IN NARENDRA MODI’S India, symbols matter as never before. Like all Indian states, Kerala, nestled in the south-western corner of the country, has its own internal diplomatic mission in the national capital New Delhi. Last month however all niceties were forgotten when the local police stormed Kerala House, looking for… beef.

The cow is an object of veneration for Hindus and in modern India its treatment is being used as a political weapon. To isolate and vilify not only those from minority faiths, but all of those who oppose the right-wing and chauvinist agenda of the government and its shadowy backers.

In May 2014 Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was elected with a non-mandate even lower than that of David Cameron.

In spite of securing only 31 per cent support from voters (little more than 20 per cent of the total electorate), it secured an absolute majority in the country’s lower house. Since then it has pursued absolutist policies combining monopoly capitalist economics or “Corporate Hindutva” (Hindutva meaning Hindu-ness) with social authoritarianism.

Modi’s base is actually an unstable and contradictory coalition, combining the pro-corporation economics of its bourgeois financiers with the cultural defensiveness of its petit bourgeois — sometimes literal — muscle.

The latter group includes shadowy entities, among them the militaristic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) whose uniformed units, in baggy brown shorts, are reminiscent of the early German fascists.

And as India opens up more of its domestic economy to global competition, including with the EU via the Mode 4 trade talks, resulting in increasing hardship among BJP’s base, the government’s war on minorities is being stepped up to compensate.

At the 2014 World Hindu Congress in New Delhi a “thought paper” identified Hindu society’s biggest enemies as “Marxism, Macaulayism, missionaries, materialism and Muslim extremism.”

Previous BJP coalition governments have tried to rewrite school history books in their favour, downgrading everything from positive achievements of the Mughal emperors to leftwingers’ sacrifices in the independence struggle.

The Modi administration

is applying this same level of mind control, backed by a supine corporate media, but it is through the aggressively communalist rhetoric of its government, paramilitary and religious supporters that the lives of ordinary Indians are being most affected.

This is straight from Modi’s own personal political playbook.

During his previous incarnation as chief minister of Gujarat state, both his anti-Muslim rhetoric and that of his close associates created the conditions in 2002 which led to sectarian riots — 800 Muslims were murdered.

And just as the hijab is the wedge symbol of choice of Western racists and fascists, so the cow has become the cultural arbiter as to who is and is not a proper Indian.

Many BJP-led states have banned the sale and consumption of beef.

In BJP-controlled Uttar Pradesh, electoral base of hardline national party president Amit Shah, Muslim families have been attacked for eating it.

In September, a Muslim man was lynched and murdered by a mob in Dadri following rumours that his family was storing and consuming beef — it was actually goat.

In Kashmir, BJP lawmakers physically assaulted a Muslim legislator because he had hosted a private party at which beef was served.

Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar has said that Muslims will have to give up eating the meat or be forced to leave the country. Some national BJP politicians have even suggested that people who vote against their party should go and live in Pakistan.

First they came for the Muslims, but attacks against other groups have also increased significantly since Modi took power.

Christian churches and cemeteries in Goa, Karnataka and Kerala have been vandalised by Hindu extremists.

Three atheist scholars who had campaigned against religious superstition have been murdered. Leftist cadres in Kerala and West Bengal have been beaten up with a number of fatalities.

And the response of Modi and the government in New Delhi? Silence. And this lack of support for the rule of law is being taken by most independent observers as tacit approval.

But amid this gathering communal gloom and suspicion, Modi’s project for an India defined as Hindu, rather than a secular state, is running into trouble.

Ironically, given the government’s divide-and-rule efforts, it is the active coming together of different communities as a united whole that is challenging Hindutva.

In elections in New Delhi earlier in the year, the BJP was crushed as voters focused their support behind the progressive Aam Aadmi Party. In polls held last week in Bihar, India’s third most populous state with 100 million people, the ruling BJP was humiliated as the two main opposition parties put aside their differences and campaigned in unison.

Elsewhere, students and workers have demonstrated in vast numbers against sectarian rhetoric and violence. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is organising a massive show of solidarity in early December across India at which all leftist parties are expected to be present. People from all communities and in many parts of India have held “beef parties” in open defiance of the thugs and BJP.

So what happened at Kerala House after last month’s raid?

All the parties in the state, plus the provincial government, united in anger and demanded that beef be reinstated. Which it was the following day.

In the face of such unity, even the head of BJP’s Kerala state unit was forced to concede that there was nothing wrong with eating beef.

Unity in the face of such chauvinism is beginning to turn the tide in the short-term.

But of course, in the longer term what India’s millions most need to neuter future BJP tactics is socialism.