Kavita Krishnan
Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent Putinist ideologue from Russia, was in Delhi last week.
There has been no critical scrutiny of his visit among political analysts, intellectuals, and democratic rights activists. This is an indifference we can ill afford.
Dugin represents a global ideological campaign against democracy that is fast gaining ground among diverse publics worldwide, including in India. If you are a defender of democracy and secularism in India, you cannot afford to ignore Dugin.
Looking Dugin in the eye is not easy for many of us – because to do so forces us to question formulations about international relations and geopolitics to which we are deeply attached. But his visit to India may make it easier to do so.
Hindu Rashtra, China and Russia As Models of Multipolarity
Speaking at an event on BRICS organised by the Russian media agency Sputnik News, Dugin said: “Russia isn’t just fighting Ukraine but challenging the unipolar world order to pave the way for a just and peaceful multipolar world.”
This is a Putinist claim, but this (or some variation of it) is also widely repeated as “common sense” among liberals and leftists in India. Dugin’s remarks in India and elsewhere urgently require them to re-examine whether that common sense is indeed good sense.
“We need to rethink all theories of international relations,”, he said, “recognising an era where forgotten civilizations are re-emerging as pivotal actors—a defining feature of multipolarity.” What are the “poles” that constitute such multipolarity? Akhand Bharat (Greater India), Greater China, Greater Russia, the Islamic world, Africa, Latin America as well as the West each constitute a civilisational power. He called for a global multipolar alliance led by Trump, Putin, Xi Jinping and Modi.
In 2019 Dugin in an article in the Seminar, declared that Modi’s electoral success is a sign of India’s rise as a multipolar power that is asserting its “civilisational” identity as a Hindu Rashtra. This Putinist praise for RSS fascism should give pause to those Indian progressives who believe Putin when he says Ukraine is “fascist.”
Putin himself, in a 2021 article declared that Ukraine was not a separate nation, but was part of Russia, since it shared the same “spiritual, human and civilisational ties formed for centuries.” In this article, Putin made it clear that he would not allow Ukraine to exist as a sovereign nation, only as a satellite of Russia.
Dugin sees two other BRICS members – China and Russia – as well as possible future members Iran and Syria as examples of such civilisational states, with which, he urges, India as a Hindu civilisational nation can build “pole-to-pole” relationships.
He sees Trump’s victory too as the “end of liberalism and Western colonial dominance”: the people of the West asserting their own civilisation values against the unipolar “ideological and geopolitical direction advocated by liberal elites.”
In the non-Western and Western world alike, he says, “Civilisation-states have overtaken nation-states as building blocks of a new international order” – a multipolar world order. This should force progressive Indians to rethink their notion that a “multipolar world order” is a threat to the West’s dominance. It is a threat only to democracy.
Democracy As Demonic Kaliyuga
We also need to wake up to the fact that certain concepts of Hindu-supremacist fascism – specifically the Manuvadi spectre of Kaliyuga as the collapse of caste and gender hierarchies – are central to the “multipolar” campaign for civilisational fascisms against democracy.
Dugin told his Indian audiences, “Liberalism and open society is translated into Indian as ‘asuravada’ (असुर वाद), the teachings of demons, the way of demons. And everything falls into place.” Both Modi and Trump push the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that democratic protest movements and opposition parties are funded by American philanthropist George Soros. India’s Minister for External Affairs, S Jaishankar, denounces all concerns about India’s democratic decline under Modi as Soros-funded plots.
Dugin gave this a Manuvadi twist: Soros, he said, is “a powerful asura (असुर). One of the avatars of the demon Kali (कलि),” an agent of the “New Age Kaliyuga.” The Congress Party, he said, was influenced by Soros’ demonic agenda. BJP propaganda says exactly the same.
Dugin’s late daughter, Daria Dugina, in a posthumously published book, gives an elaborate account of Kaliyuga as the progressive collapse of every tier of caste hierarchy. First, Kshatriyas seize power from Brahmins, then Vaishyas usurp power, and when Sudras become rulers, the descent into Kaliyuga is complete. She argues for a global application of these ideas beyond the Hindu social and political imagination. Kaliyuga, she says, is “the era of democracy and equality, the worst forms of sociopolitical organization.”
In an interview in Delhi in 2012, Dugin said “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ or, in other terms, Kaliyuga.”
Kaliyuga as the spectre of “Western/Westernised liberal elite” democracy and egalitarianism is invoked by Trumpist ideologue Steve Bannon and Trump propagandist radio host Joe Rogan. It features in memes and T-shirts in Western alt-right internet subcultures.
And of course, it is a key theme of RSS anti-Constitutionalism from Golwalkar to Bhagwat and Modi-era propaganda. Trump, Putin, and Modi along with Hitler are often projected as “Kalki” – the avatar of Vishnu who will liberate the world from Kaliyuga and usher in a new epoch of order.
Recently anti-Muslim violence broke out at Sambhal after a court ordered a survey to determine if the Mughal emperor Babur had razed a centuries-old Kalki temple to build a mosque in its place. In February this year, PM Modi laid the foundation stone for a Kalki Dham temple in Sambhal (20 km from the mosque), where he went out of his way to compare it with the Ram temple at Ayodhya, built at the spot where the Babri mosque was razed to the ground by a Hindu-supremacist mob. He also indicated that his own rule as Prime Minister indicated that “the wheel of time has turned,” and the new era initiated by Kalki had begun.
Dugin At JNU
Dugin, who denounces human rights as Kaliyuga and wants a world modelled on Manu’s caste hierarchy, was hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru University as a speaker at an event attended by the JNU Vice Chancellor herself. The Russian embassy in Delhi posted on X about his speech on “multipolar world and civilisation states.”
Who is Dugin when he is at school?
In October this year, Dugin had announced that a new academic course on “satanic Western civilisation” would be offered at the Russian State University for the Humanities. He heads the university’s lvan Ilyin Higher Political School, named after an early 20th-century Russian fascist.
He has called for orienting Russia’s education away from liberal humanities and towards the goal of “a total and comprehensive militarisation of the country, the state, the people.”
He represents the Putinisation of Russia’s education. Putin himself likes to refer to liberal democracy, feminism, human rights, queer rights, and Ukraine’s national identity as “satanic” examples of Western unipolar imperialism. In Russia under Putin, students and teachers at schools and colleges are required to gather daily in ‘Z’ formation – the letter ‘Z’ is half of the Nazi swastika, and is code for the invasion of Ukraine and for Putinism.
It is not just JNU under Modi, however, that confers legitimacy on a Putinist hack who says liberal democracy is “satanic” and “Kaliyuga”. Universities in communist-ruled China do the same.
In 2019 Fudan University in Shanghai (a public University, affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education) gave Dugin the prestigious position of senior fellow at its China Institute. In the same year, this leading Chinese University also dropped the phrase “academic independence and freedom of thought” from its charter, instead adding a clause: “The university Communist Party committee is the core leadership of the school.” It imposes “Xi Jinping Thought” as part of compulsory teacher training and student curriculum.
The China Institute is headed by Zhang Weiwei, who authored the book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State in 2011. Speaking of this book, the US-based Indian leftist Vijay Prashad says, “The peculiarities of Chinese history and the unique characteristics of Chinese socialism, which he tries to combine, is how I understand the ‘civilizational state’.” Dugin, Prashad and Weiwei are all among the contributors to the China Academy, all of whom are known for supporting Putinist narratives on Ukraine.
Democratic Standards
Fascists and tyrants both in the West and non-West (like Putin, Trump, Xi, Modi, Netanyahu, and Orban) may compete or clash on other fronts, but they collaborate in a global anti-democratic ideological coalition. Progressive Indian defenders of democracy have as yet shut their eyes to this reality, and as a result, often end up “normalising” key elements of its propaganda narrative.
One instance is of course the progressive-left reluctance, based on a concern for “multipolarity”, to back Ukraine against Russia, or even to protest Modi’s import of Russian oil for Ambani’s benefit, or the abduction of Indian workers by the Russian military.
But there are other, less obvious occasions in which anti-democracy narratives slide into our language. When we expose the double standards of Western democratic governments, we should be aiming to hold them accountable to those standards. Instead, we often point to those double standards to declare in “I-told-you-so” mode, that “Western liberal democratic standards and rules” stand “exposed.”
A rules-based world order acknowledges – in principle – that all human beings anywhere in the world are entitled to the same universal standard of democracy and human rights, and are entitled to judge their own and other states by the degree to which they comply with this standard.
We are at a moment when Netanyahu is leading the assault on the institutions of that rules-based order: the ICC, the ICJ and the UN. Putin has done the same – refused to recognise the legitimacy of the ICC arrest warrant against him.
Many otherwise pro-Israel Western democracies, members of EU and NATO, have declared that they will honour the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu. But one member of the EU and NATO has invited Netanyahu to visit: Hungary, led by the far-right Victor Orban.
A Czech civil society activist posted on X, “[The] Czech Republic is one of the most pro-Israel countries in the world, but its Deputy Foreign Minister confirmed on TV that Czech authorities – public prosecutor’s office and police – would comply with the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu, ‘just like if Putin came to visit us’.” Commenting on this post, Czech feminist scholar Tereza Hendl added, “The Czech government received a series of open letters over the last year, calling for a shift towards a less campist and more broadly just foreign policy, a whole new academic initiative was founded to discuss Palestine-Israel in CZ and the solidarity movement has been growing.”
The contrast between Hungary and The Czech Republic underlines an important point. Palestine solidarity (and other progressive movements) can be built effectively around the rulebook in a country where the government wants to be seen as rule-abiding. This is ruled out in a country where the regime leader openly salivates for the demise of democratic rules.
Many pro-Palestine voices berate Western double standards on Ukraine/Palestine, while themselves betraying a double standard in failure to support Ukraine’s resistance or the arrest warrant against Putin. Czech solidarity movements have instead held their government, and themselves accountable to the standards. That’s what standards are for.
People’s movements all over the world need to do the same. They need to pick sides and express solidarity based on common democratic standards rather than geopolitical considerations. They need to build a global movement defending democratic values and rules as a shared human aspiration and entitlement.
That is the response needed to take on the dangerous politics for which Dugin is ambassador.
Kavita Krishnan is a women’s rights activist and writer based in Delhi, India.
This article was first published on The Quint.