Fantasy Of Clean Policy In Real India: Why The Libertarian Consensus Fails To Materialise

Indian public intellectuals are frustrated. And it is not just for ideological non-alignment with the current government and the party at the centre of it all.

The libertarians are frustrated because their shiny, glossy and seemingly achievable policy suggestions no longer receive the kind of thunderous applause and adulation that they used to, less than a decade ago.

Policymakers, bureaucrats, public intellectuals and general public policy-adjacent folks no longer refer to these circles for ideas to solve problems, and this irrelevance of thought is something the libertarians are yet to make peace with. 

The Fault in Their Stars

A general diagnosis is this: a lot of libertarian ideas, proposed in good faith or not, are worthy of dismissal simply because they are curated in disinfected laboratories where society and politics do not mingle. These state-of-the-art, sterile conditions, where their ideas are bred, do not permit the ‘pathogens’ of democratic decision-making, the negative veto of select communities, crude street power, and the externalities of politics to even enter the laboratories.

The resultant output, therefore, is a precision-engineered, scientifically validated, and rigorously quality-checked policy recommendation. It is also doomed to fail.

A clean, data-driven solution that can be dropped from a great height onto the messy, complex, 1.4 billion realities of India expects the ground to reshape itself to comply with the blueprint. This intellectual posturing, divorced from the messy, non-negotiable realities of India's political economy, is why so many "good ideas" are dead on arrival.

For instance, consider the celebration from similar circles of New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's handling of Covid. Indians going gaga over her Covid management wished India could have had her as its leader during the crisis. Notwithstanding minor details like:

1. New Zealand's population is 54 lakh, less than the population of Ahmedabad. India’s 1.4 billion population is 260 times higher than that of New Zealand. Not that it matters.

2. New Zealand is a first-world economy with a per capita income of $55,781, which is just 20 times higher than India’s $2,820. Negligible difference.

3. New Zealand’s population density is 20 people per square kilometre, compared to India’s 480 per square kilometre. A 24-times difference. Again, negligible.

This is not an extreme example intended to elicit mockery. It is a serious indictment of the misdirected thinking that goes into the diagnosis of a problem. How, then, can one be expected to deliver quality recommendations?

The most profound failure of libertarianism is not its economic models, which are debatable, but its complete ignorance of political, social, and historical elements. It designs blueprints for a species that does not exist and for a society that has never been.

Yet such ideas are relentlessly floated because they are simple, arrogant, and encourage people to ‘keep politics out of policy’—a path that guarantees failure.

Take another example. While India has climbed steadily in the global ease of doing business rankings over the last decade, one consistent and valid lament of external observers is India’s abysmal performance in contract enforcement. The inordinate delays caused by bureaucratic and judicial bottlenecks discourage investors from expanding or establishing their businesses in India.

The solution proposed by libertarian policy wonks is to ape Hong Kong and Singapore—city-states smaller than Delhi in area, population, and governance complexities. These are suggested as our pole stars.

There is more. Whenever the difference in the respective populations of India and Singapore is brought up, the proposer flies straight to China. If population alone is the issue, why was China able to succeed?

Except one crucial difference between China and India is ignored—the exceptionally homogenous nature of Chinese society, with the country being over 92% ethnically Han.

China's model is one of total state control, brutal suppression of dissent, and the complete absence of the very political and civil liberties that define India. When a libertarian advocate in Delhi praises the China model, they are engaging in the ultimate act of intellectual dishonesty. They are advocating for an authoritarian political system, but since they lack the courage to say so, they dress it up in the language of economic efficiency. What looks clean on a spreadsheet ignores the social realities of the example being used for reference.

The Heterogeneity Complex

Lack of ethnic diversity matters more than one cares to consider. A real society is not a collection of individuals; it is a complex, layered organism bound by history, trust, resentment, and shared identity. A policy that ignores this and attempts to ‘liberate’ an individual from the ‘tyranny’ of the community is not a policy at all.

Take the state of Rajasthan, for example. Despite its large Hindu population, the state’s society has sufficient caste fissures lying in wait. With no single caste group exceeding or even touching 15% share in the state’s population, it is a state of perennial hunger games playing out between communities to have their demands met.

And so, you have the Jats, Rajputs, Gujjars, Meenas, and Bhils, besides the Brahmins, Muslims, and myriad smaller communities vying for their share in the pie. Everyone feels left out, and everyone is aggrieved.

If one evaluates a state’s attractiveness for investments, these factors matter. It is not all about raw materials and cheap labour. Had that alone been the case, Afghanistan would host the annual World Economic Forum summit. This is a reflection of the political reality that everybody, regardless of political preferences, must take into account before suggesting policy recommendations.

When the writer Ramachandra Guha described Indian democracy as ‘the most reckless political experiment in human history’, he was on to something.

In a country where thousands of large and small caste groups exist in an uneasy, volatile calm, the resultant situation is a tinderbox of unmet and unmeetable, unmatched and unmatchable expectations. The prevailing sense of calm is therefore not a guarantee that the peace will last. Rather, it is a sign of the eventual chaos being delayed.

When two of India’s most prosperous states, Maharashtra and Karnataka, clash over a couple of border districts and the language used in their public transportation, it is India’s diversity playing out.

When the Dongria Kondh tribals of the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha, or those inhabiting the Hasdeo Aranya region of Chhattisgarh, refuse to let entire mountain chains be mined for minerals, it is just one of India’s many special sensitivities playing out.

When the Adi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh stages protests against the construction of the Siang Multipurpose Hydropower Project, it is the policymakers’ job to balance tribal interests with ecological and geopolitical ones.

When businesses and citizens demand better infrastructure, the government is still required to acquire land and rehabilitate displaced communities—all of whom can mobilise surprisingly fast, with or without tacit political backing. Consider the Aarey Metroshed protests, or the troubles faced in acquiring land for constructing all-weather roads connecting areas near the Indo-China border.

The country’s diversity, often hailed as its strength, therefore needs to be looked at as something that could potentially derail the growth story with astonishing speed, which would put to shame Mao Zedong’s statement that ‘disequilibrium is normal and absolute, whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative’.

In an ethnically and communally diverse India, with an unbelievable diversity of castes, languages, tribes, deities, and sensitivities, disequilibrium is just around the corner, waiting for the sweet fragrance of trouble to wade in.

Imposing Moral Fantasies

The ideas often propounded in these circles are presented not as pragmatic choices but as non-negotiable moral imperatives. Their non-workability is precisely the point: it allows the proponent to maintain a position of moral purity, forever critiquing a "corrupt" system that fails to meet their impossible standards.

We see this same anti-political fantasy in the pure green environmental activism that demands a complete halt to all infrastructural development. The pristine, untouched environment must be preserved at all costs.

By refusing to engage in the political trade-offs required, these activists resort to judicial activism, creating a policy paralysis that is itself profoundly anti-growth. They offer no workable blueprint for balancing environmental concerns with economic and livelihood ones, which guarantees nothing but stagnation.

Instead of using serious scholarship to counter vested interests and their ransom-seeking behaviour, when alien solutions with zero applicability to India are suggested as the one-stop medicine for the country’s woes, it reflects a deep-rooted desire to appear on front pages and get invited to policy conferences rather than provide meaningful solutions.

Why the Fantasies Persist

First, it is an ideology of intellectual convenience. It is easy. It is a simple, elegant, universal answer for every complex problem: cut taxes, deregulate, privatise. It flatters the technocrat, allowing them to come across as a class above, armed with pure logic that transcends the chaotic realities of politics, society, and culture. They can remain insulated from the consequences of their own prescriptions.

It is also floated because there is no accountability. When the unworkable policy fails in the real world (and it always does), the blueprint is never blamed. The people are. The public was ‘not ready’ for freedom. The ‘vested interests’ were too strong. The ‘politicians’ were too corrupt. The intellectual purity of the idea remains unhurt.

Inability to Break Free of Partisan Preferences

‘A great idea is good only if the party I like is in power to implement it’ seems to be the guiding philosophy for a very large section of India’s vaunted policy commentators claiming neutrality.

Even seemingly black-and-white policy moves, such as investing more in infrastructure, defence, higher education, and space exploration, or long-term policy decisions like liberalising the agriculture sector using the farm laws, aligning India’s citizenship requirements with neighbourhood realities, or simple business decisions about sourcing energy, crude oil, and rare earth minerals, are regularly chastised by the same folks who had once been the most vociferous advocates of the same.

This opposition may look principled to them, but what it really is, is intellectual dishonesty feeding their inability to call out political positions of the opposition based on political preferences. This is not honesty; it is partisanship.

For instance, how many policymakers today deride the very existence of BSNL in the country? Several. How many of them would, however, back the government if it ever proceeded with BSNL’s privatisation? A microscopic minority. In all likelihood, they would stand with the labour and employees’ unions and the myriad morchas marching in the streets asking for a rollback of the government decision, using the protest as a platform to air their own long-held grievances against the government.

This much and more was seen during the farmers’ agitation of 2020. When the same agricultural reforms were enacted by the government, which had been in discussion for decades, only a handful of libertarian scholars sided with the merits of the reforms to disentangle farmers from vested interests. Such public intellectuals were more interested in chastising the government over ‘not holding enough consultations’.

Imagine saying this about a policy suggestion that had been in the works for decades. When this argument did not get the traction that was expected, the policy commentators finally lifted the veil—the reforms were bad because they were brought about by a ‘majoritarian, anti-democratic, and repressive regime’. Hence, the usual rules of engagement would not apply.

This is not good faith behaviour and deserves the contempt it gets.

When compromise, bending to public opinion, democratic will, and consensus-building are seen as corruptions of pristine models rather than as the very medium in which policy is made, it reeks of an ideology that seeks to remove decisions from the democratic, public sphere and place them in the private, unaccountable sphere of the market—a sphere dominated by those who already have wealth and power.

What Lies Ahead

Libertarianism in its present form is not a serious proposal for governance. The country is riddled with problems, yes. But so are the ideas being proposed by a large section of policy and public commentators.

Good faith libertarian commentators need to disassociate themselves from such malcontent elements within their ranks. Their suggestions must incorporate, as live players capable of mobilising and derailing the most benevolent of policy moves, the very peripheral issues and elements that are mostly dismissed. They must also be willing to take a sincere, principled stance if a policy move is proposed, regardless of the party doing it.

When the recognition of the determinants that constitute a country like ours is dismissed as an externality, the resultant product is futile. Just because some policy commentators are unwilling to recognise it does not change the fact that strength lies in numbers, and in a country of 1.4 billion, every side, regardless of the rationality of its demands, has numbers to push or stall policy moves. Commentators would do well to recognise this reality and curate their suggestions keeping this in mind.