Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, wrote in a leading daily shortly after the BJP-led NDA’s landslide victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha election: “There has been widespread criticism in the news media across the world (from The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Observer, Le Monde, Die Zeit and Haaretz to the BBC and CNN) of the ways and means of securing the BJP’s victory, including instigation of hatred and intolerance of groups of Indian citizens, particularly Muslims, who have every right to be treated with respect (as under the Gandhi-Tagore understanding).”

Sen’s remarks reflect a mind that genuflects to Western opinion. It is in thrall to what the foreign media writes about Indian politics, Indian democracy, Indian elections, and Indian society.

Such colonised minds — and they litter India’s Left — don’t look beyond the subcutaneous surface of Western media bias and why it despises Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Here’s why (I wrote this a year ago but it applies today more than ever): “Modi doesn’t fit in. He’s neither a clubby sort whose mind Western journalists can pick over Darjeeling tea, nor a jokey regional leader who craves Western attention and can be mocked behind his back. Modi regards the Western media — not all of it but much of it — with the same contempt it reserves for him. He gives them minimal access. He does them no favours. He asks for no editorial favours in return.”

There is of course the larger point that Amartya Sen misses entirely: Indians of his background attach far more importance to what the Western media thinks of India than they should. The Economist, Time and The New York Times have been proved factually wrong on so many occasions about India, Brexit, the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, Rahul Gandhi’s brilliance and other pieces of received wisdom that they are no longer taken particularly seriously even in their own home markets in the United States and Britain.

Since the advent of social media, readers and viewers have become real-time arbiters of editorial opinion. Ivory tower editors, long used to a one-way discourse, are unsettled by this democratisation of the media. Factual errors are called out online in hours, forcing newspapers like The New York Times and the Washington Post and television networks like CNN and BBC to apologise and post corrections. And yet these are the media that Sen and his ilk in India pay obeisance to.

In a healthy democracy, it is as vital to have two strong national parties as it is to have two strong, duelling opinions on the Left and Right.

The problem India now faces is that the near-decimation of the Congress has left the BJP with a monopoly on governance and legislation. Though regional parties do act as a check, it’s clearly not enough.

The BJP’s success can presage failure just as Indira Gandhi’s did in the late 1970s. Fortunately, the BJP is not driven by dynasty. The leadership of the BJP or the RSS does not pass from parent to son or daughter. There is no Modi dynasty. There is no Mohan Bhagwat dynasty.

That, too, though is not enough of a safeguard to protect democracy. India needs a strong Opposition. The Congress, as long as it is run like a family enterprise, can no longer provide such an Opposition.

Mahatma Gandhi foresaw this when he said on the cusp of Independence that the Congress should be disbanded. He meant the Congress must abandon the cult of individual leaders, which served it well to evict the British, but would not serve democracy quite as well. He was right.

Unlike Sen, Gandhiji never gave the Western media much time or attention nor was he an admirer of Western civilisation with its brutal history of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial invasions and cruel treatment of indigenous Indians in North America and Aborigines in Australia, crimes that remain under-reported by Western media.

Just as India — like all democracies — needs two strong political alternatives, intellectual discourse needs two poles, Left and Right. In India, the Left is illiberal and intolerant of others’ views. The Right is illiberal and intolerant as well. Both need a strong dose of liberalism that is open-minded and tolerant. The Left has appropriated the intellectual high ground in India in the absence of a strong liberal Right. The ideological Right has so far been defined by the RSS, which opposes social liberalism (LGBT rights, for example) and economic liberalism (foreign direct investment, for instance). India’s ideological Left also abhors foreign investment, demonstrating why India needs both a powerful liberal Right and an equally powerful liberal Left.

The argument that Amartya Sen and his acolytes make is fundamentally flawed, positing Left against Right when it should be positing liberal against illiberal on both sides of the aisle. The liberal Right should defend LGBT rights, freedom of expression and gender equality as well as open markets, foreign investment and low trade tariffs.

The liberal Left should drop its people-like-us arrogance (which make real liberals cringe) and engage across the ideological spectrum. Only then will the quality of public discourse rise above the intellectually facile arguments of Amartya Sen.

The writer is an author and publisher