New Delhi: If BR Ambedkar was alive today, he would have been branded a “Rightist”. With that declaration, political commentator Anand Ranganathan set the stage for the launch of journalist Abhijit Majumder’s book India’s New Right at the Indira Gandhi National Centre For The Arts, Delhi, on Wednesday.
As India sees the rise of a new class of nationalists who do not fit into easy labels, the branding and cancelling of writers, historians, journalists and social media influencers have only gone up. So deep is the problem, that there would have been calls for ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’—beheading—given Ambedkar’s views on Islam, said Ranganathan.
The new nationalists do not carry an emblem tattooed into their flesh. They are not an elite club or a secret society.
“They are every person, everywhere—quietly wiping your floor in the morning, poring over a newspaper on the local train, teaching your child, sending forwards in your family WhatsApp group, giving you change back at a toll plaza, driving your cab, talking on TV or YouTube, playing PUBG with friends at a sleepover, ordering whiskey sour at the bar, or making love to you,” wrote Majumder in the introduction of his new book.
India does not have a Right-wing in the Western sense, he said. Many who fall under the big tent of the ‘Indian Right’ do not even endorse a pure laissez-faire economy “without protection for the poor or local industry or have problems with alternative sexuality or abortion in the early stages if it is the mother’s choice,” he said. What’s more, they may not necessarily agree on many burning issues.
And while the country’s “small but disproportionately influential intellectual elite” call the rise of this new class of Indian nationalists an assault on minorities and secular institutions, the new Right does not fit into easy brackets nor can they be dismissed any more by the Left.
They are challenging existing and exclusionist social, political and historical narratives and are not bothered about being cancelled or negatively labelled.
Who is India’s new Right?
As the conversation flowed over identity and definitions, author and economist Sanjeev Sanyal, who was part of the panel, said there are many shades of Right just as there are many shades of Left. There is the “socialist Left, the Nehruvian Left, the radical Left, the Jihadist Left” and so on.
The non-Left has as many divisions, but there is a growing acceptance that the larger cause is the same.
“Despite disagreements on Twitter, many have come to agree that we can all come under one big tent,” Sanyal said.
Many of India’s foremost intellectuals and thought leaders, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Swami Vivekananda to Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai, would have fit easily into this big tent. But from the 1960s onwards, Sanyal said, the intellectual debates were hijacked by the many shades of Left arguing among themselves. Which is why, he said, this fresh crop of writers and thinkers, loosely called the Right, is a welcome change.
If fights and disagreements within this big tent lead to the best idea winning, it is Darwinian evolution, Ranganathan said. But the bigger battle for many among India’s new Right has been about being able to put their voice across.
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Pressure from influential quarters
Majumder, who has held leadership roles in leading media outlets has never shied away from putting out his socio-political views on X. But this has often made him a pariah in media circles, he said.
“I had a contract with Bloomsbury for my book and had even received an advance payment, but the publisher later backed out saying ‘they would not be able to do justice to the subject’,” he recalled. He’s convinced that it was pressure from influential quarters that made Bloomsbury back out from the project.
One of the panellists, Swati Goel Sharma, said she had been branded ‘Hindutva-vadi’ simply for busting prevalent narratives through her ground reports.
“I identify myself as someone who keeps her ear to the ground,” Sharma said. One of her recent reports, she said, was about 30 families from Meerut who were weaned away from the Hindu fold by “predatory missionaries” who offered medical aid in exchange for conversion.
In a way, Sanyal said it was fortunate that he worked in the financial markets. It was a profession where the one stated objective was: ‘Can you help us make money?’.
“No one really cared about your ideology. I saw the resistance only when I became a writer,” said Sanyal, who is a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India.
But being a descendant of a revolutionary freedom fighter, Sanyal said, “Anyone who knows us knows we, Sanyals, never back away from a fight.”
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)