Last month in Washington DC, more than 500 leaders, activists, clergies, scholars, and think tanks from the Western world participated in an international conference on national conservatism to explore the way ahead for the ideology. This was conceptualised by noted author and thinker Yoram Hazony.
Also invited to the conference as featured speakers were some names from outside the Western world such as Reza Pahlavi and Ed Husain. The Indian delegation included Ram Madhav, president of India Foundation and noted public intellectual Swapan Dasgupta.
Before and after the conference, questions were raised by both liberals and conservatives about invitations to those connected to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). They wondered whether an engagement with Hindu groups was possible.
McGrew’s allegations
An article titled Is Hindu Nationalism Friendly to Christianity, written by Bethel McGrew in a US-based journal First Things argued, “…is there really a ‘natural alliance’ between Hindu nationalists and American conservatives, particularly religious ones (and particularly Christians)? Madhav’s pitch sounds appealing when he reports that it’s ‘no longer fashionable’ for an Indian to identify as non-conservative or non-religious (sic) … he reassures his audience that Indian Christians’ freedom of religion is ‘sacrosanct’ and ‘zealously’ upheld.”
The author cited the burning of an Australian missionary in the eastern part of the country 25 years ago. She also mentions Dasgupta who had explained in his speech that “Hindu nationalists mistrust ‘Evangelical’ rhetoric because the concept of ‘conversion’ has no meaning in Hinduism.”
After going through this article and other writings that question the association of Hindu nationalists with Western conservatives, it becomes clear that ‘forced conversion’ is perhaps the only contentious issue between the two groups. On other fundamental issues, they share the same concerns—whether it is family, faith, God, nationalism, or common enemies like expansionist China, radical Islam, and cultural Marxism or wokeism.
When we set out to build a worldview we cannot afford to cherry-pick incidents. Violent attacks against Indians and other non-Whites have been reported in the US, but that cannot be singularly used to understand the official line of American conservatives. In India, the idea of mutual respect and acceptance finds more ground than that of tolerance.
Prima facie, Indian conservatives do not have a problem with Christianity or Islam, or for that matter, any religious denomination. They regard India as the cradle of civilisation and shelter for persecuted religious groups, including Jews and Parsis. All religions have the right to preach, profess, and practice in India but they must also follow the law of the land, which means ‘forced conversion’ cannot be allowed.
McGrew’s allegation also falls short of facts. She writes, “strong Christian presence was inversely proportional to the strength of the BJP”. In the last few years, the BJP has not only won seats but also formed governments in states like Goa, Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Orissa, and others where Christians are a sizable population. There should be clarity if the West wants to see India from a Christian or secular point of view.
Also read: India is de-hyphenating ties with Ukraine-Russia—5 key verticals of Modi’s historic Kyiv visit
Need for cooperation
It is high time that national conservative forces across the world engage with each other, have dialogue, and devise ways to counter the Black-Red alliance—radical Islamism and cultural Marxism. There will be inherent differences among conservatives of different countries, as the ideology pivots around rootedness. The roots of different societies are different as each society grows and prospers by responding to the problems in its surroundings.
At the moment, the world stands paralysed by dilemmas that challenge not just our faith but also fundamental ideas of childhood, sexuality, lifestyle, and knowledge traditions.
Noted intellectual on Indian foreign policy, C Raja Mohan has also advocated for consultation and cooperation among Western and Indian conservatives. He wrote for Foreign Policy, “The Western nationalist right may be driven by racial, cultural, and religious anxieties, but wherever it gains power, it faces the need to deal with the non-Western world. If engaging non-Western conservatives becomes part of a long-term strategy, the BJP presents itself at the top of the list as one of the world’s largest parties on the right. The West, too, has traditionally engaged India through its left-leaning elites, and a better understanding of what drives the BJP and its ideology would help it relate to one of the world’s most important rising powers.”
Liberalism as an ideology should be understood in its full context and there is a lot that could be extrapolated from liberal principles but this does not hold true when we look at the liberals today. Many liberal intellectuals and politicians of the day have lost direction in search of a revolutionary change. Caught in a deficit of ideas, they are unable to resolve the problems of our time.
Instead of having a dialogue with conservatives of the world, the present-day liberal intellectuals want to establish through their writings and activism that those against them must be considered illiberal. With academic and intellectual discourse tilted toward them, contemporary liberals are able to spin and sell better.
The truth is that the opposite of liberal is conservative, which has a glorious intellectual tradition and offers well-thought-out solutions to the problems of our time. Hindu nationalism, with its long intellectual history, comes closest to the idea of Indian conservatism.
There is a need to have an engagement between Western conservatism and Hindu nationalism that has hitherto been absent. Both need to understand each other. A sustained interaction will offer guidelines for the future.
Swadesh Singh is a Distinguished Fellow at India Foundation, New Delhi and teaches Political Science at Delhi University, Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
There are commom points of agreement for sure. But a party that does not value the the individual’s fundamental God given rights to practisce, profess and propagate the faith that his conscience obliges him to do cannot call itself conservative. The problem is not the so called ‘forced conversion’ but the ‘right to conversion’ itself. To say that Hinduism does not have converts or a concept of conversion is itself a lie if one looks at ghar wapsi programs and ISCKON monks doing street evangelization.
Another point of contention is with disregard for standards in religious discussions. Most discussions are futile without respect for standards. Most of the Hindu-right is dominated by people from tech or the fringe with limited knowledge of how the inter-religious scholarship has progressed in last 100 years.
As of now to call BJP a conservative party would be a mockery of principles of Christian conservatism.