MORE than a decade ago, in the course of a book review, I described the respected sociologist Andre Beteille as a ‘conservative’. My assessment stemmed from the importance he attached to the efficacy and integrity of the institutions of state. Shortly thereafter, I met Beteille at a public function. Referring to the review, he contested my categorization of him as a ‘conservative’. In the Indian context, he felt, conservatism implied veneration for lineage and kinship. To that charge he pleaded not guilty.

Maybe I erred in mechanically transporting a facet of modern conservatism from the Anglophone world and imposing it on a very different world. However, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with his equation of Indian conservatism with social orthodoxy. At least this did not correspond with my understanding of conservatism – particularly conservative politics – in other countries.

The subject of what constitutes Indian conservatism resurfaced after Narendra Modi’s victory in the 2014 general election. In her assessment of the verdict published in Outlook, 16 June 2014, the Cambridge historian Shruti Kapila argued, ‘Modi’s victory has declared the arrival of a distinct brand of conservatism as the mandated political language to direct India’s future… In India today, conservatism has acquired a revolutionary import, in that it is a byword for change.’ In effect – although she didn’t use the analogy – Kapila was equating the Modi project with the quasi-radical ‘Tory democracy’ that Benjamin Disraeli had injected into British politics by incorporating middling business and the aspirational middle classes into the hitherto Shire-dominated Conservative Party.

The extent to which Modi has succeeded in forging a political coalition between the neo-middle classes of India and Hindu nationalism will be better assessed over time. However, the use of conservatism as a distinct political category, enjoying a large measure of electoral support is noteworthy. It certainly marks a change from the time conservative politics in India was automatically equated with bodies such as the Ram Rajya Parishad of Swami Karpatri – it won three Lok Sabha seats in the 1952 general election – and gau raksha movements championed by ultra-orthodox sankaracharyas.

 

The temptation to equate conservative with the pejorative term ‘reactionary’ has been fairly widespread. Equally, the omnibus term ‘right wing’, used for a variety of political expressions ranging from fascism to peasant populism, has only served to steer the discourse away from specifics. In the Indian context, matters are further complicated by the fact that conservatism, along with its perceived polar opposite ‘liberalism’, has no real equivalent in either Sanskrit or in any modern Indian language. At best, conservatism is used in purely oppositional terms: anudar panthi (anti-liberal), a-samanta vaadi (anti-egalitarian), and so on. Indeed, I am only aware of C. Rajagopalachari ever using ‘conservative’ as a self-description. Other politicians who come under the broad embrace of conservatism have preferred to describe their political inclinations as rashtravadi (nationalist).

In recent months, there has been a spate of attacks on the Modi government for its ‘anti-intellectual’ inclinations. Although the term ‘stupid party’, frequently used to debunk conservative parties and politicians, has not yet found a place in the Indian political vocabulary, there have been frequent suggestions that the Indian right – often dubbed the Hindu right – lacks intellectual pedigree and has failed to evolve its own distinctive intellectual ecosystem. In part this derision stems from political partisanship, but it also owes a great deal to a surprising unfamiliarity with the vast literature on the subject of conservatism.

The spectacular influence of western political thought – particularly Mill, Bentham, Comte and Marx – on Indian intellectuals professing liberal or socialist politics has been extensively documented. By contrast, the intellectual roots of India’s conservative tradition have been less scrutinized. While some scholars have detected European influences – conscious or otherwise – on individual public figures, the indigenous knowledge systems that shaped the minds of those who don’t fit easily into the ‘progressive’ mould have been relatively less explored. The exploration of India’s conservative thought is still at a nascent stage.

 

It has often been argued by Indian liberals – and not without a large measure of condescension – that whereas India could do with a right wing or even conservative party, there is none that fits the bill. The politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, in their opinion, is far too crudely revanchist and thus unworthy of being equated with mainstream conservatives in UK, US, Germany and France. The most generous comparison of Modi is with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Erdogan – practitioners of muscular nationalism. Without directly assessing the conservative credentials of the BJP, it is, however, worth looking briefly at the broad general principles that have shaped conservative politics outside India, and particularly in the West.

First, there is a general disinclination of conservatives to reduce their beliefs and convictions to either theoretical constructs or dogma. In his preface to historian Arthur Bryant’s The Spirit of Conservatism published in 1932, a doughty backbench MP, Colonel John Buchan, asserted that ‘Conservatism is above all things a spirit… and the fruits of that spirit are continuity and unity.’ The formulation isn’t terribly helpful but it does reflect Edmund Burke’s misgivings of ‘abstractions’. This wariness was echoed quite lucidly by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton: ‘Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae or aims…This lack of confidence stems not from diffidence or dismay but from an awareness of the complexity of human beings, and from an attachment to values which cannot be understood with the abstract clarity of utopian theory.’

 

Second, there is nothing universal about conservatism. Disraeli’s remark, ‘The Conservative Party is national or it is nothing’ still holds true and makes comparisons across national boundaries challenging. Third, conservatives show a marked preference for community wisdom over individual choices. Burke expressed this succinctly: ‘The individual is foolish but the species is wise; prejudices and prescriptions are the instruments which the wisdom of the species employ to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites.’ No wonder English conservatism invariably fell back on the country’s so-called ‘ancient constitution’ for determining what was just or unjust. In India, there is a similar reliance on samskaras that can loosely be translated as inherited ethical and behavioural codes.

Burke believed that only a small fraction of human knowledge is formally codified. Much of what we are is embedded in instinct, prejudice, custom and usage that should be cherished, even as they impose constraints on absolute liberty. In practical terms, this translates into paying heed and even respecting what British Conservative politician, David Willets, has described as ‘the unreflective but deeply felt values of the normal citizen.’ Scruton called it an adherence to ‘common decencies’.

 

Fourth, conservatives have accorded considerable importance to upholding the sacred for maintaining national life. Though this principle is not uncontested, most conservatives would readily echo Irving Kristol’s quip that without the religious dimension, the conservative disposition is ‘thin gruel’. In The Conservative Case written to coincide with the British general election of 1959, Lord Hailsham argued: ‘There can be no genuine conservatism which is not founded upon a religious view of the basis of civil obligation, and there can be no true religion where the basis of civil obligation is treated as purely secular.’ At the same time, Hailsham contended, ‘Religion owes to secular society the debt of recognition that without the stability of the social order a full religious life becomes impossible except in the hermit’s cell or in the monastery.’

Hailsham wrote his tract in the context of a Britain that in 1959 was overwhelmingly and self-consciously a Christian country. As such, he didn’t have to grapple with the challenges of either a multi-faith or, more ominously, a plural society where the ‘political’ values of one faith conflict sharply with even a secular, civic nationalism. The conservative experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries, it would seem, shed little light on ways to cope with this uniquely 21st century challenge – without abandoning competitive democracy. The goody-goody multi-faith dialogue approach, while oozing nobility of purpose, doesn’t possess the armoury to cope with the problem of jihad, apart from appealing for good sense to prevail. Multi-faith coexistence that simultaneously acknowledges the validity of the sacred in public life is prefaced on religious groups shedding (or at least shelving) claims to a monopoly of true faith. This cannot happen if political pragmatism and theological revisionism do not go hand in hand.

 

Fifth, conservatives seem to be bound by the belief that the authority of the state cannot be absolute and has to be circumscribed by the will of society. In short, the state should not impose any preconceived version of the good on a reluctant society. Ideally, the state should aspire, in the words of the Oxford philosopher David Miller, to provide ‘an environment in which the culture can develop spontaneously rather than being eroded by economically self-interested action on the part of particular individuals.’ This implies a conscious disavowal of state sponsored cultural engineering.

There is a more radical view, articulated by Scruton in the context of the appeal of free market conservatism of the Thatcher or Tea Party variety. To him, the state must take exceptional care to be above any transactional relationship with its citizens. The state must possess ‘the authority, the responsibility and the despotism of parenthood… (It) must therefore withdraw from every economic arrangement which puts it at the mercy of individual citizens.’

Scruton’s goal of ensuring total state detachment is unlikely to pass electoral muster in most societies. But what strikes me as interesting is that while a minimal state is the instinctive preference of conservatives, it is not a principle etched in stone. As a rule, conservative parties have been disinclined to elevate economic policy to the level of dogma. Self-professed conservatives fought bitterly among themselves in the early 20th century on the question of free trade and protectionism. In the 1980s, Thatcher encountered significant opposition to her privatization programme from within the grandees of the Conservative Party who put social cohesion – ‘one nation conservatism’ – above all else.

Taking a long view, it would seem that the conflict between the ‘economic right’ and the ‘cultural right’ is somewhat peripheral to the larger evolution of conservative thought. At times it even seems contrived. However, like in most issues relating to conservative politics, the experience varies from country to country.

 

Sixth, conservatism sees itself as the embodiment of national identity: a conservative is much more than a patriot; he is simultaneously a nationalist. As of now, the post-national conservative is yet to emerge, even in the European Union. To the conservative, it is insufficient to be merely wedded to what is called ‘constitutional patriotism’ except insofar as it distinguishes him from the fascist who seeks a forcible takeover of the state using, if necessary, violence.

The superficiality of being merely wedded to political institutions is most marked in the case of France. That country, it has been remarked, gets through Republics with about the same frequency as Zsa Zsa Gabor runs through husbands. Yet France does not lack either a national identity or national pride. But these seem more centred on culture and cuisine than expressed in terms of attachment to political institutions. At various points in its history, Germany too experienced a sharp detachment between culture and politics. In his remarkable The Seduction of Culture in German History, Wolf Lepenies observed that ‘Germany’s unity had been achieved not by politics but by culture. For a long time the Germans were content to remain a Kulturvolk whose self-esteem could not be lowered by the absence of a unified German state.’

Constitutional patriotism has its role in resisting knee-jerk changes to the political system but as Miller argues, it doesn’t provide any ‘sense of the historical identity of the community that binds present-day politics to decisions made and actions performed in the past.’ A purely ‘private set of cultural values’ ranging from the love of music to whiskey tasting and love of dogs cannot substitute for a ‘public understanding of the terms on which we are going to carry on our collective life.’

 

Finally, there is a distinctly Indian dimension to conservative thought that has to be factored. In India, at least till the 1920s, the liberal-conservative divide wasn’t so apparent. This was because public intellectuals were almost entirely focused on the theme of national recovery in the face of a loss of the country’s sovereign status. In assessing why India had become a subject nation, there was broad agreement over the absence of a national feeling, something that the colonial rulers were seen to possess in such abundance that it even transcended their codes of morality.

There were different approaches suggested for instilling national self-esteem in a subject people: some suggested rigid adherence to the shastras, others called for the creation of a robust Hinduism shorn of embellishments and corrupt practices, and still others preached combining the personal search for God with service to the poor. The thread that bound these disparate prescriptions for national recovery was the emphasis placed on charitra – the combination of individual enterprise with respect for religious and social norms.

The theme found expression in the historical writings of Sir Jadunath Sarkar, particularly on the Moghul Empire and the Maratha kingdom. The Chicago historian Dipesh Chakravarty has captured the essence of Sarkar in a recent historiographical study. To Sarkar, ‘What mediated between the "destiny" of a people and the contingency of their empirical reality…was something called "character", the sheer capacity in humans for leadership, discipline, effort, reason, mastering passions and self-cultivation. It was what separated destiny from fate and left the former open to multiple possibilities. Take away the question of character and the revealed greater purpose of history remains unfulfilled.’

Combined with the self-restraint that underpinned the commitment to traditional social institutions, notably the joint family, this emphasis on c haracter building – also a defining feature of the Victorian age – elevated conservative thinking to a level above politics.

 

The extent to which contemporary political currents in India adhere to these broad principles of conservatism, culled from international experience, is a subject for another essay. A quick overview suggests that commonalities blend with large measures of distinctiveness, some of which cut across partisan lines. What emerges is the fact that the desire to change and change recklessly is counterbalanced by tendencies that seek to both conserve and change at the same time. Conservative politics in India may have only recently stepped on to the centre stage self-consciously. That, however, doesn’t imply that conservatism is a recent phenomenon lacking depth and rigour. Politics, after all, is only a small part of the wider desire to effect a contract between the dead, the living and the unborn.