" (July 25), India faces danger from three sources: externally, there is China-supported Pakistan, with its death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy; internally, the persistent attacks by Maoists, and the exploitation of tribals by capitalists and upper castes. Apart from these, we have the Hindu right wing, which is focused on taking away from people their freedom of choice, labelling all dissent anti-national and imposing a uni-culture domain on the secular polity and diversity of India. They are doing so through a series of well-calibrated small steps, not just in politics and economic policy, but also in food, history, dress, language, films and so on. In today's world, fascism has to take a form different from the earlier one in Italy or Germany in the inter-war years. But the result is the same: emasculation of liberal democracy.

P Datta, Kolkata

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