Tharoor Calls for India’s Own Liberalism

Hyderabad: Writer and Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said India’s political future needed a form of liberalism grounded in its own intellectual traditions and not borrowed from outside. Tharoor said the assumption that liberalism is a Western idea “ignores a long record of inquiry, argument and moral reflection that has always shaped Indian thought.”

Delivering the first Jyoti Komireddy Memorial Lecture in the city on Thursday, Tharoor pointed to the Upanishads, the Buddhist Sanghas and the debates in the Mahabharata as early examples of a culture that valued reasoning over rigidity. “The idea that truth emerges from dialogue, not dogma, is older in India than most realise,” he said.

He was speaking on the topic “Radical Centrism: My Vision for India”. Tharoor argued that the country’s civilisational ideas contain the foundations of a liberal ethos that balances liberty with social justice.

He noted that this tradition continued into modern public life. “From Raja Rammohan Roy’s reformist zeal to Tagore’s prayer for freedom from insolent might, from Gokhale’s belief in reasoned progress to Ambedkar’s constitutional vision of equality, the liberal impulse has long animated India’s moral core,” he explained. Tharoor argued that these thinkers did not import liberalism but extended ideas already familiar to the subcontinent.

He said reclaiming Indian liberalism requires “rediscovering a native grammar of freedom” that unites dignity, harmony and justice. He described radical centrism as an approach that draws on this inheritance to offer a balanced political path for a diverse country.

During the discussion that followed the lecture, he spoke about the decline of political civility in recent decades. He said his reading of parliamentary debates had shown him a different era of disagreement. “There was once a certain amount of courteous cooperation across party divides,” he said, adding that opponents often acknowledged each other’s sincerity even when they held sharply different convictions.

He cited the relationship between Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as an example. “Nehru fundamentally disagreed with Vajpayee, yet he recognised his ability and even sent him as an opposition MP on Indian delegations to the UN General Assembly,” he said. Vajpayee’s tribute to Nehru in Parliament, Tharoor noted, “remains one of the most moving speeches in our parliamentary record.”

He also recalled episodes where Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi extended help or respect to Vajpayee, saying these were not isolated gestures but “part of the texture of political life in those years.” According to him, such exchanges showed that leaders once viewed each other as working, in different ways, toward the same national purpose.

Tharoor contrasted this with the environment he encountered after entering Parliament in 2009. “It had become increasingly difficult for each side to see the other as acting in good faith,” he said. With political language reduced to accusations and suspicion, he argued, the space for understanding and principled disagreement had narrowed.

He said a revival of India’s liberal inheritance would only be meaningful if accompanied by a return to dialogue. “Nobody is perfect on either side of the debate, and nobody is only bad either,” he said. “Democracy works when disagreement rests on respect.”