Two Fuhrers across time

Hitler’s Third Reich had a single motto: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’: one people, one empire, one leader. Nazis considered themselves the Herrenvolk, a master-race of pure Aryans. Their aim was to create a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ of the master-race where ‘inferior’ humans like Jews, Romans and Slavs had to be exterminated.

Today, the above is epitomized in Fuhrer Modi’s Hindutva and the Indian multitude that has fallen prey to its lethal seduction. The genocidal Nazi template has become the horrific path RSS/BJP/Modi has adopted in Occupied Kashmir and India. Modi emulates Hitler; two Fuhrers across time, both self-declared genocidal custodians of the mythical master-race.

On May 1 and 2, I wrote in these pages – in a two-part article ‘The myth of a secular India’ – about the RSS, a surrogate of Nazism, and its absolute take-over of India and all its institutions. The articles were based on facts recorded internationally and within India. The sheer volume of invective-laden emails I received from Indians within India and around the globe is an alarming indicator of how fast and how far and wide this inferno of hatred has spread with radicalism being accepted, adored and embraced.

In the article, I had traced the recorded nexus between RSS/Hindutva and Nazi ideology and how Indian Army Chief Gen Rawat, an RSS mouthpiece, was dismayed at the increase of Muslims in Assam terming it a ‘continuous migration from Bangladesh’s need for lebensraum’ (territory deemed necessary by a nation for its natural development – a concept first used by Hitler in 'Mein Kampf') and the subsequent cancellation of four million Muslim names from India's National Register of Citizens. Fuhrer Modi revoked Article 370 and Article 35-A only to implement Hitler's lebensraum policy in Occupied Kashmir. The RSS/BJP ideology and actions are exactly those of Hitler in creating a Nazi Germany.

The beliefs of Savitri Devi Mukherji, born as Maximiani Portas, are being resurrected in Modi’s India. Savitri Devi (sun goddess in Sanskrit), daughter of a Greek-Italian father and English mother, earned two Masters Degrees and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Lyon in France and was fluent in eight languages. She traveled to India in the early 1930s to ‘uncover and obtain the Aryan culture’ and converted to Hinduism.

Savitri came to believe that after Hitler’s third Reich, India was the only true Aryan homeland. In 1940, she married, Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Brahmin Nazi-lover who took out ‘The New Mercury’, a Nazi mouthpiece.

Savitri’s biography by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is titled ‘Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo Nazism’. In 1939, in her booklet ‘A Warning to the Hindus’ she urged Indian nationalists to embrace their Hindu identity and guard themselves against non-Aryan influences. She declared Christianity and Islam the enemy of India.

She also scorned the Congress for its secular policies and said there was no India but a Hindu one. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat echoed the words in an Oct 27, 2017 speech to RSS workers at Indore where he brazenly said: “Whose country is Germany, it is a country of Germans, Britain is of Britishers and America is of Americans; Hindustan is a country of Hindus only”.

Savtri regarded Hinduism as the only living Aryan heritage in the world. She greatly admired the Brahmins whom she saw as the single pure race, and was convinced that only Hinduism could take on and oppose the Judaeo-Christian heritage. She advocated that the ‘final solution’ (Nazi ideology for Jewish extermination) was the merciless elimination of ‘enemies’ and that the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem was their expulsion from the German lebensraum (as planned for Occupied Kashmir today).

In 1945, Savitri travelled to Germany where she was arrested for distributing pro-Nazi pamphlets. In prison she etched ‘Heil Hitler’ on her cell walls. After being released, she went around Europe to visit all the sites associated with Hitler. When with like-minded people in India and elsewhere, she exchanged Nazi salutes; a ritual still practised in RSS cadres. In her book, ‘Gold in the Furnace’, Savitri “did not regard the destruction of the Third Reich as the end of Nazism but a purification; a trial by fire that would separate the base metal from the gold; a prelude to a new beginning”.

In 1982, Savitri died in London. Her ashes were taken to the US where they were placed alongside those of George Rockwell, longest serving leader of the American Nazi Party, in Matthias Koehl’s (a former Marine, neo-Nazi politician and Savitri disciple) Nazi ‘hall of honor’ at Arlington. A displayed picture of Savitri was draped with a funeral sash said to have belonged to Hitler as Third Reich music played in the background. This was the final resting place of Savitri Mukherjee who believed Hitler to be a ‘devta’, the Western incarnation of Vishnu who had come to save the world.

Hitler, Savitri and Modi were (are) a lethal amalgam of hate and contradictions. Savitri was so devastated by Hitler’s defeat in World War 2 that in June 1945 she tried to commit suicide by drowning herself in the Indian Ocean near Varkala on the Malabar Coast. In an August 28, 1965 letter to George Rockwell from Braunau (Austrian town and birth-place of Hitler) Savitri wrote: “As I walked into the water, a command flashed into my mind; live…I walked out of the sea for the sake of that future…for that alone and started living without hope, only for hatred’s sake”.

To be continued

The writer is a freelance contributor.

Email: miradnanaziz@gmail.com