The Right liberal impulse

The fierce ideological battle being fought amidst the 2016 United States presidential election finds particular resonance in Britain, continental Europe and India. Right wing parties are on the rise across northern and central Europe — for example in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary. 

In Britain, the Left is in retreat. The Labour party has imploded. Its implacably socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn refuses to go. He has vowed to fight again for the party leadership if an election is held among Labour grass-roots members. Britain’s new prime minister, Theresa May, is clinically right wing. As home secretary for six years, she fought grimly but unsuccessfully to keep immigration down to less than 1,00,000 a year.

In India, the BJP regards itself as a right wing party. So do most Indians. They are wrong. A classically right wing party — like the American Republicans or the British Tories — believe in free markets. The BJP’s ideological parent, the RSS, does not. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an economic liberaliser by instinct. He hews to the right of the ideologues in the RSS on economic reforms. Some in the RSS in fact have more in common with the Left on economic issues. They instinctively distrust foreign direct investment (FDI). For instance, they oppose FDI in multi-brand retail, arguing that it will kill kirana stores. 

The prime minister has had to walk on egg shells to balance his natural inclination for economic liberalisation with the party’s ideologues who confuse economic nationalism with economic common sense. 

Successful modern societies globally tend to be those that lean rightwards economically (free markets, open trade) and lean leftwards socially (LGBT rights, gender equality). Many “right wing” parties in fact do the opposite.

They oppose free trade and economic reforms — positions the classical Left holds. Socially, they abhor gay rights and resist giving women absolute equality in, for example, access to places of worship. 

The challenge is to be both an economic liberal and a social liberal. Right wing parties are often neither. They are economically close-minded and socially illiberal. Prime Minister Modi has managed to steer the BJP towards relative economic liberalism. But on social liberalism, he has made little headway. Article 377 criminalising the LGBT community is a disgrace to civilised society. It puts India in the unseemly company of countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. 

The BJP though has a natural ally in the US Republican party. The GOP is economically liberal but socially conservative. Many sections of the party — and like the BJP the Republicans have several ideological shades — are virulently against liberal values such as same sex marriage and giving women free choice over abortion. 

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is a closet social liberal but pretends for the sake of the party’s largely conservative electoral base to be a borderline born-again Christian. He needs to woo the evangelical core of the party’s hard right. Trump is a free marketeer who built a global business empire but now preaches anti-globalisation. He wants to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and has pledged to take America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TFP) that is currently under negotiation. 

In classical terms, a liberal must be both economically and socially liberal. By that definition, few right wing parties globally would qualify as being truly liberal. Left-leaning parties would of course fail the test entirely. As the world tilts to the Right, it’s important to remember that such ideological monikers have lost much of their relevance. Communist China, for example, is more capitalist than some “socialist” democracies in Europe. 

The political theorist Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book The Origins of Political Order: “Modern democracy was born when rulers acceded to formal rules limiting their power and subordinating their sovereignty to the will of the larger population as expressed through elections. Political institutions came (about) in societies that now take them for granted. The three categories of institutions in question are: 1) The state; 2) the rule of law; 3) accountable government. 

“The fact that there are countries capable of achieving this balance constitutes the miracle of modern politics, since it is not obvious that they can be combined. The state, after all, concentrates and uses power, to bring about compliance with its laws on the part of its citizens and to defend itself against other states and threats. The rule of law and accountable government, on the other hand, limit the state’s power, first by forcing it to use its power according to certain public and transparent rules, and then by ensuring that it is subordinate to the will of the people.” 

The Congress under Indira Gandhi used socialism to win elections along with an illiberal dose of populism. As a result, between 1966 and 1984, India’s GDP crawled at an average annual rate of less than 3.50 per cent. The rest of Asia — Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan – cruised at over seven per cent a year. 

Had India embraced in those two crucial decades both economic liberalism and accountable governance as Fukuyama suggests, the country’s GDP would have been roughly double of today’s $2.15 trillion (Rs145 lakh crore). Per capita income too would be double at over $3,000. It would have halved the number of Indians living below the poverty line from 260 million today (by Professor Suresh Tendulkar’s BPL methodology) to perhaps just over 100 million.  

Going forward, the prime minister must pivot the BJP further to the right economically. There are still too many controls on economic activity. Tax and labour laws are outdated. Public sector divestment is crucial. The PM though is not an enthusiast. He believes in a strong public sector. But for the government to hold equity in an airline (Air-India), telecom companies (BSNL and MTNL) and hotels (ITDC) is poor economic strategy. Fixing bank debts, recapitalising power discoms and PSU divestment are an inseparable part of economic reforms. The liberalisation process begun in 1991 must be taken to its logical conclusion. 

Socially, the task will prove even trickier. The BJP’s swadeshi mindset is good in principle, unwieldy in practice. To build a modern society, social liberalism must move lockstep with economic liberalisation. It is a challenge the US and other industrialised democracies share with India. 

The writer is author of The New Clash of Civilisations: How the Contest Between
America, China, India and Islam Will Shape Our Century (Rupa, 2014)