THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Championing ‘centrist liberalism’, senior Congress leader and MP Shashi Tharoor has said it was high time the country moved beyond the Nehruvian statist model and 1991 liberalisation framework, the two streams that have long defined India’s political discourse. He also suggested that India now needed a political formation inspired by the Swatantra Party, founded by C Rajagopalachari and Minoo Masani, instead of relying on existing constructs of liberalism, socialism, and cultural nationalism.
Political observers view Tharoor’s latest articulation as an attempt to redefine centrist politics in India, seeking space between the Congress’s socialist legacy and the BJP’s cultural nationalism.
The Congress MP laid out his vision in an article titled ‘The use of centrist liberalism in India’s ideas- starved Politics’ published in an English magazine. He had also published a scathing attack against dynastic politics targeting the Gandhi family in an online website recently.
Tharoor laments that like in other parts of the world, in India also liberalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy, with attacks from both the left and the right.
According to him, the left in India views liberalism as an elitist doctrine that enables crony capitalism while the right dismisses it as a Western colonial import alien to Indian tradition.
However, Tharoor argues that the key values of modern liberalism are embedded in Indian intellectual and spiritual traditions. . “Indian liberalism begins not in Locke or Mill, but in the Upanishads and the Buddhist sanghas, in the dialogues of the Mahabharata and the disputations of Nalanda," he writes.
"Thinkers across schools of thought, from Mimamsa to Charvaka, were engaged in argumentation. Ashoka’s edicts reflect a proto-liberal ethos of tolerance and ethical pluralism, while the Arthashastra, emphasised rule of law and accountability of kings.”
He traces the liberal lineage through reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dadabhai Naoroji, Swami Vivekananda, MG Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Gurudev Tagore. "Reformers like Roy, Naoroji and Gokhale absorbed Western liberal thought, but rooted it in Indian realities and also were all expressions of a liberal nationalism. Rabindranath Tagore was an authentically Indian liberal voice of freedom.”
According to Tharoor, the Swatantra Party, founded in 1959 by C Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and others, was an attempt to revive liberalism after it was eclipsed by Nehruvian socialism. After the 1967 elections with 44 seats in Lok Sabha, Swatantra party was the principal opposition in parliament, before fading away by 1973.
Rejecting the tendency to conflate liberalism with left -liberal, Tharoor argues that liberalism is not synonymous with socialism. "It values markets, individual autonomy, and limited government- one that has no place in the citizen’s bedroom or kitchen." It is not reducible to cultural relativism, since it affirms universal rights and constitutional norms.
“If there was ever a time to articulate a reformed and expanded idea of Indian liberalism, it is now," Tharoor declares. To revive liberalism in India is not to mimic the West, but to rediscover a language of freedom that is both principled and emotionally resonant."
He urges liberals to reconnect with India's own intellectual traditions, drawing inspiration from samvad, not sermon; from Adi Shankara, not just Aristotle; from Vivekananda rather than Victorianism. It would affirm dharma as moral responsibility, not religious orthodoxy."
Criticising the Indian liberals for neglecting the emotional and cultural anchors that gave communities meaning, he argues that it has allowed right wing populists to exploit feelings of marginalisation, to offer ‘belonging’ in place of justice, to attack ‘appeasement’ rather than inequality.
Highlighting his arguments why a renewed Indian liberalism must be centrist, Tharoor says: “It must engage with tradition and history—not as nostalgia, but as moral resource. The older model of economic liberalism has lost its moral centre as it failed to address systemic inequality. Indain liberalism must embrace a more inclusive and compassionate framework, defending markets, but also insist on fairness, sustainability and opportunity.”
Tharoor concludes that in "India’s idea-starved politics, centrist liberalism, couched in a grammar of hope, can offer not just critique but construction," he writes. .
"It is time to revive it—not as nostalgia, but as necessity.The challenging question is whether anyone in our political establishment is ready,” he asks.