Conservative Like Us

(The article was originally published in Indian Express on May 31, 2025 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)

Earlier this week, I was in Budapest to address the annual conference of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), a US-based prestigious conservative political group. CPAC is influential in US politics enjoying close links with President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders. In Europe too, CPAC plays an important role in creating a unified voice for Conservative parties and leaders.

This year’s conference attracted who is who of the right-wing leaders from various countries in Europe and a few others from Latin America. Viktor Orban, the host country’s prime minister was there along with the prime minister of Georgia, several former prime ministers from UK to Czech Republic, several serving ministers, MEPs, MPs and right-wing commentators. President Trump delivered a brief video message for the success of the conference. As one of the speakers, an Arab origin Congressman from Arizona, US, commented, the CPAC conference in Budapest became the proverbial Mecca of European Conservatism.

Through two days and dozens of speakers, the agenda of the conference revolved round the challenges the European Right is facing at the hands of the opportunistic rainbow alliance formed by all others including traditionally centrist parties and the liberal and left parties with the sole aim of preventing the rise of the Conservative politics in the continent. Last decade witnessed unprecedented rise of Right-wing parties in several European nations including Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia and Czech Republic. Hungary has been under the Right-wing Fidesz Party rule of Viktor Orban for last fifteen years.

In 2024, as the elections to the European Parliament came closer, many political observers started predicting that they could lead to the emergence of a first-ever Right-wing dominated parliament. However, the election results of June 6, 2014, did not provide that opportunity to the Right parties. Although registering significant gains, they failed to emerge as the dominant force. They emerged as a strong voice and formed a pressure group called Patriots for Europe (PfE) which today boasts of a membership of close to a hundred MEPs.

Rise of the Right seems to have rattled European liberals who control the EU. Prominent Conservative leaders like Orban have been subjected to severe criticism and his government was denied legitimate financial support from the EU on the flimsy grounds of citizens rights and democratic downslide. When Orban took a firm stand against immigration tightening borders and asylum laws, the EU leadership took an unusual measure of slapping a penalty of one million euros per day on his government.

If the enthusiasm at the Budapest conference is any indication, such undemocratic and coercive measures by the EU dominated by groups inimical to the rise of the right-wing parties seemed to have the opposite effect. A renewed vigor and determination to take on the challenges like illegal immigration, radical Islam, globalism and woke forces was palpable through the conference, which had Age of Patriots as the main theme. Speaker after speaker reiterated their commitment to Conservative ideals and determination to fight back what several described as “liberal fascism”.

Incidentally, I was the only non-Western speaker at the conference which highlights the fact that while the Western liberals have reached out systematically to all corners of the world, Western conservatives limited their political activism to Europe and Americas. I told the conference that while our politics may not be the same, we too share some of the conservative values like God, religion, family, sovereignty and patriotism. Like the Western conservatives, the Indian Right too sees illegal immigration as a threat to national sovereignty and woke liberalism as a danger to tradition and family values.

In India, unfortunately, initial decades after independence witnessed the dominance of Western liberal political ideas like socialism and globalism. A Nehruvian consensus was created championing those liberal ideas through not only the state institutions but also the non-state organs like media and academia. Those decades saw our religiosity, cultural values and national identity facing serious threat. Over the last several decades a relentless battle was waged at the grassroots level to unshackle the country from that left-liberal influence and build a strong cultural nationalist politics. It culminated in the election of Narendra Modi government in 2014.

In the last one decade, the cultural nationalist project in India achieved significant successes. Rise of Ram Temple at Ayodhya symbolised the defeat of pseudo-secular politics in the country while the demise of Article 370 signified the death of liberal appeasement of separatism and radicalism. While Modi’s market-friendly policies catapulted India in just ten years from the eleventh big economy to the fourth big in the world, his zero tolerance to terror resulted in decimating radical Islamist forces and clamping down on illegal immigrants. Although not fully, Indian media and academia too substantially turned nationalist and patriotic, pushing left-liberals to the fringe. In the wake of the recent terror attacks in Kashmir, Modi successfully mobilised the support of some of the liberal and radical Islamist apologists, forcing them to sing the nationalist tune along with the nationalists and patriots in defence of India’s right to protect its sovereignty and wage a war on Islamic terror.

Understanding the nuances of this Indian experience of the revival of cultural nationalist politics can help the Western conservative movement in their struggle to win back tradition and sovereignty from the left liberal onslaught. The Indian Right may not fully subscribe to the agenda of the Western Right and a gap exists between the two. European conservatives use God and religion in singular, while the Indian nationalists use them in plural. The Indian nationalists believe in values like pluralism, statism and environmental activism, which may sound very much like the liberal agenda for the other side.

Yet, there is enough ground for engagement and dialogue. In their ideological battles against left-liberal globalism and wokeism if the Western conservatives secure support from a big country like India their power is bound to multiply manifold. After all, having India on their side means having two Europes, four Americas and 140 Hungarys with them.