Counterculture Under Neofascism

I write this against the backdrop of increasingly sophisticated fascist machinery that doesn’t need validation from psychedelia. The IDF-run raves in Shimla are one manifestation of this trend; I’ve even seen my beau dance, unknowingly, with a former IDF officer in Hampi. This is without even mentioning the raves outside masjids (!). It feels like a new wave of neo-pagan drum-and-bass rituals melding with Hindu nationalism.

As a member of the anointed minority-to-despise in the meta-structure of fascism, I’ve been at the receiving end of some rather banal, stupid, and bizarre essentialisms. I remember being a teenager when access to psychoactive substances felt like an initiation ceremony to upward mobility. The “counterculture” was merely its inverse—its quasi–cottage-core radical-chic crowd maintained a pursuit of ruthless self-interest and never considered themselves flawed, apathetic, or, dare I say, revolutionary.

People took acid to “get closer to Allah (s.w.t.)” at a rave, to signal social capital, or to succumb to peer pressure and chase the romanticized ego death—the usual. But the counterculture’s paradigm-shifting associations from the 1960s found themselves in a universe of impossibilities for revolt. The commodity fetish for an “oceanic” feeling—obtained by consuming cultural artefacts—proved itself hegemonic. For a while, I was seduced by facile talk of spiritual awakening, as though these parties were a cure-all remedy. In practice, though, it mostly bolstered melodrama: basslines thumped beneath the chatter while god-complexes and romanticized messianic visions of nature swirled around—like recycled 1960s tropes. It was the same self-indulgent nonsense, repackaged in psychedelic trappings.

All I wanted to do was dance for the first time in my life—but all I got was predatory inclusion and, frankly, Islamophobic tokenism. I tried to assimilate, embracing the typical social lubricants uncritically, only to realize that my acceptance was always conditional on how much I “participated”—proof of how shallow my apostasy had been.

Eventually, I returned to faith with renewed passion, because liberation theology gave me a kick where a Daiquiri never could—perhaps as mere contrarianism, or out of pure spite at the kind of shit they were doing to my people under their many disguises.

The Illusion of Liberation

I withdrew from the symbolic structures of representation; I didn’t want to get booked under the draconian UAPA. Why does the counterculture get so easily absorbed into fascist logic? I don’t know. What I do know is that when the name-of-the-father (a psychoanalytic concept roughly denoting the nomos or law) beckons under the guise of unity, there is always an exclusion—because the negation negates.

The indignities of being ostracized from the über-coca megalomania of post-psychedelic neoliberal India worked heavily in my favor, instilling in me a deep hatred of power and anything that signaled an upper-caste, facile moral predisposition. However, the closest alternative—the organized religion of elite “Enlightened” liberalism (the LSD-inspired spiritual Darwinism that reigned supreme before COVID)—collapses into contradiction at the slightest nudge.

This exclusionary/inclusionary pathos that upholds the outsourced counterculture is bound by the repressive politics of dogmatic progressivism. Its temporality borrows heavily from the post–World War II human-rights discourse (as critiqued by Robert Meister in After Evil), which perversely treats the perpetrators rather than the victims as the beneficiaries of injustice. This logic of misplaced benevolence echoed the messianic urges my best friend felt for me. I even found a word for it—“antiselytism” (the opposite of proselytism). Naming this quasi-religiosity gave me some comfort, because “antiselytism” directly identifies the modus operandi of that kind of “love” as giving what one does not have to someone who does not want it.

I’ve had my fair share of banal “secularism”—I even thought Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (whom Terry Eagleton dubbed “Ditchkins”) stood by my convictions. Yet this line of reasoning is riddled with contradictions, especially if one’s naïve starting point has been the (uncannily named) Enlightenment. The material implications of Enlightenment rationality had never been accessible knowledge for a community like mine, struggling for the bare minimum—food, shelter, or any sense of security against a very real existential threat. What’s bizarre is that we’re now at the receiving end of its 19th-century wrath. But, you see, the apple on the back of this screen has a bite out of it, and I refuse to eat.

Faith, Identity, and Resistance

The counterculture doesn’t harbour any respite for the average Salafi woman, who is usually essentialized into oblivion or eyed only so she can be “liberated” for liberal virtue signaling. Especially insidious is the post–Afghanistan “invade-to-rescue” doctrine, which props itself up on the same rationales that most Hindu nationalists used for the Triple Talaq ban—played out like chess in the courts.

In a twisted “politics of piety” hijacked by virtual assailants auctioning off photos of Muslim women, I found myself walking around with a shaved head and being offered free ice cream because I looked ill. I took it anyway.

In this hollowed-out void of post–Cold War politics, everything went up for sale. In the deeply entrenched meritocracy of saleable sorrow, the solace that could have been art became just another playground to deradicalize the Muslim subject, and psychedelia offered no refuge. What once empowered me—asserting my identity—merely became one of the symbols I needed to denounce in order to break free.

Emile Habiby’s Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is the closest I have come to feeling represented in literature. Saeed, a dumb, luckless fool caught in a contentious subaltern identity, feels like an echo of how people like me are seen: to be handled by the rationales of Machiavellian prowess that move across this ground with impunity, high on coke. Nothing has proved otherwise.