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indiafacts.org /beyond-right-and-left-restoring-indias-dharmic-school-of-social-thought/
David Frawley
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India needs to return to its traditional dharmic approach to political thought in order to take the country
out of the quagmire created by following western political ideologies contrary to its deeper civilizational
ethos.The effort to understand Indias political concerns according to usual ideas of right and left in the
West is misleading. Indias dharmic approach cannot be defined according to the parameters of
western thought as it reflects a very different foundation and goal.
Indias dharmic social and political philosophy is thousands of years older than the left or the right in the
West. It possesses a well-defined terminology, literature, and concerns. Yet it is not frozen in time. It
has its own evolutionary movement and ability to adapt to ongoing developments in civilization and
technology. There is much in both left and right in the West that can be dharmic or adharmic. Dharmic
categories cannot simply be identified with either, but can provide a helpful critique of both.
language today does not have equivalent terms to accurately translate Indias dharmic thought. This
extends to all other western languages.
It is well known that the terms of Indias spiritual discourse have been subject to significant
distortions by English renderings, such as dharma as religion, moksha as salvation, or Yoga as
asana.
The same is true of Indias traditional social discourse. Some of these distortions like varna as caste
have been quite misleading. We must recognize that just as the West does not have an appropriate
vocabulary for Indian spiritual thought, it is also lacking in one for Indias social thought.
However, it is necessary to develop a terminology for Indias dharmic social thought that is meaningful
in modern English in order to reach the global audience. This should include key untranslatable
Sanskrit terms like the term dharma itself, much as how Vivekananda, Chinmayananda and
Dayananda put Vedanta into a clear modern idiom of English with key Sanskrit terms to clarify its
nuances. For this to occur, we should avoid describing Indias dharmic school of thought
according to English terms of political debate today.
promoting economic liberalization and free markets, as distinct from the state control policies of the left.
Yet the Indian right like the BJP does endorse policies that may be regarded as left wing in the West
like reservations and subsidies for the poor.
Both Indian right and western right are also more aligned on dealing with global terrorism, but the
United States, both on the left and the right, has always been close to Pakistan and still
excuses its terrorist connections.
A number of the cultural projects of the so-called Indian right, like cow protection, vegetarianism,
honoring nature and the earth, Yoga and Ayurveda would be part of a left wing agenda in the West.
Hindu Americans are strongly left in their voting, choosing democratic candidates eighty percent of the
time, much as new immigrants in the West tend to do.
Yet Hindu groups today should not try to reinvent themselves as a kind of new Hindu left, seeking the
recognition and approval of the western left. Otherwise they will fall into the trap of the left and get
subordinated to it. If we look at dharma, the so-called right wing in India more often invokes the cause
of dharma than does the left that claims to be liberal and progressive. The left in India opposes
dharma as a communal term, but still looks up to destructive Marxism as a factor of social
harmony.
Overall, traditionally based thinkers in India today describe themselves more as right wing than left
wing. Yet this suits the Indian left and its anti-right wing sentiments, which can then be uncritically
projected upon them. This means that if we choose to use the term right wing to describe Indias
traditional social discourse which can appear as a simple way to distinguish it from the Indian left
we must do so carefully, and not fall into the right-left dichotomy of western discourse, or that debate
will distort how our views are received. Sometimes we see the term right liberal being used. This
helps in many ways but may require further qualification.
Here we should examine the government of Narendra Modi. The Prime Minister has been careful
not to define India according to such western right and left dichotomies. He has made diplomatic
friendships with leaders as diverse as Obama and Putin, without compromising Indias national
interests.
It is inside India that Modi has been maligned as a figure of the far right, which he never was ,
because of the extreme leftist and Marxists views prevalent in the media. His foreign policy and
domestic policy both reflect a good understanding of Indias dharmic approach to social issues, and do
not simply fall into any right or left wing categories today.