Testament of a Radical Liberal

THE EDITOR’S INVITATION TO USE THIS SPACE TO EXPOUND my own political beliefs, as India celebrates the 79th anniversary of its Independence, comes at an opportune time. If there was ever a time for an Indian writer to articulate a personal and expanded idea of an authentically Indian liberalism, it is now. The current legitimisation of illiberal alternatives and the erosion of trust in egalitarian democracy, the surrender of individual liberties to the hands of a ruling dispensation that has often exceeded its constitutional powers, the rampant undermining of institutions that were meant to check executive overreach, and the mainstreaming of bigoted and chauvinistic nar­ratives that seek to ‘otherise’ entire communities, all point to an urgent need to offer a reimagined idea of liberalism to counter the systemic distortions that plague India’s democracy. I am working on a book that aims to do just that, but this is an early opportunity to offer a curtain-raiser.

My belief in liberalism was not forged exclusively in libraries. It was also shaped in my own experience as a student and then as a United Nations (UN) official, in refugee camps, conflict zones, and diplomatic briefings. Perhaps the earliest experience that reinforced my liberal instincts was in my student days, when after a taste of campus democracy as president of the St Stephen’s College Union, I had every expectation of following a conventional path into public service. My late grandfather, like many of his generation, had hoped I would join the civil service. The Foreign Service was a respected calling, and one I, as someone who was chronically good at taking exams, seriously considered. Then came the Emergency. Watching, from graduate school in America, a democratically elected govern­ment back home suspend civil liberties, censor the press, and imprison political opponents, forced an uncomfortable question upon me: What does it mean to serve the state when the state itself has ceased to respect the freedoms it exists to protect? For the first time, I found myself unwilling to assume that public institu­tions were inherently worthy of trust sim­ply because they were public institutions. Prestige was no guarantee of principle.

The experience did not turn me against government in general. It did, however, shape my understanding of one of liberalism’s central insights: that power must always be subject to re­straint. The Emergency demonstrated how quickly rights could become vul­nerable when too much authority was concentrated in the executive and too few institutions were willing or able to resist. It reinforced my belief that liberty depends not on the goodwill of those in office but on an independent judiciary, a free press, a robust opposition, and con­stitutional limits that no government can easily set aside.

Liberalism appealed to me not be­cause it distrusted the state in principle, but because it recognised that even democratic states require checks on their power. So I refused to take the ex­aminations that might have brought me into government service. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I would have chosen a different path had Emer­gency never occurred. What I know for certain is that it left me with a conviction that has never departed: a citizen’s duty is not blind faith in the state but vigilance against the misuse of state authority.

I saw a great deal of such misuse dur­ing my years at the UN, where I worked for eleven years for the refugee agency (1978-89) and then seven in peace-keep­ing (1989-96) before graduating to the upper echelons of manage­ment. I encountered societies where diversity had ceased to be a source of strength and had instead become the fault line along which entire nations fractured. One of my earliest encounters with the practical meaning of liberalism came during my years with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, when I witnessed the consequences of the Vietnamese boat people crisis. The refu­gees I encountered who had been rescued at sea after desperate escapes to freedom had lost homes, livelihoods and, in many cases, even the protection of a state. Yet what remained was their irre­ducible humanity. Watching families rebuild their lives from the ruins of displacement impressed upon me a fundamental liberal truth: that human dignity precedes citizenship and cannot be contingent upon nationality, race, or creed.

THE SAME LESSON came home to me as the principal officer tasked in the UN peace-keeping department with managing the world body’s response to the civil war in, and breakup of, the former Yugoslavia. To watch a multi-ethnic, multi-religious society collapse into illiberalism and conflict was an object lesson in the value of liberal principles in ensuring hu­man coexistence. It also reminded me that the protection of di­versity was a hugely vital responsibility of politics, that human beings at their worst are capable of extraordinary cruelty when led by bigoted and hate-filled politicians, and that again liberal­ism has the great virtue of rising above prejudice and narrow-mindedness to focus on the inherent rights of all individuals in a society. Indeed liberalism, at its best, insists that every individual possesses rights simply by virtue of being human. Though I had encountered this principle in the writings of philosophers, I saw its necessity in the lives of people who had been deprived of ev­erything except their humanity.

Since leaving the UN and entering Indian politics in 2009, my liberalism has been sharpened further in the crucible of domestic politics. In parallel, my convictions have been articulated in my books. A cohesive thread of liberal-democratic thought runs di­rectly through my extensive literary corpus, with several books prefiguring the central concerns brought together in this current volume. My intellectual journey in hardcovers began with the foundational liberal hope articulated in India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), a vision that was subsequently grounded in the inclusive, pluralistic architecture of the republic in Nehru: The Invention of India (2003). As the battle lines over the country’s iden­tity sharpened, The Battle of Belonging (2021) offered a vital defence of civic nationalism over exclusionary ethno-nationalism, while Ambedkar: A Life (2022) reinforced the indispensable concept of constitutional morality as the nation’s ultimate ethical compass. This structural analysis reached its logical contemporary evolu­tion in Our Living Constitution (2025), which meticulously evalu­ated the strength of the nation’s legal framework against modern pressures, complementing the sharp administrative and econom­ic critique I originally laid out in India Shastra (2015). Together with my decades of political commentary, essays, and columns, these works do not merely stand as isolated volumes; they form a continuous intellectual manifesto that consistently champions a robustly liberal, secular, and equitable vision for India’s politics, foreign policy, and socio-economic transformation.

I had been writing about India for years, even as a UN official abroad, articulating my liberal understanding of the nation’s polit­ical, economic and social development. A few years ago, however, I found myself writing a book I had never imagined I would need to write. I had spent much of my public life discussing politics, diplomacy, development and history. Yet increasingly, I was being asked to defend or explain something far more personal: my faith.

The question itself revealed a change in our public discourse with the ascent of the Hindutva-espousing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For most of my life, religion had been understood as a matter of personal conviction. One’s faith was something one practised, reflected upon, questioned, or interpreted in one’s own way. In­creasingly, however, religion seemed to be treated as a political category before it was understood as a spiritual one. Citizens were expected not merely to belong to a faith but to subscribe to a par­ticular political interpretation of that faith. It was this develop­ment that ultimately led me to write Why I Am a Hindu (2017).

The experience taught me an important lesson about liber­alism. Liberalism is often misunderstood as hostility towards religion. In reality, one of its greatest contributions may be the protection of religious freedom itself. A liberal society does not ask citizens to abandon faith; it asks only that faith remain a mat­ter of conscience rather than communal coercion. It recognises that individuals should have the freedom to define their own relationship with religion, rather than having that relationship defined for them by political organisations, governments or ideo­logical movements.

What troubled me most was not that others interpreted Hin­duism differently from me. Hinduism, after all, has accommo­dated countless interpretations over thousands of years. What troubled me was the growing assumption that a citizen’s un­derstanding of his or her own faith could be declared invalid if it failed to conform to a prescribed political narrative. The moment individuals lose the freedom to interpret their own identities, liberalism itself comes under strain.

Looking back, I realise that the impulse behind Why I Am a Hindu was not merely religious. It was liberal. It was an asser­tion of a simple but increasingly important principle: that in a free society, identity belongs first to the individual. Whether we are speaking of religion, culture, language, gender, nationality or sexual orientation, citizens must retain the right to define themselves rather than be defined by others. The defence of that freedom is, ultimately, one of liberalism’s most enduring tasks.

Paradoxically, perhaps, my liberal instinct to stand up for my own views, more recently on various issues of national security and foreign policy, have put me even more at odds with the ‘Left-liberals’ in the political ecosystem. This was especially the case in the wake of my support for the Indian government’s retaliatory missile attack on Pakistan, Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, lead­ing to some celebrated debates with sections of my own party, the Indian National Congress, and the broader commentariat. I felt strongly that liberalism is not the opposite of patriotism. Liberals are often caricatured as insufficiently attached to the nation, while patriotism is frequently presented as the exclusive preserve of those who speak in the language of nationalism. My own experience has led me to reject this false choice.

The events surrounding Operation Sindoor brought this ques­tion into unusually sharp focus. When I agreed to represent India abroad as part of a multi-party delegation explaining the country’s response to terrorism, I found myself subjected to criti­cism from unexpected quarters. Some questioned whether I was being insufficiently loyal to my own party. Others implied that participation in a government-led initiative amounted to political endorsement. The criticism revealed a troubling feature of our increasingly polarised politics: the assumption that every issue must be viewed through a partisan lens, and that cooperation across political divides is somehow suspect.

I did not see the matter that way. My disagreements with the government on numerous domestic and political questions re­mained entirely intact. But I have always believed that there is a distinction between loyalty to a party and loyalty to a country. Po­litical parties are instruments of democratic competition; nations are larger and more enduring communities. To support India’s position against terrorism was not, in my view, an act of parti­san allegiance. It was an act of national responsibility.

A liberal democracy also depends on precisely this distinction. Governments are elected, criticised and eventually re­placed. Nations endure. Citizens should be free to oppose a government vigorous­ly while still standing with their coun­try in moments of challenge. Indeed, a democracy matures when it becomes possible for political opponents to unite around certain fundamental interests without surrendering their ideological differences. Liberalism is not an abdica­tion of patriotism. Nor does patriotism require unquestioning loyalty to a gov­ernment or a party. Properly understood, liberalism asks us to place constitutional values, democratic institutions, and the national interest above partisan calcula­tions. In an age of growing polarisation, that may be one of the most important forms of patriotism we can practise.

THE LARGER QUESTION re­mains: Is there space in India for an authentically Indian liberal­ism? My life has taught me that there is.

“I am, I suppose, an old-fashioned lib­eral,” I wrote in the Introduction to my 2014 collection of essays, India Shastra, “one who believes in political liberty, social freedoms, minimal restrictions on economic activity, and a concern for social justice.” The sentiment was expressed somewhat defensively. “This has tended to put me in a very small mi­nority in India,” I explained, “where po­litical opinion is divided between a ‘left’ pledged to upholding socialism and state command of the economy, and a ‘right’ defined principally by its adherence to religious and cultural nationalism rather than economic or political con­victions.” A dozen years later, the need to explore the liberal impulse further, and to understand why liberalism has fared so poorly in India, strikes me as all the more acute.

The writer and thinker Gurcharan Das describes a liberal thus: “At a per­sonal level, a liberal is an open-minded, generous, and tolerant person, who is open to new ideas. When presented with evidence to the contrary, the lib­eral is apt to change his mind. A liberal’s temper tends to be suspicious of po­litical, military and theocratic power. When confronted with someone of the opposite belief, the liberal has the abil­ity to show respect and even value the opponent’s creed.” His words resonate with me because that is exactly the kind of person I am. I tend not to judge people, accepting them as they are, while retain­ing the right to engage or disagree with their ideas and actions. I believe every­one is free to be themselves, so long as they do not harm others in the process.

In that earlier statement of conviction, I expanded briefly on my personal dilemma. “The one liberal political party that largely embodied my views, C. Rajagopalachari’s Swatantra Party, disap­peared in 1974, and it was only after the liberalization policies undertaken by the Congress Party in 1991 that I was able to find a congenial home there, albeit, on some issues, on its fringes,” I explained. “My political isolation in many respects has been compounded by the robustness of my views on foreign policy and national security, laid out in greatest detail in Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century (2012). A liberal hawk is a rare bird anywhere, but particularly in an India whose social and economic pieties and peace-loving credentials were sanctified by the hal­lowed freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi.”

I tend to be a confusing figure to those who like to typecast their politicians: within Congress but not a socialist, and with a long track record of being critical of previous Congress govern­ment decisions ranging from the ‘license-permit-quota Raj’ to the Emergency; a critic of BJP for its divisive Hindutva politics but a proud advocate of India’s civilisational legacy and the Hindu faith; an opponent of the communists, who nonethe­less applauded their staunch secularism while deploring their primitive economics.

In an analysis for The Wire, often described as the house organ of ‘Left-liberal’ political commentary in India, critic NK Bhoopesh excoriated me in 2025 as “India’s Most Celebrated Post-Ideology Politician,” writing of me that “his political philosophy anchors around what is essentially his post-ideological politics.” His im­plicit view is that my liberal outlook was by definition “post-ideo­logical” because it did not conform to the orthodoxies of the leftist ideological consensus. But surely liberalism is also an ideology? It’s just that, in my matrix, “Left-liberal” is an awkward hybrid; a leftist, by definition, cannot be a liberal. They can coexist, even cooperate on issues like secularism or social freedoms, but most of what liberals believe in politically and economically would be anathema to a leftist.

Part of the difficulty in writing about Indian liberalism is the tendency of such analysts to see liberalism as an exotic foreign concept rather than a set of coherent beliefs applicable to Indian society as to any other. Liberalism is best understood not as a monolithic dogma but as a complex set of political principles rooted in the primacy of the individual and the preservation of personal liberty, which apply universally. At its core, it posits that human beings are rational agents capable of self-determination, which necessitates a system where individual rights—specifi­cally life, liberty, property and expression—are protected from arbitrary interference by the state or religious institutions. This is structurally supported by the rule of law and constitutional­ism, ensuring that governance is based on established legal prin­ciples rather than the whims of a ruler or the tyranny of a party. A liberal ideology typically demands religious toleration and a pluralistic society where diverse viewpoints can coexist through open debate. Economically, it emphasises market freedom and the right to private enterprise, though modern variants (often called social liberalism) argue that true liberty requires state intervention to provide a ‘level playing field’ through educa­tion and social safety nets. (That is indeed my own view; call me a social liberal.) Politically, liber­alism is inseparable from consent of the governed, usually manifested through representative democracy, where the state exists as a ‘neutral umpire’ tasked with maintaining a framework within which individuals can pursue their own versions of the ‘good life’ without harming others.

In the Indian context, liberalism also involves the state being strong enough to promote social change, managing society’s evolution from some of its more regressive, discrimi­natory, and oppressive practices (no­tably caste and gender discrimina­tion), while resisting governmental encroachment on citizens’ kitchens, wardrobes, and bedrooms. Liberals can join with leftists in opposing commu­nal bigotry, with rightists in liberalis­ing the free market, with leftists again in demanding social protections for the marginalised, and with rightists in demanding the dismantling of reg­ulations that restrict the individual’s freedom to conduct economic or politi­cal activity. The inclusive rationalism that liberals respect may put them at odds with religious conservatives, but their respect for the rights of conserva­tives to follow their own religious and cultural practices might contradict the preferences of the left. The liberal belief that the individual takes ethical prior­ity over any collective or social group might encounter opposition, in different circumstances, from both the left and the right. So does liberals’ willingness to allow views or actions with which they themselves disagree, provided they do not infringe on others’ rights. Liberals profoundly believe in being able to act, speak, or think without restraint (negative liberty) and to fulfil one’s potential (positive liberty).

In short, my liberalism is a political ideology centred on the primacy of the individual, the protection of inherent rights, and the belief that government exists to safeguard liberty rather than restrict it. While liberalism is sometimes described as a philoso­phy rather than a rigid ideology, it does have a coherent set of principles. It emphasises freedom, equality before the law, lim­ited government, and rational progress; in the Indian context, it expands to include developmental individualism—the idea that individuals flourish when the state ensures opportunities for education, welfare, and equal chances. In a classical liberal framework, ‘limited government’ is defined as the structural restriction of state power to ensure the preservation of negative liberty—the vital, protected zone where an individual can act without external interference—thereby preventing the over­reach of paternalistic bureaucratic planning and the suffocat­ing expansion of arbitrary government regulation. In India, the social liberal accepts the role of government in uplifting mar­ginalised sections of society, and in administering appropriate regulation to this end.

In India, liberalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy, with attacks from both the Left and the Right. For those on the Left, liberalism represents a dangerous elitist doctrine, prioritising the interests of a handful of privileged individuals over the needs of the col­lective, and promoting an individualism that has resulted in the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots, the primacy of corporate interests, ‘crony capitalism’, and the further marginalisation of the disadvantaged. The Left sees an untenable contradiction between a commitment to egalitar­ian democracy on the one hand and an individualistic market capitalism on the other.

The Indian Right sees different dangers in liberalism, particu­larly its emphasis on individual freedom and its perceived asso­ciation with Western ways of thinking. The ascendant Hindutva Right garbs itself in the social values that emphasise the ideals of community, identity and tradition, as paramount, deriding the cosmopolitanism and secularism associated with liberalism. Its votaries, warriors of ‘cultural nationalism’, dismiss liberalism in India as a Western colonial import that has no connection with our traditional values and way of living.

Whereas Tagore’s liberalism was hailed a century ago— “Give me the strength never to… bend my knees before insolent might,” he prayed in Gitanjali—in today’s India, “insolent might” commands the stage, across parties. What is worse, it seemingly also rides high in public opinion: a Pew survey in 2024 found 85 per cent of respondents in India indicating a preference for authoritarianism or military rule, alongside a decline in those who believed that representative democracy was a good way of governance. Similar trends are apparent even in the West, where (as the phenomenon of ‘democratic deconsolidation’ attains an unprecedented pace), public dissatisfaction with liberal democ­racy and liberal values has been plummeting, enabling Vladimir Putin to triumphantly declare “Liberalism is dead”. Many in New Delhi would agree with him. To both Right and Left, liberalism today is synonymous with elitism, privilege, and an outdated Westernised worldview.

Misunderstood as Western, elitist, or synonymous with left­ist activism, liberalism in India has struggled to assert itself as a coherent and indigenous tradition. Yet, its principles—individual freedom, pluralism, constitutionalism, and moral reasoning— are not foreign imports. As I will argue, they are embedded in In­dia’s ancient intellectual soil, refracted through colonial encoun­ters, and periodically revived in modern political experiments. To reclaim liberalism is not to mimic the West, but to rediscover a native grammar of freedom.

IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA, political discourse has large­ly devolved into a dialogue of the deaf. Some liberal-minded citizens demand accountability and democratic propriety, but they come up against an ecosystem of those entrenched in power, resisting any challenge to their authority. The loudest voices domi­nate the airwaves, and nuance is the first casualty of the shouting match. In this cacophony, the term ‘liberal’ has been distorted, weaponised, and turned into a term of abuse, usually by rightwing demagogues and trolls—being liberal is seen as synonymous with being out-of-touch, elitist, a member of the ‘Khan Market Gang’ or, in the favoured slur of the troll armies, ‘anti-national’.‘Urban Liberal’ and its weaponised political twin, ‘Urban Naxal’, are highly powerful, pejorative slurs engineered by contemporary majoritar­ian populists to toxify the public square. By deliberately conflating the constitutionally anchored, institutional dissent of a traditional liberal with the violent, anti-state extremism of far-left insurgen­cies, the current regime seeks to delegitimise the very concept of a critical, free-thinking citizenry. In aggressively clarifying my beliefs, I seek pre-emptively to rescue genuine liberalism from its detrac­tors and its deformers alike, reasserting it not as a shield for private capital or an alienated elitist fashion, but as a passionate, egalitarian mass project centred on human dignity, institutional restraint, and rights-based citizenship.

So, what does it actually mean to be a liberal in India today? For too long, the Indian Left has claimed the monopoly on liberalism, while the Right has successfully painted it as a foreign import incompatible with Bharatiya culture. Both are wrong. I argue for, and from, a different position: the radical liberal centre.

To be in the centre is not to be wishy-washy, devoid of convic­tion, or equidistant from the truth and the lie. It does not mean splitting the difference between the arsonist and the firefighter. In the Indian context, the centre represents the gravitational core of our republic—the Constitution itself.

Why radical? Because in an era of majoritarian triumphalism on one side and ideological rigidity on the other, holding fast to the values of the Constitution is no longer a passive act. It is a com­bative one. It requires a radical commitment to the principles of pluralism, individual liberty, and social justice.

The radical centre is where the true battle for India’s soul is being fought. It rejects the reactionary politics of identity that seeks to divide us by religion or caste, but it also rejects the doctrinaire stat­ism that stifles our economic potential. It draws from the wisdom of the ancients—Yad bhavam tad bhavati (You become what you believe)—and the modernity of Ambedkar. We are not the Left Lib­erals or Urban Naxals of rightwing caricature. We are constitutional democrats. And it is time we reclaimed our ground.