When I look at my friend’s social media accounts every morning and read the headlines, I can see that defiance is up. Joining fellow students taking to the streets in December 2019 to protest against the newly passed CAA, I was afraid that this act of dissent would soon be forgotten.

When the FRRO office in Chennai told me that I had to leave India on trumped-up charges connected with my participation in the protests, I thought back to the comparison to the Nazis I had carried on a placard during my last demonstration.

Especially at home in Germany, I would face many critical questions as to whether this comparison was warranted. Indeed many people felt that the Indian government was justified in making me leave for calling them fascists.

To start with the baseline: India is not a fascist dictatorship as of now. But the BJP government has a lot of what it takes to make India one – if the public’s indifference and complicit, silent support for Hindutva allow them to. Here, the years 1933-1945 come into play.

In 1933, the Nazis had just been elected and had started testing how far they could go. Only the partly active support and partly passive consent of a majority of Germans, as well as appeasement from other countries, gave them a free ticket to ramp up their full regime of terror.

The consequences are known: World War II claimed 70 million lives, including those of six million Jews that the Nazis had first humiliated as second-class citizens before deporting them to extermination camps.

Also read: German Student Made to Leave India for Protesting Against CAA

In the same way, BJP is constantly gauging the climate at home and abroad. When asked to comment on the anti-CAA protests, Narendra Modi’s guest US President Donald Trump answered by saying, “I want to leave that to India and hopefully they’re going to make the right decision for the people’”.

He did not even make a reference to core American values like freedom of expression as an afterthought. By saying ‘them’, Trump presumably was referring to the Indian government. ‘Nationalist’ friends trust each other to attain the greater good for the people, no matter the lives of a few minority citizens.

More importantly, he managed to sell US helicopters and weapons for three billion dollars and pleased a lot of ultra-conservative Indian-Americans and rednecks at home.

The US president is not alone in his silent support for Modi’s Hindutva agenda. In July 2019, the German ambassador Walter Lindner officially visited the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. Lindner claims to have ‘the country (India) and its people close to his heart’ ever since ‘travelling to India as a 20-year old with a backpack and a lot of time’.

Also read: The Cruel Irony of the German Ambassador’s Visit to the RSS Headquarters

During an interview to The Hindu which asked him critical questions about the visit, Lindner posed in front of his red Hindustan Ambassador as if he was on a safari adventure, bringing 68-generation love and peace to the Third World.

Nowhere is there any modesty to be read when he says that he wants to meet ‘as many people as possible from all walks of life’ while just having given international legitimation to a group of fascists.

Under the auspices of the new colonial thinking of Trump and Lindner, the West should not mind what the ‘savages inhabitants’ of their erstwhile colonies believe or do as long as the tourist beaches and the outsourced production sites are safe and voters at home are happy. Fortunately, the situation is a bit different away from ignorant presidents and uninformed ambassadors. Students don’t sell helicopters and they don’t make official visits to fascist groups. At IIT Madras, I encountered a lot of genuine interest in German politics and strong opinions about Europe. Likewise, fellow students and professors were also accepting of our foreign views on Indian politics.

Also read: CAA Protests: Indian Students Worldwide Raise Voices in Solidarity