Evola in the BJP

A contributor to Swarajya, a somewhat disreputable English-language Indian magazine closely aligned with India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recently published an article supportive of the tough approach of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to the long-running (Maoist) Naxalite insurgency in central and east India. It was Kishan Kumar, “Hammer of the State: End of Naxalite Nightmare Under Modi-Shah Doctrine,” available here. 

So far, so unremarkable. What was remarkable was the article made frequent use of references to Julius Evola to drive its message home, without any explanation of who Evola was, other than that “Julius Evola taught that decadence must be met with the sword, that the regression of the modern world is not to be negotiated with but to be crushed.”

Evola, we are told, “reminds us that true authority requires the destruction of that which defies hierarchy. That is precisely what the home ministry has done.” “Evola, the article concludes, “taught us that modernity must be resisted with transcendence. India is now fighting not merely for land or law but for Dharma. The forest has been cleansed with fire. The citadels of ideology have been breached. The Kali Yuga still lingers, but the hammer has struck.”

Kishan Kumar, the author of the article, evidently knows his Evola and appreciates Evola's message. Whether he refers to him without introduction because he thinks his readers will all know who he was, or whether he is the only BJP supporter who has ever heard of Evola, is unclear. There are no other references to him in Swarajya, so perhaps the latter.

Maybe a BJP expert will read this post and help out with a  comment