Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

It’s common for liberals to call any political group they don’t like, “right-wing” or “conservative”. The Nazis as conservatives are an example. The National SOCIALIST party complained about rich people, were anti-Christian, wanted stronger government control, and had no interest in restoring the Kaiser or any other German government system that had ever existed. They were anti-Stalinist, but so, of course, were the Trotskyites. Similarly, in the 1980’s we used to hear about Kremlin conservatives and conservative Maoists— by then, even the Communists were honorary conservatives to liberals.

I came across a funny example of that in a column about India by Martha Nussbaum.

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..right-wing Hindu extremists…In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers. Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the future is unclear…..the violent values of the Hindu right are imports from European fascism of the 1930’s…

From the rest of the article, however, it is clear that the Hindu extremists are no more conservatives than were the Nazis, though the National People’s Party (the BJP) is at least free-market and decentralized in its organization (not something the article says, actually– that is beside the point). As Nussbaum says,

Traditional Hinduism was decentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision of a unitary, “pure” Hinduism that could provide the new nation, following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressive ideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders of the Hindu right had to import it from Europe.

So why are the Hindu extremists right-wing? They want a Hindu India, to be sure, but a more intolerant India than has ever existed– and recall that India has been mostly British and Moslem, not Hindu, since at least 1550.

In this, the Hindu extremists are much like al Qaeda and the Wahabis in Islam: extreme, to be sure, but so extreme that they are highly untraditional.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Writing, Social Reg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.