Gurcharan Das: What is the future of liberalism in India?

India is truly a land of ironies. When I was growing up, India was admired for its robust, liberal democracy but pitied for its socialist, illiberal economy. Today, it is a dynamic, liberal economy but its democracy is slipping, turning illiberal. This is happening, paradoxically, when India’s stature has risen in the world and it is considered a democratic bulwark against autocratic China. What does this reversal mean for the country’s future, and, indeed, of liberalism’s future in India?

I became a liberal in my 30s because I believed in openness, the rule of law and tolerance for others’ views. I also learned to be wary of power – political, religious and economic. Liberalism offered an ethically responsible order of human progress without excessive dependence on the state. It did not surprise me to learn that this philosophy had been the reigning ideology of the world for two centuries as democracies and free markets had spread around the world and become the only sensible way to organise public life. Today, it is disheartening to find that this idea is under grave threat around the world.

I grew up in the “Age of Hope” when Jawaharlal Nehru was our hero and we were all socialists. From 1950 to 1990, India offered the most amazing freedom to its people – of life, speech, association, religion and the like – but it refused economic freedom. Nehru meant well, wanting India to become a more equal society, but the bureaucracy gave him a terrible regulatory system that would crush individual enterprise for two generations. Freedom fighter and veteran politician C Rajagopalchari called it “licence, permit, inspector Raj”.

I became a victim of this system.

I worked for a company that made Vicks Vaporub. There was an outbreak of flu one year and the sales of Vicks soared. We were happy, having done good for the country during the epidemic but at the end of the year, a summons arrived from the government, claiming we had broken the law – our production had exceeded the limit authorised in our licence. It was a criminal offence with a potential jail sentence. I appeared for a hearing before a government official who treated me like a criminal. I explained to him that the flu epidemic had resulted in extra demand and we were only doing our duty, keeping store shelves stocked. But the official pronounced us guilty. In the end, the government quietly dropped the case but I felt sickened by this nightmare. I abandoned socialism to become a “classical” liberal and joined Rajagopalchari’s Swatantra Party.

I do not blame Nehru for he did not know any better, reflecting the spirit of his socialist age. But I do blame Indira Gandhi. By then, Japan, Korea and Taiwan had risen. Instead of emulating their policy of exporting labour intensive manufactures, which turned them into middle-class societies, she did the opposite, tightening controls, and India lost two generations of opportunities for its young. Ironically, she justified her policies in the name of the poor but the number of poor doubled between 1950 and 1985.

India got its economic freedom in 1991 and went on to become the world’s second-fastest growing economy over the next three decades. It grew at an average rate of almost 6% over the next 30 years, lifting 400 million out of poverty as the middle class expanded from 10% to 30% of the population. India had achieved the liberal dream – a true democracy with a free, dynamic economy.

But the past decade has seen the weakening of democracy with the rise of identity politics, majoritarianism, Hindutva politics and Islamophobia. Critics are being silenced and the discourse on social media has become extremely polarised. The atmosphere of hate has damaged India’s cherished secular ideal of “sarva dharma samabhav” – respect for all religions'. There has been no no communal riot on the scale of the Gujarat riots in 2002 or anti-Sikh pogrom in Delhi 1984 but there have been many localised incidents of violence, especially against Muslims.

Liberals are partly to blame for this.

Liberalism remains an elite enterprise and the rise of Hindutva is partly a revolt against the English-speaking elite. Moreover, hardly any liberal political leader has had a serious dialogue with tradition, nor sold the ideas of the Constitution. Mohandas Gandhi, alas, died too soon. He had been able to translate liberal ideas of freedom and equality into the civilisational language of dharma, capturing the hearts and minds of the people. But many still believe that the Constitution dropped from the heavens one day and is not theirs.

My dilemma this Lok Sabha election was that a liberal was neither electable, nor was there hope for a true liberal party – the Swatantra Party had died long ago. Worse, I had no one to vote for. I could not vote for the authoritarian identity politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which was turning our proud democracy into an illiberal one. Nor could I vote for the Congress and the INDIA bloc because I did not trust its populist, statist economics, ever ready to make a false trade-off between growth and equity.

India may have become a fast-growing economy but it did not create enough jobs. It had failed to create an industrial revolution. Manufacturing was only 15% of the gross domestic product and manufactured exports less than 2% of world exports. How else would 45% of the country’s workers, stuck in agriculture, rise to do more productive jobs? It would require tough reforms, and I trusted the BJP, not the Opposition alliance, to execute these reforms.

The results of the election, however, have given me hope. It vindicated the belief of political scientists, Lloyd and Suzanne Rudolph, in the 1980s. They observed that “persistent centrism” is a striking feature of India’s politics. India’s social pluralism draws a limit against extreme ideologies. Moreover, Indians are an argumentative and disobedient lot, economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen pointed out, and this results in an open, liberal temper.

In a land of 330 million gods, no god can afford to feel jealous. The seed of scepticism was sowed in the famous Nasadiya verse of the Rig Veda, around 1500 Before Common Era, which concluded that human beings may never know the origins of the universe. This temper was nourished in the “neti-neti” style of questioning in the Upanishads. In the epistemological debates on pramana, or knowledge, among competing schools in the Gupta Age, philosophers of all sects concluded that the only true source of knowledge is non-transcendental – perception and inference.

These are and other reasons make me optimistic about liberalism’s future in India. History too tends to be cyclical: if we give up on liberalism, our children will return to it. Besides, liberalism is too decent an idea. It is still the most sensible way to organise public life and it won't be kept down for too long.

Gurcharan Das is an author. His two most recent books are Another Sort of Freedom (2023) and The Dilemma of the Indian Liberal (2024).