Oh can we stop with this bullshit? In hindsight Nazism is an almost cartoon like singular epitome of pure evil but in its day it was considered by many throughout the world not just in India to be a cutting edge political philosophy whose ideas were to be taken seriously.

Nazism like many other ideologies including some varieties of Hindutva was an offspring of 19th century Romanticism. The idea of one’s culture having a primitive yet glorious mystical past was appealing to many freedom fighters the world over and implied nothing about their feelings towards Jews or German expansion etc. Similarly the superficial adoption of e.g. the swastika doesn’t imply Germans were rushing to make a yatra to the Himalayas.

In fact the most prominent example of a “Nazi” Indian is not any RSS member but Subhash Chandra Bose. His nickname Netaji is a direct translation of “fuehrer”! He died in the Burmese jungles where, bankrolled by Berlin, he was trying to open an attack against the British colonial regime. However he wasn’t so much pro-German as he was anti-British. And that’s how India remembers him; as a freedom fighter. A couple of years ago he briefly came into the news in the US because Saikat Choudhary (the architect of the Democrat party’s “Green New Deal”) wore a t-shirt with his picture on it. When a “fascist” is on an ultra-leftists apparel, the word fascist has lost all meaning.

I’ll leave you with an assignment. Find out about the prominent Indian Muslims of they 1930’s who made pro-Nazi comments. It’s an interesting historical exercise (especially their reasons why.) but I don’t think it would reveal much about the views of todays Muslims. Do you?