(a) Fascism displays an ambivalent stance towards parliamentary democracy. Explain. (20 marks) (b) Affirmative Action Policies…

Modern political theory continuously grapples with the limits and contradictions of liberal modernity. Whether through fascism's tactical exploitation of democratic procedures, the welfare state's struggle over the meaning of equality via affirmative action, or post-colonialism's contentious relationship with Western epistemology, liberal categories are simultaneously inhabited, mobilized, and contested.

Fascism’s Ambivalence Towards Parliamentary Democracy

Fascist ideology fundamentally rejects liberal parliamentarism while relying instrumentally on its institutions. Philosophically, fascism denounces parliamentary democracy as decadent, inefficient, talkative, and inherently divisive. Thinkers like Giovanni Gentile and Carl Schmitt (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 1923) critiqued liberal parliaments for fragmenting national unity into partisan conflicts and paralyzing sovereign decision-making.

However, fascism's operational mechanism displays deep ambivalence rather than simple external opposition. Fascist movements do not merely wage war against the democratic state from the outside; they utilize electoral legitimacy to capture power from within. In Italy, after the March on Rome (October 1922) Benito Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister within the existing parliamentary system and passed the Acerbo Law (1923) to secure electoral hegemony before dismantling democratic pluralism after the Matteotti murder of 1924. Similarly, in Germany, Adolf Hitler weaponized the Weimar Republic’s proportional electoral system to make the Nazi party the largest in the Reichstag (about 37 per cent in July 1932), was appointed Chancellor in January 1933, subsequently enacting the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act to legally liquidate constitutional governance. Fascism thus tacticalizes the ballot box, using democratic legitimacy to dismantle democracy. The ambivalence persisted even in power: both regimes kept the façade of a legislature - the Reichstag as a rubber stamp, and in Italy the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations that replaced the elected chamber in 1939 - and claimed to embody the people more truly than parliaments did, through plebiscites and corporatist representation.

Affirmative Action and the Concept of Equality

Affirmative action policies generate intense polarization because they expose the theoretical tension between formal equality and substantive equality.

Critics, anchored in classical liberal traditions of formal equality (treating all individuals identically), argue that race- or caste-based preferences constitute "reverse discrimination." They contend that group-differentiated rights compromise individual merit, violate procedural fairness, and entrench social divisions. Conversely, advocates argue from the standpoint of substantive equality (equality of outcome and genuine opportunity), asserting that historical subjugation and structural inequalities cannot be rectified through neutral procedures alone; unequals cannot be treated equally without perpetuating injustice.

In India, this dialectic is embedded within Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution, which provide for compensatory discrimination in education and public employment. The Indian judiciary has consistently negotiated this tension. In Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992), the Supreme Court upheld reservations for Other Backward Classes while simultaneously preserving administrative efficiency and formal merit through a 50% reservation cap and the exclusion of the "creamy layer," reflecting the ongoing imperative to balance substantive redistribution against individual merit. The debate continues: in Janhit Abhiyan (2022) the Court upheld a 10 per cent quota for economically weaker sections that breaches the 50 per cent line, while in the United States the Supreme Court ended race-conscious university admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). Philosophers such as Ronald Dworkin defend such policies as serving legitimate social goals rather than rewarding individuals, whereas libertarians see them as violating individual entitlement.

Eurocentrism as Target and Motive Force in Post-Colonial Theory

Post-colonial political theory operates within an epistemic paradox where Eurocentrism serves simultaneously as its primary target and its generative motive force.

As a target, post-colonialism deconstructs European claims to universalism, unmasking how Enlightenment rationalism, modernity, and development discourses constructed the non-Western world as primitive, backward, and in need of civilizing intervention. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) exposed how Western knowledge production legitimized imperial domination. Gayatri Spivak ("Can the Subaltern Speak?", 1988) interrogated the epistemic violence that silences subaltern subjectivity, while Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments, 1993) demonstrated that post-colonial nationalism had to carve out an inner sovereign domain of cultural identity distinct from Western state models.

Conversely, Eurocentrism functions as post-colonial theory's motive force because the discipline remains embedded within Western academic institutions and relies on Enlightenment categories of critique. Post-colonial scholars primarily utilize Western theoretical tools—Marxian political economy, French post-structuralism (Foucault, Derrida), and psychoanalysis (Fanon)—to mount their critiques. As Dipesh Chakrabarty observed in Provincializing Europe (2000), European political thought remains both "indispensable and inadequate" for analyzing non-Western realities.

Conclusion

Fascism's subversion of parliamentary institutions, affirmative action's debate over formal versus substantive equality, and post-colonialism's entanglement with Western epistemology all illustrate how modern political formations inhabit liberal categories in order to contest and transform their universalizing claims.