India’s liberals have never had it so bad. They had opposed Narendra Modi tooth and nail, and yet there he is, in colour co-ordinated kurta and jacket, anointed commander-in-chief for the next five years, at least. Still in shock, the country’s liberal establishment has retreated into quoting Jawaharlal Nehru’s lofty idea of India, as if that magic chant will make Modi disappear.

‘If only Nehru’s great grandson had half his brains’, you can almost hear the collective lament at the India International Centre in Delhi. Yet they make the same mistake as their princeling — they quote the past to a generation in search of a future. For two-thirds of the population, which is below 35, Nehru is the sarkari landline of political leaders; Modi is the Android and iPhone rolled into one. In spite of the democratic evidence, liberal intellectuals and political parties are living in denial: India has moved decisively to the right in economic thinking, and no number of quotes by Nehru will pull it back now.

If individual liberty (political and economic) is the central tenet of liberalism, then Nehru’s idea of India had one central flaw: it did not encourage economic freedom of the individual, instead putting faith in the nanny State with its excessive regulations and patronising doles. As it turned out, the State was an unworthy au pair. India’s left-liberal consensus since Independence is over: free market is the new normal, 23 years after India tentatively opened up its Statist economy. In the future, the push will be for even greater economic freedom, individualism and private enterprise. A poor country may have voted for the nanny State in the past, but a young, lower-middle-income country will prefer growth and private enterprise.

Hence, the future of the Indian liberal project lies in classical liberalism that celebrates the political and economic freedom of the individual, not the Statist left-liberalism of the Nehruvians. Until they dehyphenate the left from liberal, until they embrace economic freedom as a core liberal idea and until they look beyond Nehru, India’s liberals will not be able to counter Modi strategically.

Lessons from Clinton-Blair

Instead of a return to Nehru, India’s liberals should study how the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair reinvented the Democrats and Labour in the ’90s, and eventually defeated the powerful legacies of right-wing heroes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Both Clinton and Blair recognised the fundamental rightward economic shift in their countries, pulled their parties away from welfarism and trade unions towards market-friendly policies, refreshed the packaging with youth and focused squarely on liberal social issues. This was their successful antidote to end an era of Reagan-Thatcher conservatism.

Like Modi, conservatives Reagan and Thatcher had come to power promising recovery for their floundering economies, which were suffering from low productivity, high inflation and a general sense of drift in the late ’70s, under liberal governments. The hallmark of the Reagan-Thatcher era was cuts in welfare spending, financial deregulation, privatisation and union busting. Their policies paid off, the economies recovered, and both their parties went on to prosper. Reagan’s Republicans stayed in power for 12 years, Thatcher’s Conservatives for 18.

Meanwhile, liberals in both countries floundered through the ’80s, as they stuck to their old policies and candidates. Bill Clinton changed that in 1992, when he defeated Reagan’s successor George HW Bush to capture the White House. Clinton had spent years positioning himself as a centrist, a “New Democrat,” very different from the previous liberal challengers, who were in the same old welfarism mould.

Since World War II, every Democratic presidential candidate had tried to pitch some version of Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the government-led relief and recovery package of the Great Depression era in the ’30s, which became the bedrock of American welfarism. Roosevelt was the 20th-century liberal godfather of the US, their Nehru, and the New Deal was their ‘idea of India’. Clinton broke from that past. “We should expect people to move from welfare rolls to work rolls,” he declared in his announcement speech. But for the 1992 campaign, Clinton also had to appeal to the traditional liberal base, particularly to underprivileged Blacks and Hispanics, many of whom were on welfare. Here he campaigned agaianst the Reagan-Bush conservatism, promising to end the 12-year “party of the rich”. But soon after becoming president, he realised that old-school class warfare and welfarism had limited appeal, even among his liberal base.

After the setback for Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, Clinton went back to being the centrist, enthusiastically embracing Reaganomics. By the end of his second term even the chief ideologues of Reaganomics were praising Clinton effusively. “I thought Bill Clinton was a great President,” said Arthur Laffer, one of Reagan’s top economic aides. “The first two years were really bad. Then he changed the tune and became even more Reagan than Reagan.” Clinton had won over the crucial swing voters and even usurped some Republican votes. But he also retained his liberal base through progressive laws on gun control, crime, gender equality and nuclear disarmament. Most importantly though, he got the economy going: 22 million new jobs were created and unemployment hit a 30-year low, a deficit budget was turned into a surplus and poverty was at an all-time low. He succeeded by reinventing American liberalism to suit the times and by co-opting his predecessor’s success, with a liberal twist.

In the UK, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” finally presented a viable liberal alternative to Thatcherism and won the 1997 elections by a landslide. Instead of going back to “Old Labour’s” militant trade unionism, Blair successfully positioned New Labour as part of Cool Britannia: a liberal, globalised marketplace of arts and ideas, with London as a pre-eminent financial services hub that rivalled New York. He could do so only because of Thatcher’s financial deregulation.

Blair and his New Labour successor Gordon Brown were called “sons of Thatcher” because, though she was their political rival, they retained much of Thatcher’s successful economic policies. Labour had a good 12-year run in office till 2010.

So what lessons do the Clinton-Blair years have for Indian liberals? That in bipolar democracies, sometimes it’s smarter to subtly co-opt the adversary’s successful policies, than to oppose them for the sake of it. That liberal holy cows like Nehru or Roosevelt must be set aside for a new set of ideas and leaders to emerge. And that unless they update to a newer version of Indian liberalism, away from Nehru’s Fabian socialism, they face more than a decade in political wilderness.

Refreshing Indian liberalism

Unfortunately, many of India’s liberal intellectuals are not ready to move beyond Nehru. Last month, as India celebrated the 125th anniversary of its first prime minister, the liberal eulogies kept pouring in, and with that a misguided defence of his economic policies.

In Frontline , noted economist Prabhat Patnaik wrote that Nehru’s economic strategy forms “to this day, the core of any genuine anti-imperialist and pro-people development strategy in an economy such as India’s.” Then to support his assertion, he wrote, “it is instructive that several of the Asian economies that had appeared to have forged ahead of India in terms of growth, through an ‘outward-looking’ economic strategy, are today facing acute economic difficulties (which includes Japan, the most successful of ‘export-led’ growth stories of Asia).”

It is true that Japan is facing an economic slowdown, part of the boom-and-bust cycle of an open economy. But it is also true that the average Japanese is still 25 times richer than the average Indian (before India opened up its economy they were nearly 70 times richer). Japan has zero hunger, negligible poverty, scores way above India in every social indicator. And remember, World War II devastated Japan around the same time that India gained its independence.

And yet, a noted liberal economist argues that Japan’s current slowdown proves that Nehru’s economic strategy was superior to Japan’s! Wouldn’t it just be smarter (and more honest) to admit instead that Nehru was a visionary when it came to instilling secularism and democracy in the country, but he got it wrong with the economy?

Unfortunately, though, such assertions point at a deeper malaise: Indian liberal elites suffer from a patronising, the-masses-are-dumb delusion that goes back to the time of Nehru. One of the primary reasons that Nehru chose the State-led model of economic growth was that he believed economic freedom in the hand of the private citizen would be misused: that businessmen would loot the country, while the poor would not get their dues. He was perhaps a well-meaning patriarch, but like an overbearing parent, he hampered the ward’s development.

Outlook ’s Lola Nayar had a nuanced take in the newsmagazine’s Nehru Quasquicentennial Special. “Indeed, the legacy of India’s first prime minister has slowly been undermined by subsequent Congress leaders, including Indira Gandhi, who did away with many democratic norms,” she wrote. “Only the 1991 reforms brought some long-awaited relief — not just to industries, but concomitantly to consumers.”

The architect of those reforms, Manmohan Singh, was a liberal and a devout Nehruvian. But with India’s economy pushed to the brink, he was forced to correct course in 1991, putting India on a path to greater economic freedom and growth. The 2009 mandate, in particular, was one for greater reforms momentum under Singh, a move further away from Nehru’s socialism while keeping his ideas of secularism intact. Unfortunately, the liberal power elite did not comprehend or respect the electoral mandate.

As a result, today Nehru’s cherished idea of secularism too is under threat from a right-wing government with a huge mandate. Nehruvians can no longer save Nehru or Indian liberalism; we need a new generation of liberal thought leaders who can.

(Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian)

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