Rearticulating the ‘Indian Right’ point of view to an India that is now considered the youngest nation in the world (70 per cent of the country’s population is said to be below the age of 35 based on the 2011 census), with a growing and increasingly assertive middle class with, as they say, fire in its belly, could well be an excruciating tightrope walk.
Steering this boat, when the socio-political milieu is more in sync with discounting ideologies if not totally debunking them, and when concepts like nation-building and national identity are sought to be constructed on a religious basis — ‘Hindutva’ or Hindu cultural nationalism in the Indian context — the surface calm or the stock market exuberance may be no indicator of the churn beneath.
A new discourse But the current scene is no sociology of melancholy or despair for an enthusiastic band of thought leaders led by noted writer and journalist Sandipan Deb, who see in these testing times a great opportunity to rationally and humanely build a “liberal right-of-centre discourse,” as he put it, which they hope will redefine both tradition and modernity in India and give the country far greater self-esteem in the comity of nations.
Big ambitions, but thought processes, begin somewhere. Calling themselves “India’s new liberal right,” Mr. Deb and his team are all set to shortly relaunch the Swarajya magazine, which was started in 1956 by the veteran journalist, Khasa Subba Rao, with the patronage of C. Rajagopalachari, popularly known as Raja ji , one of the tallest leaders of the freedom movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘conscience keeper.’
Raja ji gave Swarajya its Charter, to champion the cause of “individual liberty, private enterprise, the minimal state and cultural rootedness,” Mr. Deb explained in an hour-long interview to The Hindu in New Delhi recently. Those core principles will continue to guide the new Swarajya , 59 years since its inception, he said, while underscoring that Raja ji ’s vehicle of communication was “the first coherent and consistent intellectual response to Nehruvian socialism and the ever expanding Big State in newly independent India.”
Aiming at a formal launch in early February 2015, Swarajya in its new avatar will be a glossy monthly instead of a weekly, have a strong digital presence and hopes to be on a par with magazines like The Economist in generating top quality content, including commentary, opinion and essays. It will “naturally be a magazine of ideas,” says Mr. Deb, whose fame as an author spread with his book “The IITians: The Story of a Remarkable Indian Institution and How its Alumni are Reshaping the World.”
On January 15, it was an extremely cold evening in Delhi as Mr. Deb and I tried in vain to spot the noted Barista Coffee shop at Connaught Place, where we had initially planned to meet for the interview. Then, as we settled down on the mezzanine floor of another quiet and sombrely lit café nearby, sans the Italian flavours, the entire gamut of what it is to run a liberal journal now unfolded. The new editorial-director of Swarajya was unflinching to every query that this correspondent posed.
Full text of interview:>Re-launching Swarajya, a voice for India’s new Right
It was a totally different era when Raja ji started Swarajya in the mid-1950s, as a right-of-centre, conservative magazine. Reminded of the great literary critic George Steiner’s memorable one-liner, “the long liberal summer is over,” I gently prodded Mr. Deb as to how he saw the journal’s revival “in the age of Hindutva” and religious extremism.
Mr. Deb, with both an IIT and IIM background, retorted that he would rather use the word “classical liberal” than “conservative” because “we are for, and also Raja ji stood for, and we also hope to stand for, individual freedom, human rights, gender equality, freedom of expression etc., which are not usually associated with the term ‘conservative’; we are in fact right-wing liberals — we will support gay rights for example.”
Doctrinaire ‘Hindutva’ is not to be conflated with being a simple Hindu, he made clear. “We are not in any way embarrassed about being Hindu, but we are against lumpen Hinduism,” he said. Swarajya will also promote the scientific temper, but will not fall for uncritical, uninformed, self-glorifying forays into the Sanskritic past as reflected in recent public statements like “the spaceship was invented in India.”
However, real, solid Indian advances made in mathematics and physics, whether they were by Aryabhatta, Madhava, Brahmagupta or the Kerala school of mathematicians, are things that should be seriously studied, he argued. Again on the issue of secularism, Mr. Deb said, “we are against mixing of religion with politics … We are for secularism, but a certain sort of secularism which is not aimed at creating only vote banks.”
The only hope Mr. Deb acknowledged that in the last two decades, the right-wing debate in the Indian polity, politically, economically and culturally, “has been hijacked by all sorts of rabid people.” But understanding the true foundations of our civilisation as plural and rooted in the spirit of openness, questioning and scepticism is the only hope to retrieve economic and political policies from the “Hindutva forces,” he stressed.
“I do not think India can be ruled very long based on polluting religious extremism,” especially given the country’s vastness and diversity of every kind, Mr. Deb said. He termed the 2014 general election that catapulted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Narendra Modi to the post of Prime Minister a “watershed election.” It was not just a vote for Hindutva but also for good governance, while reflecting the aspirations of “millions of Indians who believe in certain right-of-centre ideas” and yearning for the economic and entrepreneurial space to expand. This dynamics overlapped with what he also saw as Nehruvian Socialism “slowly losing the battle of ideas in India,” despite the Congress being the “original reformers.” Yet, the biggest test for the BJP is how it handles “its bigoted supporters,” he added.
venkatesh.mr@thehindu.co.in
Full text of interview:>Re-launching Swarajya, a voice for India’s new Right
