From a free-thinking liberal to a liberal conservative: A new paradigm

I was raised in a family which was religious but not fanatic and my father had a trust in a secular constitution with liberal values and he never taught us ideas of segregation among communities or casteism and so on. As an adult, I became more of a free-spirited liberal but never an activist one. It was my own experiential journey of finding rationality and truth in which I have been fairly successful. Most of my close connections are either liberal atheists/agnostics or those religious people who do not wear religion on their sleeves and are open to discuss anything about religion. And I generally found that my Hindu friends more open to introspection and dialogues on nuances of religion and this is the beauty of Hinduism (not Hindutva) which I personally appreciate. Maybe people from other religions would also be open but I did not have those experiences as yet.

Coming back to the title of this article, I have increasingly experienced that the activist liberals have a lot to explain, and their contributions have shaken my faith in liberalism. In the recent issue of Hamas V/s Israel, no liberal thinker (especially with leftist ideologies) has vehemently condemned the actions of Hamas, which the liberals call a “resistance movement.” Whether it is the LTTE in the initial phase or Radicalization of Kashmiri youth (liberals like Arundhati Roy shared stage with Kashmiri radicals once upon a time) or even a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, there was a muted response from the left leaning liberals. A friend of mine criticised attack on Salman Rushdie last year and asked on a liberal group on facebook that why were the liberals silent. She was labelled as a Hindutva leaning fascist on the group within no time. These are the same liberals who condemn Hitler but not Stalin, Castro or the North Korean leadership. They even justify killing of Russian Tzar Nicholas’s family including the children by going with the “But” theory — But the Tzar was a tyrant! That is true but what about Lenin and Stalin themselves? The astonishing thing is that when I write this article, both the liberals and the Muslim community globally (not all) are creating memes on Israel and the Jewish community and not even bothered by the fact that the Hamas killed people in an ISIS style template by beheading the children, taking women (including holocaust survivors) hostage and even killed the pets. A lot of women rights activists and even those who empathize with pets were again silent on this. Somehow armed struggles have historically been romanticized by the left leaning activists and they have given a lot of free passes to Islamic fundamentalists.

I also see the hypocrisy of liberals. When Afghanistan was taken over by the Taliban and they stopped women’s education, the liberals were seen to be saying, “Oh that’s a local issue there. Let the Taliban handle Afghanistan. Who are we to talk about them? Yes, we know its’ terrible”. When it comes to Israel Palestine issue, same liberals are donning the flags of Palestine as their social media display picture. Now, isn’t this an internal issue of Israel and Palestine? Students of AMU in India were seen protesting against Israel and the liberals were appreciating this. The same group did not protest against the ISIS or the Taliban or against the Ayotollahs of Iran for brutal actions against innocent women who demanded their rights of dignity. I am not saying that they should protest about everything in the world. They should pick their causes but a lot of it looks hypocritical. Centrists like me are misunderstood. I believe in plurality, equal opportunity and a liberal polity and the reason why the right wing forces are coming to power in many countries is this — the irrationality of liberals when it comes to calling out trouble makers and leading lives in their ecochambers, sometimes far from reality. Even a liberal like Dr. Richard Dawkins is calling out this hypocricy of calling any critic of radical islam as “Islamophobic”.

I consider myself centrist who is now tilting slight to the conservative stance only when it comes to understanding rationality based on the view that all societies and religious practices are contextual to different realities. We cannot put everything in simple black and white which both the leftists and rightists do. The right wing feels that one religion, culture or a race is superior to others while the left feels that all religions are the same and equally bad and unscientific. However, the same left doesn’t mind sharing stage with the fundamentalists of other faiths and espousing their cause. I believe that all religions, irrespective of few commonalities are essentially different.

In Israel Hamas war, Israel has created a humanitarian crisis by subjecting the poor people to starvation. This is barbaric. On the other hand, Hamas and Hizbollah keep on firing rockets at the time I write this, provoking further damage to their own cause, of a free Palestine. If influential arab countries had condemmed the killings by Hamas, things would have been different. However the way people were rejoicing in places like Tehran after Hamas’ butchering of Israeli Men, Women and children, showed how anti-Semitic and violent they are.

In terms of a liberal education, I am all for it. However, when I see what kind of books children or pre-teens are reading (like graphic details of gay sex) in countries like the US, I am aghast. Moral education is overrated but in terms of educating the kids, there should be more balanced ways for them to understand the world they live in. Societies that teach the value of individualism also make people aloof and lonely in many ways. And that is the crisis of the western world. In these areas, I am a bit conservative.

As an agnostic, I am away from religions. Though I like few things like long term relationships, giving equal space for divergant views, the cultural aspect of religion, value of spiritual tools like meditation, discipline in classrooms and freedom of expression. I am not a typical conservative but a centrist who moves from left to right based on the context and rationality.