Education Markets and Rise of the Neo-Fascist State in India

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The Continued Relevance of the State: Theorizing the Role of the State in 21st Century Global Educational Reforms

Proposal

The commodification and marketization of education in India has been accompanied by overt signs toward state fascism in recent years. This apparently contradictory movement of state authoritarianism and the dominance of markets and market rules in the education sector (and other sectors) in India needs to be theorized as interrelated phenomena. In conventional analysis, the efforts of the ruling Hindu right-wing party in the education sector are often interpreted as ‘nationalistic’ and ‘culturalist’ and at odds with a rapidly privatizing education sector with global aspirations. In this paper, I argue that these seemingly opposing currents are interlinked and represent a new stage in global capitalism where erstwhile Third World countries such as India attempt to reposition themselves as powerful economies within a new imperial geopolitics. In this new stage of global capitalism, the education sector features prominently in the Indian policy context both in terms of its profit potential and as vital for a new state formation.
The growth of education markets in India and market logics in general points to the encapsulation of national societies within a ‘global’ or universal modernity as it were, that echoes the claims of ‘world culture’ theorists (Meyer and Ramirez, 2000). However, the cultural politics of the Indian state and its educational interventions contradict ‘world culture’ theory in ways that cannot be understood simply as ‘local’ institutional variance or cultural specificity and needs to be theorized as part of contemporary state-capital dynamics. My analysis therefore aligns more closely with Dale’s (2000) work on the globally structured educational agenda (GSEA) that posits wealth accumulation as the central problematic of the state, extending this neo-Marxist analysis within a postcolonial framework that foregrounds the cultural logics of the state-capital dynamics, with India as my case study.
In this paper, I chart key educational transformations and education state policy of the last fifteen years in India, showing how elements of neo-fascism have been present even prior to the 2014 electoral victory of the BJP, the Hindu Right-wing party that is publicly known for its fascist agenda and sympathies. I clarify how the growth of education markets and privatization has been accompanied by much greater state intervention in this period than has ever been present in the postcolonial period. The state has been deploying a mix of regulatory policies, disciplinary measures and welfare-type schemes. In other words, state reforms are of multiple kinds that cannot all be characterized as neoliberal. In developing my central claim of the rise of the neo-fascist state in India, I draw on the work of Karl Polyani’s work, the Great Transformation (1957), and the works of postcolonial scholars such as Stuart Hall (1980), Eqbal Ahmed (2006) and Paul Gilroy (2000) explain the complex and contradictory nature of state-capital-culture dynamic relevant to our times.

References
Ahmad, E. (2006) Collected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad. Columbia University Press.
Gilroy, P. (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color line. Harvard
University Press.
Hall, S. (1980) Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In: United Nations
Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ed.) Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism. Paris:UNESCO, 305–345.
Polyani, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.
Beacon Press, New York.

Author

• Sangeeta Kamat, University of Massachusetts Amherst