BOOKS: NOT QUITE RIGHT
It is a little alarming to find myself in substantial agreement with Jerry Rao in his view of ‘Indian culture’ as a multi-layered palimpsest—not least because JR is a self-confessed “conservative” and I fancied myself as a leftist once. I am not eager to gatecrash JR’s already well-populated “we”—still, I must confess that there are many other attractive features in JR’s assemblage of exemplars of Indian right-wing thought. But alas, “a history of Indian rightwing thought” this is not. It does have something of a chronicle in it—a listing of names from the past to the present, but it has none of the analytic bite, the architecture of cause and consequence expected in a true history. Perhaps one might think of it as a generous guest list, for a large spectral assembly in the Valhalla where reactionaries gather.
JR is concerned to save the fair name of conservatism, and picks up random names in a somewhat promiscuous fashion. Burke and Adam Smith are there, of course, but so are many, many others—Rammohan Roy and Gokhale, Savarkar and Gandhi, Rajaji and Patel—but not Nehru, of course. Even Indira Gandhi is included, because she was concerned to “save” the environment. It’s a pity Godse is excluded, because he too was trying to “save” something, albeit in his perverted fashion. JR’s bar of inclusion in the conservative pantheon is both low and eccentric. There is no sense of any strong philosophical “necessity” at work in any of this. It is to JR’s credit that for all his admiration for the BJP’s cultural nationalism, he is keen to distinguish his “conservatism” from the cow-loving lynch-mobs. But a more rigorous philosophical exercise would require some attempt to relate the allegedly benign and malign aspects of Sanghi culture into an integrated understanding of the underlying phenomenon. Or indeed, to probe the manifest contradictions between JR’s conception of the layered and hybrid nature of Indian culture and the “Aryan” fantasy favoured by “conservative” Sanghis—consider Gurugram and Prayagraj. But, at the end of the day, JR is too “nice” to make such rigorous, uncouth demands.
In fact, that “niceness” might be the fatal flaw here. JR is nice in the way
THE BOOK LACKS THE ARCHITECTURE OF CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE EXPECTED IN A TRUE HISTORY
that 1950s Hollywood is nice: smiling, sunny, and stubbornly ignorant of the toxic realities—of racism and patriarchy and imperialism—that were simmering just beneath the surface. The analogy with the American ’50s goes further, because JR is located in the moral certainties of the Cold War era, when anti-communism was endowed with a moral aura, and the grim realities of post-2008 capitalism were not even a gleam in Fukuyama’s eye. But such certainty is inadequate to cope with our complex, interwoven despairs— the earth uninhabitable, inequality rampant, collapsing societies, tides of desperate refugees washing up on hostile shores. JR’s innocent admiration for “Reagan-Thatcher” makes me almost nostalgic for the world in which the lying simplifications of neo-liberal ideology—markets good, states bad; “there is no such thing as society”—were deemed adequate by anyone.
In fact, that phrase “neo-liberal” is particularly offensive to JR. But there is hardly space here to tangle with JR apropos neo-liberalism, beyond saying that it has few defenders now, even on the sentient Right. But JR’s struggles with the word “liberal” offer a good illustration of why such a rambling, gossipy level of discourse (!) is inadequate to the philosophical project announced in his title. “Liberal” is particularly slippery because it alludes both to free markets; and to the rights and freedoms, the flourishing of human beings in, and against, societies and markets. As such, “liberal” is defended and attacked, in one or other of its senses, by people both on the right and the left. “Liberal values” still command a degree of moral heft in the rest of the world, even though being called a “liberal” is practically to be accused of being “antinational” in our “new India”.
Beyond the guest list for that ultimate party in the sky, there is very little here that one can agree or disagree with. This book has been written, the author informs, in direct response to Ramachandra Guha’s remark about the absence of right-wing thought in India. I’m afraid the question of whether it constitutes a refutation, or a confirmation thereof must remain moot. ■