The Age of Creative Conservatism

MY RECOLLECTION OF THE TIME Hafez al-Assad ousted his own Socialist Ba’ath Party colleagues in 1971 to be­come the latest autocrat to govern Syria is extremely hazy. Apart from the fact that the Middle East seemed very far away, I cannot recall if any of the mainstream English-language news­papers covered the event in a way as to excite my schoolboy imagination. In any case, we in Calcutta (as it was then called) were too preoccupied following the course of the turbulence next door in East Pakistan.

However, I vividly recall the day in 1979 when a smiling immigration officer at Heathrow informed me that Britain now had a woman prime minister, adding helpfully “a majority of 24”. Hasten­ing to my college in London to find out the mood among my radical friends who, after fulminating against the ‘betrayal’ of the Labour government had proceeded to campaign for the Labour Party, I realised the importance of footnotes.

In hindsight, the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister of a Britain that was often referred to as the “sick man of Europe” was a landmark event. However, to many of my fellow students what was unacceptable was that a splinter Trotskyist group had polled enough votes (probably not more than 300 or so) to allow the Conservative Party to edge the Labour candidate to second place in the neighbouring constituency of Paddington. I think this is what Ayatollah Khomeini meant when he said that he didn’t usher in the Islamic Revolution to bring down the price of watermelons.

Never mind the all-time validity of the Chinese saying, “When the finger points to the moon, the idiot points to the finger.” The election of Thatcher was a personal landmark. More than anyone else, it was her robust advocacy of conservatism that forced me to reconsider the tonnes of leftist verbiage that many of us of the post-1968 generation had considered obligatory to spout. Along with the recon­dite Marxist theory was the spurious show of solidarity with ‘socialist’ dictator­ships all over the world. In India, at least two genera­tions of Bengalis with intellectual pretensions spent their waking hours thinking of ways to emulate the destructive Cultural Revolution whose mere men­tion sends shivers down the spine of people in China.

I don’t exactly recall which wise person described a conservative as a former liberal who had been mugged by reality. Whoever it was, it fully describes the predicament of many individuals who were helped by Thatcher to rediscover their lost common sense. Before Thatcher, conservatism had an intel­lectual basis but it stood for the rationalisation of the ancien régime, including the culture of deference and entitlement. Of course, taking off from Edmund Burke, there was a natural wariness of radical breaks and a partiality for slow change and even no change at all. Benjamin Disraeli was perhaps the only radi­cal Tory, as perhaps was Joseph Chamberlain, a man who never made it to the top job. Otherwise, conser­vatism meant dull individuals with limited and pre­dictable interests and lacking spark. There were lots of classics scholars from Oxford who helped shape Britain’s imperial policy and develop an imperial mentality. The name of Lord Curzon immediately comes to mind. However, World War II killed off this tradition and the old paternalist conservatives gradually became a rarity, post-Empire.

Thatcher injected an economic philosophy into conservatism. It didn’t come out of abstract theorising, although the imprint of the likes of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman were un­mistakable. What came to be known as Thatcher­ism was essentially a political programme aimed at addressing two problems: first, arresting the British decline and, secondly, and perhaps more challeng­ing, reversing nearly four decades of socialism.

It is not necessary to spell out exactly what Thatcher did and did not do in her long spell in government. What she succeeded in doing was converting market economics into plain com­mon sense. The pitfalls of deficit financing—a measure of short-term expediency that was transformed by socialists into abiding fiscal indiscipline—were spelt out in terms of house­hold budgets: that you must not spend more than you earn. The grim squalor of public hous­ing was addressed by selling of properties to ten­ants on the correct assumption that people will take pride in what they own. Finally, Thatcher initiated the process of privatisation of ineffi­cient state-owned enterprises. The distinctive feature of her divestment programme was that she didn’t fall back on strategic sales—meaning transferring ownership from the state to another big corporation. The creation of what came to be called “shareholding democracy” was a political masterstroke. It created a class of people who acquired a vested interest in the success of companies.

The flowering of Thatcherism coincided broadly with the unacknowledged re­alisation within the Congress-dominated governing elite that the mixed economy, statist economic policy, was producing diminishing returns. It is sometimes dif­ficult for today’s generation to realise the extent to which the so-called Hindu rate of growth and the obsessive preoccupation with planning bred a sense of frustra­tion. The era of permanent shortages—from essential foodstuffs to all manner of luxury goods—had a definite impact on the way Indians imagined their personal and national existence. It set definite limits to what individuals could aspire to and, as Firdaus Kanga was to write in one of his novels, leaving India was an idea we grew up with. Those who could, from the humble unskilled labourer in Punjab to the ambitious postgraduate student in one of the better educational institutions, bought one-way tickets to the US. There was a great deal of public despondency and chest-beating over the unending brain drain, but there was complete political paralysis when it came to reversing the policies that had created the problems to begin with. I remember writing an article in the mid-1980s arguing that it was time to let the state sector be overshadowed by private enterprise and being told by a journalist colleague “you can’t do that.”

Looking back at how an intellectual consensus against the Nehruvian model of socialism came to prevail, I would give some of the credit for beginning the process to Rajiv Gandhi. Unlike his younger brother Sanjay, whose preference was in the direction of letting public sector dominance go hand-in-hand with private sector cronyism, Rajiv was perhaps the only Gandhi politician who had worked for a living. Although his exposure as a commercial pilot was in the public sector, he had realised that India was falling behind thanks to its own deficiencies. I certainly believe that had he not been completely derailed by the Bofors controversy, Rajiv would have begun what PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh set in motion in 1991.

A feature of the conservatism that Thatcher and her more distinguished contemporary Presi­dent Ronald Reagan articulated centred mainly on economics, although both were equally passionate in drumming up patriotic impulses at home. Pre­dictably, their ideas were quite vi­ciously attacked by the stalwarts of the liberal and Left ecosystem. Reagan was especially portrayed as stupid. However, the American president, whose landslide elec­toral victory over Walter Mondale hasn’t been bettered, had the last laugh after the Berlin Wall was dismantled by the citizens of East Germany themselves.

Yet, this preoccupation with the economy had a curious unintended consequence. In a recent study, The War against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (2024), the Marxist-turned-conservative writer Frank Furedi noted that while the Reagan-Thatcher years were associated with the triumph of conservatism, “the ideological triumph of Reaganomics and the formidable support that it enjoyed were not matched in the sphere of culture. Indeed, in the cultural domain, traditional conservative ideals regarding tradition, the fam­ily, sexuality, morality and the past were on the defensive. It was precisely during this decade that cultural norms calling into question the traditional values of the West gained rapid as­cendancy. What American conservatives had previously characterised as ‘adversary culture’ was fast acquiring hegemonic influence. The verdict of the American sociologist Alan Wolfe on these key developments in this era is perti­nent to this day. He noted that ‘the right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war, and the centre won the political war’.”

In India, the battle against Nehruvian socialism always re­mained patchy and very incomplete. To this was added the existential di­lemma facing India’s foreign policy based on non-alignment, following the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union. The pro-Moscow tilt that Indi­ra Gandhi ensured to offset American support for Pakistan during the Ban­gladesh crisis of 1971 lost all relevance. Narasimha Rao made up lost ground by reaching out to the US and making amends in the Middle East by recog­nising Israel. However, the tentative moves towards a nation-first policy meant that at least two of three pillars of the Nehruvian order—socialism and non-alignment—went out of the window. What remained was secular­ism, and it was on this issue that the culture wars involving the progres­sives and conservatives were fought.

The terms of battle also ensured that the Indian conservative camp was made up primarily of those with an attachment to tradition, culture and faith over economics. Indeed, as subsequent events were to confirm, India’s conservatives were flexible on matters of state control and the primacy of the market. Their distinctive identity was established in the battles over securing a more decisive Hindu identity for India and challenging the onslaught of the liberal-Left-Islamist triumvirate. Secularism became the omnibus term of the war for the soul of India.

Disraeli once said that conservatism is either national or it is nothing. To study the trajectory of India’s conservative politics through the prism of move­ments in European countries and the US would be flawed. There may be ele­ments of national conservatism which have cross-national links, but in the ultimate analysis conservative politics is invariably based on national particu­larities. Moreover, within conservative movements there are divergent trends.

In many ways, the fact that the Indian Right rescued itself from marginal exis­tence owed almost entirely to the Ayodhya movement acquiring mass popularity. Yet, this was by no means inevitable since the issue had been simmering locally since at least 1948. Whether Ayodhya was triggered by the fact that the socialist edifice on which Congress depended was experiencing a terminal crisis in 1989-90, or whether it was the fear of social disintegration triggered by the Mandal agitation on the one hand and the Khalistan movement on the other, is best left for future historians to answer. Also significant was the convergence of a mass movement with extremely radical impulses with a parliamentary thrust to change India’s pattern of governance. If the former provided the excitement that drew in both the young and the subordinate castes, it was the humdrum of electoral politics that drew in old-fashioned conservative impulses.

The Indian experience was not dissimilar to the post-Reagan conservatism that the US experienced. President Trump could combine his impetuosity and anger at an entitled Washington Establishment with the foundation that had been laid by the Christian evangelists, the Tea Party movement against high taxes, the Dixiecrat revolt and a refined ideological thrust that had been providedbythe likes of WilliamBuckley. Likewise, Narendra Modi benefitted from the assertive Hindu nationalism that Ayodhya generated, to which was added the aspirational thrust of a younger generation impatient with the slug­gish pace of change, inadequate infrastructure and the worship of poverty by the political class. This conservatism had only a tangential con­nection with the conservatism that the likes of C Rajagopalachari and Minoo Masani tried to build through the Swatantra Party.

In the early-1990s, there were many well-heeled Indians that turned their backs on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because they insisted that the Right meant market econom­ics and not the creation of a new Hindu identity. A few of them even reposed their faith in Con­gress. Their big miscalculation was in think­ing that there was a single trajectory of conser­vatism, namely persisting with the legacy of Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Rajaji, et al. Like those conservatives in the US who were left high and dry by Trump and could never com­prehend MAGA, Ayodhya gave India’s politics its unique direction. This is an inheritance that needs to be built upon, creatively.

2025 New Year IssueAtal Bihari VajpayeeBJPC RajagopalachariCongressCreative ConservatismLK AdvaniManmohan SinghMargaret ThatcherMinoo MasanipoliticsPV Narasimha RaoRajendra PrasadRajiv GandhiRonald ReaganSardar Vallabhbhai Patel