GOA, India — The three places to which I am connected by birth, origin and marriage — Britain, India and the United States — have now experienced revolutions at the ballot box. In each, an election has revealed that liberal, globalized coastal elites stand at a tremendous remove from heartlands in open revolt. The revolt does not look to the left for inspiration but to the right. Make no mistake: “Liberal” and “left” are now said in the same breath as “corrupt establishment,” and those with torches and pitchforks are nativists, populists and nationalists of every stripe.

In India, the left lost the battle. But this month, at what was described as “a conclave of ideas” organized by the Hindu right, I was reminded of a simple truth: Winning is not everything.

The right wing won an electoral mandate in 2014, but it still has a tremendous sense of intellectual inadequacy. The conclave here in Goa was about building what is regularly described on Indian social media as a “right-wing ecosystem” to counter the left’s alleged control of the news media and academia.

We came to this sleepy seaside state — more familiar to me, a louche liberal, as a backdrop for raves than for heated discussion about Hindu civilization — to address what the historian Ramachandra Guha has described as the “paradox” at the heart of Indian public life: “While the country has a right-wing party in power, right-wing intellectuals run thin on the ground.”