The political landscape of India has seen a significant transformation in recent years, especially with the rise of authoritarianism and fascism. While this phenomenon itself along with its political implications and happenings have been widely recorded by scholars, the (inter)play of emotions with respect to this has been neglected. The modern political phenomena of fascism finds a direct correlation with emotion of desire, states of irrationality and fantasy. This paper is an attempt to explore and delineate the emotional dimension of the rise of fascism in India - both at the levels of authority and the masses. It explores how the emotions of pride and ego become a mass phenomenon for fascism to rise and be accepted among the masses, while also paralleling it with the emotions of hatred, fear, and anxiety. It does this by incorporating the methods of historical analysis - looking at history of fascism and colonialism, and its implications on present day India, case study method, and by utilizing the tools of philosophical, psychoanalytic, sociological and anthropological methods of inquiry. Collective selfhood, especially religious, and othering is analyzed through the Freudian “castration anxiety”. The paper also explores how the aforementioned emotions are responsible for simultaneous destruction and construction of master narratives in turn pushing towards artificial restoration of memory and the complex emotion of longing, especially for the past that never existed but is fantasized. Everyday narratives and experiences of the Indian masses of various sections are taken into account and accounted for through the method of narrative care. It therefore argues for both particularism and universalism of emotions in context of fascist beginnings and continuations. How is it that everyone is at stake? What awaits the fascist, neo-liberal, capitalist nexus drunk India? Could care and love ever occupy space as mass, collective emotions?
