Hindu Fascism in Rushdie

[Terrance]

The action of The Moor's Last Sigh describes the unwelcome
metamorphosis, over three  generations, of the hopeful India that
Rushdie had known as a child. This is arguably his most anxious and
despairing novel. From the more or less patrician hierarchies of
colonialism, through the democratic bid of the national movement, India
in The Moor's Last Sigh is consumed by a struggle between two kinds of
mafia: the “criminal-entrepreneurial” and the “political-criminal.”
These positions are taken up, respectively, by the Moor's father,
Abraham, and by Raman Fielding, a right-wing fundamentalist Hindu who
leads a revivalist party called Mumbai's Axis. (Fielding is based on the
real-life leader of Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray.) With the conquistador
name “da Gama,” Moraes' ancestors had made a fortune in the spice trade,
but now, after much thuggery and terrorism, the spice trade has become
the drug trade, and it involves a conspiracy to commandeer nuclear
weapons for the purpose of high-stakes corporate extortion. Meanwhile,
Raman “Mainduck” Fielding's legions profit well from the business scam
known as religion. The idealism of the da Gamas' past that is treated in
the earlier chapters—Francisco's involvement in the Home Rule League,
for example, or Camoens' active support for communism—disintegrates
mid-way through the novel. Moraes (who shames himself by working as a
torturer and strikebreaker for Fielding) is forced finally to admit that
the only thing that can prevent Hindu fascism in India is corruption and
bribery; the choices are religious extremism (the past's idealism gone
haywire), on the one hand, or some financial racket, on the other,
choices which hardly differ in nature or effects.