Few get under the skin of the saffron parivar as Amartya Sen does. The globally acclaimed economist, Nobel Laureate, former Chancellor of Nalanda with a colossal body of scholarly works is repeatedly attacked on social media because he once happened to voice his voting preference for leaderships that in his eyes are perceptibly humane to minorities.

Targeting liberal intellectuals is quite the norm these days, so the question arises, where is the saffron equivalent of Amartya Sen? Jagdish Bhagwati may be Sen’s scholarly rival yet Bhagwati’s certainly not “saffron” in his social thought. He’s openly spoken about the need to end backward thinking in education, has spent the majority of his working life in western universities, amidst western academia and his economic vision is sharply at odds with left leaning outfits of the sangh who detest liberalisation, WTO and economic reforms.

So who are Hindutva’s intellectuals? Surely not the internet Hindu army which pops up on right wing websites with the singular purpose of denigrating anyone even mildly critical of their demigod Narendra Modi. Could it be a Rajiv Malhotra, a self-appointed “authority” on Hinduism, now facing serious charges of plagiarism? The scholar Andrew J Nicholson wrote recently, “Malhotra twists the words and arguments of respectable scholars to suit his own ends. He has used my work and the work of the great historian of philosophy Wilhelm Halbfass in such a parasitic way.”

Is Hindutva’s leading living intellectual the head of the ICHR Yellapragada Rao who almost every historian has denounced as unworthy of his post? Do any of these figures seriously compare with Amartya Sen, Romila Thapar, M N Srinivas or Ashis Nandy? The stark fact is that the Indian right or the Hindutva movement lacks intellectuals of global stature.

What are the reasons for this? One of them could be that the bharatiya inheritance has not really produced writers and thinkers on political philosophy and liberal governance. The Indian tradition may have had a preponderance of thinkers on spirituality, divinity and otherworldly concerns, but where for example is the bharatiya John Locke or Thomas Paine? Where’s the bharatiya Magna Carta? The exception is the Arthashastra, but that’s over 2,000 years old. The Bhagwad Gita does not contain tenets of liberal governance but is predominantly concerned with good and bad conduct. The Manusmriti cannot really be a blueprint for a liberal progressive society.

So beyond the Arthashastra, the sangh parivar has no texts of authentically Hindu political philosophy or governance it can claim as its own in the ages before its 20th century ideologues Savarkar or Hegdewar.

The other reason why the Indian right wing lacks intellectuals of global stature is because it’s never had to be globally competitive. Cocooned in an insular world, veritable frogs in the well, a sangh writer or activist has never had to compete for global professional stature, or compete against international scholars the way left and liberal intellectuals and scholars did because there already was a vast western scholarly tradition in which they had to strive to make their mark. By contrast there is no vast international Hindu intellectual tradition beyond a handful of Indophiles like Max Muller or a Wendy Doniger, so the Indian right wing was never internationalist, never had to test its ideas and scholarship before a demanding competitive international audience.

An important reason why there are few saffron intellectuals is the nature of RSS itself. Line and command organisations like the army rarely encourage original thinking or revisionism or fresh ideas. Challenging the guru is not considered bharatiya sanskriti in a culture where mantras are handed down without question. It is also true that the heavy hand of state sponsored left historians who once controlled academia did not allow deviations from the party line and stamped out dissent in universities, isolating any fledgling right wing academics.

But left hegemony has been on the decline for a while now, and yet we still haven’t seen the emergence of a bank of globally recognised saffron intellectuals. And that’s because in Indian politics there is simply no genuine contest of ideas. When there is no political challenge to the ideas of Congress (beyond renaming the Planning Commission as Niti Aayog), how can there be an intellectual challenge? Right wing parties the world over are close to the religious right wing, yet also fiscally conservative, pro-business and pro-market. In India, the right wing is only the religious right, not an economic right. The colour saffron is only a few shades removed from the colour red. Today it is sangh outfits who oppose the land acquisition bill and labour reforms as fiercely as the left. Sangh leaders like Uma Bharti have threatened to burn down Walmart.

In fact, in his speeches PM Modi seems to promise a more efficient, better administered, less corrupt UPA, with the same schemes of financial inclusion, saying no to privatisation, yes to Aadhaar card, Nrega, et al. When Modi himself is neither Reagan nor Thatcher then how can India produce economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, regarded as architects of right wing economics? Thus, with saffron cadres preferring swadeshi and anti-rich populism, NDA poses no intellectual challenge to the UPA consensus on the economy. Right wing economists Bibek Debroy and Surjit Bhalla would hardly find favour with sangh footsoldiers.

Lastly, an obsession with an identity based on vilification of manufactured enemies can hardly engender an intellectual tradition. To reiterate then the question to those who abuse the first Asian to head an Oxbridge college: Where’s your Amartya Sen?