Can India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) go global? Can it cooperate with like-minded nationalist parties in the West at a time when there is a resurgence of the right wing in Europe and the United States?
In early July, the idea that the BJP should engage with the American right came up at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington. Sponsored by the Netherlands-based Edmund Burke Foundation, the conference has emerged as a major clearinghouse of ideas among the U.S. and European nationalist right, with the aim of building a global front against liberalism. Earlier this year, a similar conference in Brussels featured such right-wing luminaries as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Brexit architect Nigel Farage, who both delivered keynotes.
Two leading intellectuals of the BJP, Ram Madhav and Swapan Dasgupta, spoke at the Washington conference, where they promoted the idea of consultation and cooperation between the Indian and global right. While they were not officially representing the BJP, it was the first time that the Indian right participated in the National Conservatism conferences.
At first glance, the idea of practical cooperation between the Indian and Western nationalist right appears a bridge too far. The gulf that separates the two is real, not least due to nativist, religious, and other anxieties on both sides. Still, these first contacts should not be written off. They could lead to several interesting outcomes, especially for India and the BJP.
These include the expansion of the Indian political elite’s engagement with the world, which has traditionally been dominated by the left. Increased contacts could help replace the Indian right’s congealed anti-Western sentiments with a more nuanced understanding of the current political churn in Europe and North America. The new connections could also lend a wider base of support for the Western right in the non-Western world.
India’s internationalism has long been dominated by its elite connections with the international left. Indian liberals, socialists, and communists developed significant contacts with their Western counterparts at the turn of the 20th century. Connections with the British Labour Party and European social democrats flourished in the first decades after independence. As the organizational structures of the Indian Congress Party and various socialist parties weakened toward the close of the 20th century, their ability for institutional engagement with Western left-of-center parties diminished.
Indian connections to the Western right can also be traced back a long way. The nationalist and fascist parties that emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s impressed the Indian right with their military-style discipline, tight organizational structures, and ability to mobilize their societies—a fascination shared at the time by many in the democratic West. In early 1931, Hindu nationalist leader B.S. Moonje traveled to Italy, where he met Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Moonje saw Mussolini’s nationwide fascist youth organization—the Balilla—as a model to regenerate Hindu youth into a vigorous force.
To undermine Britain, both Mussolini and German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler extended support to Indian nationalist groups on the right and left. The Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose moved to wartime Berlin in 1941, where he allied himself with Hitler in hopes of accelerating a British defeat in India. But Bose was anything but right in his political orientation. For Bose, any external support was welcome in overthrowing the British Raj. As Indian nationalist sentiment surged on both the right and left between the two world wars, there was considerable empathy for Britain’s enemies in Europe (as well as Imperial Japan). But these contacts did not translate into any serious engagement on political, economic, or ideological issues between the Indian and Western right, whether its extreme forms in Germany and Italy or democratic nationalist parties elsewhere.
Hindu nationalism did not emerge as a powerful political force until the early 2000s and has been slow to make international contacts. Initially focused on connecting with the Indian diaspora in the English-speaking world, the BJP’s international outreach as a ruling party has recently included a wider range of international actors, such as the diplomatic community in New Delhi, under a plan to promote a better understanding of the BJP. In addition, it has reached out regionally, bringing it in touch with Vietnamese communists, Sri Lankan Buddhists, and Nepali Hindus.
The BJP’s political networking with Western conservatives would be different from this limited outreach. It would add a right-wing hue to modern India’s internationalism.
Second, engaging with right-wing parties in the United States and Europe could help India’s conservative elite get a more differentiated view of Western societies and their politics. On both the Indian left and right, there is a strong tendency to see the West as a hostile black box. The left’s radicalization at the turn of the 1970s made it more anti-Western in its orientation, leading to an entrenched and knee-jerk opposition to Western policies. That leaves little room to take a differentiated view of Western societies and their internal divisions.
The Indian right’s hostility to the West comes from another direction: the perceived threat of Western values to Indian culture and religion. That fear did not keep the BJP’s predecessor, the Jan Sangh, from being generally pro-Western during the Cold War era. India’s Hindu nationalists were deeply anti-communist and critical of the ruling Congress party’s cultivation of the Soviet Union while picking needless quarrels with the West. But as a conservative cultural force, the emerging Hindu nationalist movement was deeply anxious about what it considered the polluting influence of Western culture.
Given Asia’s shifting geopolitics, it is hardly surprising that the two BJP prime ministers—Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi—have been instrumental in bringing India closer to the United States on the strategic front, despite much of the right’s anxieties. But there is a growing concern within the BJP about Western criticism of Modi’s domestic policies. Many in the party can’t really recognize that this criticism comes mainly from Western liberals; instead, they interpret it as general hostility to India.
To be sure, Washington’s policies do not reflect Western concerns about the BJP—not even under the Biden administration, whose foreign-policy rhetoric emphasizes democracy. The BJP’s new engagement with the Western right will hopefully help the party better appreciate that the West is not a monolith but has multiple internal arguments and fault lines. Greater familiarity could move the BJP—and therefore India—toward a more sophisticated understanding of the West.
Third, engaging the BJP should also bring some benefits to the Western right. 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.
The case for Western conservative engagement with the BJP has been made most clearly by Walter Russell Mead: As India’s global salience rises, “understanding the ideology and the trajectory of the Hindu nationalist movement is as important for business leaders and investors seeking to engage economically with India as it is for diplomats and policy makers wanting to put the strategic relationship on a stable footing.”
While there is a clear case for Western engagement with the BJP, the obstacles are real. The BJP is peeved by Christian evangelical missions focused on conversion in India, especially among the tribal and lower-caste populations. Christian conservatives in the West are concerned about the attacks on India’s Christian minority and tend to share the Western liberal critique of the BJP and its policies toward non-Hindu minorities. At the Washington conference, Dasgupta pointed out that Christian proselytization is a big threat to potential collaboration between the two sides.
Although the BJP shares some elements of Western conservatism, it also differs quite a bit. In its quest to join the Indian mainstream, the party in the 1980s adopted socialism as a political creed. As it gained power, it also began to acquire a taste for statism, leveraging the government’s massive power to cultivate political support and project its ideological agenda. That will not endear the party to those parts of the Western nationalist right that espouse small government and market economics.
At the conservatives’ conference, Madhav laid out what might bind the Indian and Western right: “God, religion, tradition, family, patriotism, and nationalism,” as well as a shared distaste for the domination that liberal ideas have achieved in public policies and discourse. At the same time, the long shadow of European colonialism still makes Indian conservatives cautious in engaging their Western counterparts. But Madhav insisted that the “power of a billion Indians is ready to stand by our conservative colleagues” in the United States and Europe. That still seems a long way off, but the recent exchange in Washington may have been the first tentative step.