Building A Center Right Coalition
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India Needs its own Milton Friedman
In his column in Mint, Jaithrith Rao has commented on the lack of a quasi-libertarian party in India: ”a khullam khulla supporter of free markets and individual liberties”. In a similar vein, Atlantean has argued that India needs a truly secular, rightist, libertarian party.
There is little doubt that India needs a new political formation. One which will not shy from openly endorsing economic reforms; one which will advocate governance and not overarching state intervention; one which will stand up for individual liberty; one which will place natural justice higher than social justice and ”inclusive growth”.
But as any observer of Indian politics would testify, there is no political party which comes even close to meeting these lofty standards. Congress is socialist at its core and its ruling clique has too much at stake in the current system to envision genuine change. BJP, especially after its defeat in the 2004 elections, represents the worst of both worlds: religious obscurantism with swadeshi economics. Regional parties with their narrow caste/region based support base are more interested in fighting turf battles to protect their constituencies than genuine ideological wars.
India’s increasing vivisection along caste/religious line poses a further challenge to a Rightist political party. How will a formation which actively seeks to fight sectarianism survive in a polity increasingly reliant on caste based handouts? The increasing acceptance of divisive politics which forces individuals to seek comfort within community zones and ties his material and political advancement to fortunes of his community makes it well nigh impossible for a party of individuals to prosper.
And that is why no such party exists. Politicians are in the business of winning power and it’s futile to expect them to invest in a Big idea if it fails to deliver electoral benefits. It can be argued that politics of a country is reflective of its sociological realties and therein lies the failure of the Indian Right. The failure lies not merely in its inability to move beyond newspaper columns but also in its failure to deliver a cogent vision. How can we hope to correct this situation?
Perhaps, the example of Swatantra party would be illustrative. Swatantra, India’s first and only genuinely right of center party openly advocated free markets, individual freedom and private property rights long before these terms became fashionable. In fact, at a time in which socialism was on march and was increasingly seen as the natural system of governance, it stood upto it and offered an alternative system of governance.
But Swatantra leaders were not merely politicians. Its president, C.R.Rajagopalachari popularly known as Rajaji was an intellectual tour de force: brilliant writer and a passionate speaker. Rajaji’s open defiance of the existing consensus was in many ways repudiation of his own life’s work–better part of which was spent in Congress. Apart from Rajaji, Swatantra was blessed with towering intellects such as K.M Munshi, Minno Masani and H.M Patel many of whom were not only intellectual leaders of the country but also institutional builders.
This is what a new right of center movement needs. A new Rajaji; an Indian Milton Friedman or as Nitin calls it: a free market Mahatma. Rather than an individual, it has be a collective movement which spans academia, professionals and the general population.What is required is a strong ideological movement, which, while drawing from classical liberal traditions in the West would adopt them to the peculiarities of a diverse and vast country like India. It would be an Indian movement, not directly transplanted from the West but one rooted in an intrinsic belief in Indian genius.
This movement will need to address the growing pains of a rapidly industrializing and globalizing India. For far too long, India practiced equality of poverty where a favored elite in cahoots with the state snuffed out Indian ambitions and offered a mirage of equality. The rise of the Indian middle class has posed a piquant challenge to this elite which has reacted characteristically by blaming growth and has attempted to flame caste/class war to short circuit the yearning for true change. The key challenge for the Indian Right is to challenge this traditional wisdom; educate those who have benefited from economic reforms and channelize the angst of the poor so they too can demand the tools which would help them escape poverty. In other words, the Right must not only stoutly resist statist interventions to foist a state mandated version of growth but also offer an alternative version for those who have missed the bus. One extremely important step would be to build new institutions which can serve the needs of a changing India.
Only after this can the Right hope to capture political space–otherwise, a Rightist party would either be a non-starter in electoral politics or will have to compromise on its ideological principles.
This is not to argue that political mobilization is not important but merely to illustrate that such a political formation must be founded on a bedrock of a strong intellectual movement. In fact, in a democratic country like India, a completely non-political movement would neither be effective nor desirable in the long term. The Right has to work within the confines of a democratic polity and still attempt to change the rules of the game. But can such a center of Right party ever work?
Here again the example of Swatantra is illuminating. In the 1967 general elections, the party won 45 seats and 209 assembly seats, many more than the communists did! This when India was still in thrall of Nehruvian socialism and there was no middle class to speak of.
In his ”Why Swatantra’ Rajaji once wrote,
The Swatantra Party stands for the protection of the individual citizen against the increasing trespasses of the State. It is an answer to the challenge of the so-called Socialism of the Indian Congress party. It is founded on the conviction that social justice and welfare can be attained through the fostering of individual interest and individual enterprise in all fields better than through State ownership and Government control. It is based on the truth that bureaucratic management leads to loss of incentive and waste of resources. When the State trespasses beyond what is legitimately within its province, it just hands over the management from those who are interested in frugal and efficient management to bureaucracy which is untrained and uninterested except in its own survival.[link]
There can be no better guiding principle for the Indian Right.
Update: A slightly edited version of this article appears in the July issue of Pragati.
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