Decoding The Indian Liberal Paradox

I recently finished reading Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri’s book, A New Idea of India (I know, I’m late to the party).

In case you haven’t read it yet, I can only describe it as indispensable reading to better understand the nuances of our contemporary political debates (this discussion between one of the authors and Shashi Tharoor serves as an excellent teaser).

As a young Indian student studying in the US, I have had multiple conversations with fellow members of the diaspora on the subject of Indian politics.

Many of them, identifying as “liberals”, have a cynical outlook towards the current dispensation, levelling the oft-heard accusations of “democratic backsliding”, and what have you.

I have tried to check such claims wherever possible, knowing intuitively that there is often one standard applied to India and another to other democracies. But it was only after reading A New Idea of India that I became more acutely aware of just how deeply rooted the hypocrisy of self-styled “liberals” actually is.

For instance, I am sure that many of the people I have spoken to who denounced the abrogation of Article 370 and 35A would be surprised to know that the repeal of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in 2018 had no bearing on Jammu and Kashmir so long as its special status remained in place, or that under their auspices, many Hindus and Sikhs were denied the right to vote in state elections for decades.

These are the same people who, in any other context, would unconditionally champion LGBTQ+ causes and condemn the arrogation of voting rights.

Similarly, I am sure that many of them are blissfully unaware of the fact that it was the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government that took the initiative to amend the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act in 2021, which raised the upper gestation limit for terminating a pregnancy from 20 to 24 weeks for certain categories of women and instituted exemptions in the event of substantial fetal abnormalities.

These changes, amongst others, were hailed as “historic” by the World Health Organization, noting that they would “further empower women by providing comprehensive abortion care to all”.

Are these examples not reflective of liberal values? Do they not speak to inclusivity and social progress, of equal treatment under the law? Indeed, there are many more examples that I could cite that would undoubtedly lead to a diagnosis of cognitive dissonance for these self-styled “liberals,” starting with the government’s steadfast push for a uniform civil code that would outlaw polygamy and child marriage.

So, then, what explains the knee-jerk contempt for the incumbent government and the state of Indian democracy harboured by the “liberal” political class?

My theory, and I confess this is based purely on anecdotal evidence, is that the process by which one defines their political identity has devolved from being value-driven to position-driven.

In other words, being a liberal is no longer a function of what you believe in but whom you vote for. Granted, these two things are not mutually exclusive, but in the Indian context, they appear increasingly so.

Certainly, this phenomenon is not confined to the landscape of Indian politics.

For example, on US college campuses, the new litmus test for whether or not someone is a “liberal” is not whether they believe in the right of all persons to live a life of peace and dignity, but how they respond to the question, “are you a Zionist?”, to which the only acceptable answers are “yes” and “no".

I don’t know when this devolution began or what the primordial cause was.

However, I do believe it is being enabled by mainstream media outlets (the kind that might describe violence against Hindus as “revenge attacks”) that peddle one-dimensional narratives and reduce complex issues to false dichotomies.

This is subsequently exacerbated by the echo-chambers we erect around ourselves by consuming more of the same content, which strengthens our convictions but diminishes our willingness to test the underlying assumptions. 

And when these convictions don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, rather than changing our stance, we simply change the topic of conversation because if one position doesn’t pass muster, we can always brandish our “liberal” credentials by talking about how much we hate fossil fuels. 

As a “self-styled” liberal myself, let me be the first to admit that, as a group, we need to do better. We have to go back to the basics and understand that our political positions should be derived from our value-based ideology and not our ideology from our political positions.

We need to recognise that what might be considered “right-wing” in one geography may not be the same in another. And, perhaps most importantly, we have to learn to be okay with being wrong. 

In 1970, the late American economist Paul Samuelson said on TV: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I hope that one day, the universal answer to that question will be, “I change my mind too".