38 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the fascist forces across Europe, the Comintern began to draw lessons which were being provided in fragments by dissident Marxists such as' Trotsky and Thalheimer and by Communists such as Gramsci and Klara Zetkin. The policies of the united and popular fronts pushed Marxism to reanalyze the differences between Social Democracy, dictatorships from above (Bonapartism) and fascism. The writings of these important theorists enable us to begin to differentiate the concepts for an analysis of the Emergency of 1975-77 (which was itself not 'fascist') as well as the emergence of the Hindu Right movement from 1980 (which is 'fascist'). I will draw from these theories to reconstruct the concepts of 'Bonapartism' and of 'fascism' in order to specify the nature of the various exceptional state-projects which have dogged Indian history from the mid-1960s. This essay, offered as a preliminary foray into contemporary history, aims to chart out the nature of Indian liberalism and the crisis of authority which emerged in India after the mid-1960s. The argument of this essay is that from the mid-1960s the ruling clique in India has sought a new constellation of political force. In broad outlines, this essay argues that the Indian state form 1947 to the mid-1960s was a coalitional state of the petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie; in the mid-1960s, the coalition fell apart and Indira Gandhi attempted to forge a state without the petty bourgeoisie (the 1970s, as I will show, begins the era of economic liberalisation and it restructures the liberal contradiction by returning India to a haute bourgeois populism in the from of Garibi Hatao), the growth of the Hindu Right in this period reflects the effort of the petty bourgeoisie to re-enter the equation of state power.7 Indira Gandhi's attempts at stabilization by a project of neo-imperial funding for the poor alongside a shift to the state's agenda towards the bourgeoisie failed and led to a more dramatic failure, the attempt at stabilization by dictatorship from above (Bonapartism), which has since been delegitirnized as a political tactic. Following this phase, Indian politics was left with three possibilities: (1) a tired and lethargic political party (Congress) plodding through the motion^ of^sustaining hegemony and willing to administer over an unprincipled peace; (2) a dynamic ultra-nationalist fascist movement from below, led by the Hindu Right; (3) the emergence of a broad-based Leftist movement with national strength. The Hindu Right, I will show, survives on the same ideological terrain as the Congress, but its significant difference is in the movement which it inaugurated: at the heart of its movement lie tactics which pledge the various militia units of the formation to an adventuristic attack on gerontoiratic politics and to therefore produce a politics whose myth of eternal renewal implodes any attempt to govern.8 In order to show that the Hindu Right and the gerontocracy of the Congress live on the same ideological terrain, an analysis of Indian liberalism is imperative. As the self-image of the bourgeoisie, liberalism offers us an understanding