Western political labels don’t always travel well to India.
For decades, pundits and commentators have assumed that India’s politics can be plotted on the same spectrum as that of Britain or the United States: left versus right, liberal versus conservative, free markets versus redistribution.
And while they aren’t entirely wrong, Indian politics is cleaved along different faultlines. Trying to understand Indian voting behavior through Western ideological labels is rather like trying to read a map drawn for another country.
What do we think about when we talk of the political Right? A conventional Western understanding might gesture towards cultural conservatism with a preference for smaller government, lower taxes and freer markets. The left, by contrast, favors wealth redistribution, stronger welfare systems and greater state intervention.
But the chips fall differently in India. Research by political scientists Suhas Palshikar, Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma has shown that economic policy has rarely separated India’s major parties in the way it has in Western democracies. Across ideological camps, voters overwhelmingly expect the state to provide welfare, subsidize essential goods and intervene to reduce poverty. This holds true whichever party forms the government.
The current example would be India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has expanded cash transfers, subsidized cooking gas, promoted rural welfare schemes and widened access to banking. Millions of Indian voters associate the party not with laissez-faire economics but with an active state delivering tangible benefits. If the Left-wing is understood simply as favoring government support for underserved people, then the label makes perfect sense to many BJP supporters.
Increasingly, Indian politics revolves around questions of identity: who belongs, whose history should be recognized, and what role religion should play in public life.
Chhibber and Verma argue that contemporary Indian politics is organized around two separate dimensions. One concerns statism — the degree to which government should intervene in economic and social life. The other concerns recognition i.e. which identities and which communities deserve official acknowledgement and protection. It is this second axis on which the ruling party’s electoral appeal rests. Debates over minority rights, Article 370, caste reservations, religious conversion and the place of Hindu identity have become defining political questions. These issues do not and will never fall neatly onto the familiar left-right spectrum inherited from Europe.
Research by Alexander Haas and Aditi Majumdar bolsters this point. Rather than asking respondents whether they are left or right, they measured ideology through attitudes towards issues that dominate Indian politics: state intervention, caste-based redistribution and Hindu nationalism.
Once ideology is measured this way, BJP supporters cluster exactly where one would expect — on the culturally conservative side of questions relating to religion and national identity. The apparent contradiction largely disappears.
Nivedita Jhunjhunwala, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas, studying the Indian public’s evaluation of wartime violations of international law (civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons etc) found that her preliminary research happened unintentionally to throw up similar intriguing points. Her observation? Roughly 34% of BJP supporters in her sample, self-identified as left-leaning on a standard ideology scale.
“For many Indian respondents these labels may be thinking about economics, not culture,” Jhunjhunwala explains, “In everyday Indian usage, ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ are loosely associated with pro-poor government schemes, welfare delivery, and state support for the disadvantaged — all things the BJP has actively pursued under Modi … A BJP supporter who backed the party because of welfare delivery may sincerely self-identify as left-leaning on that dimension, without any sense of contradiction with their cultural or nationalist views.”
The other reason she posits is that Indians may be understanding the word through a more colloquial rather than political sense. Besides, “Hindu nationalism may simply operate on a dimension that is orthogonal to the left-right axis as most Indians understand it,” she says, “Supporting cow protection, opposing minority reservations, or backing the abrogation of Article 370 simply feels like common sense, or nationalism, or religious duty. These commitments don’t register on the left-right scale because that scale wasn’t built to capture them.”
Labels don’t fail because voters are confused; they fail because the labels were built somewhere else for someone else. That’s not a quirk of Indian politics; it’s a reminder that ‘left’ and ‘right’ were never universal categories. The words survive the journey. The meaning usually doesn’t.
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