Before we begin, allow me to suggest a little thought exercise.

I am going to describe what a certain world leader did with his or her political capital upon coming to power, and you should think of who it reminds you of, past or present.

Extending health insurance access to the poorest.

Bringing electricity to the most poor and remote communities.

Building toilets and street lights that keep women safer in cities and villages.

Protecting the economically vulnerable from rapacious moneylenders, through financial inclusion and microcredit.

Liberating rural women from wooden stoves that decimate their life expectancy and consume much of their productive time.

Strengthening women's legal rights when it comes to divorce, domestic abuse, and protection from sexual violence.

Reducing diarrhoea rates from 199 million per year to almost zero and preventing 300,000 deaths from water-borne diseases within 5 years.

Investing in renewable energy to become a leader in solar power.

Decriminalising homosexuality.

Introducing and passing laws to protect the transgender community.

Enforcing animal welfare, food safety, and consumer protection laws.

Resisting the call to privatise the country's state-owned airline and banks, to recapitalise them with public funds instead.

Drafting a law to make it easier for refugees escaping religious persecution to claim asylum.

Becoming the first ever head of government from their country to visit Palestine, and using the occasion to proclaim support for Palestinian independence.

Providing foreign aid to disaster-hit countries in Asia and Africa, to the extent that one president from the Non-Aligned Movement even named his grandchild after them. Received the highest civilian honours from Afghanistan, Palestine and the UAE.

So, is it the darling of the contemporary liberal world, Jacinda Ardern or Justin Trudeau? The radical feminist communist revolutionary of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara? The Arab socialist Abdel Gamal Nasser? The original himself, Vladimir Lenin?

Well, it is actually Narendra Modi, the supposedly 'right-wing', 'Hindu nationalist' Prime Minister of India. Strange, since his policies and rhetoric sure don't sound like they fit into the contemporary right-wing populist trend of Trumps, Orbans, or Netanyahus. In fact, it sounds more like something out of the Bolivarian socialists of Ecuador and Bolivia.

The World Has Moved Beyond The Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative Paradigm

So, why is there such a disconnect between reporting and reality? Let's take a step back. The liberal-conservative or left-right paradigm is wearing out its utility even within the Western world from where it arose, as we can see from the current developments taking place across the global north today, between ‘mainstream’ parties of the neo-liberal centre, and ‘populists’, who are challenging the hegemonic neo-liberal consensus both from the left and right.

As soon as one moves even slightly away from the metropole of the West into central or eastern Europe, it barely fits at all when one looks at post-socialist states of the region. In the Czech Republic, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia negotiated to support a billionaire businessman from an anti-establishment populist party as prime minister. Does that make them a left-wing party or a right-wing party? Should the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, with its Marxist-Leninist rhetoric but protectionist economic policies and nationalistic social policies be considered left-wing or right-wing?

To really bamboozle you, in the Slovak presidential election this month, the candidate from the Progressive Slovakia party, which claims to be centre-right, was the socially liberal environmental lawyer Zuzana Caputova, who won votes among pro-EU (European Union) voters. Meanwhile, while the candidate from SMER-Social Democracy, the centre-left party that merged with the far-left Party of the Democratic Left in 2004 but today is in coalition with far-right nationalists, was a retired EU bureaucrat who talked about conservative social values and won votes from anti-EU voters. Bet you didn't read that in The Guardian or The New York Times – which made it about a liberal David fighting a conservative Goliath.

And yet, when one reads the reporting in the international media on countries such as these, do we get this sort of nuance? For the most part, no. Much of the reporting infantilises the reader, as if all we need to know to make sense of this strange and backward country is "which party/candidate is the closest to my favourite back home?" Or, put it more simply, "who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and who is our guy?"

Moving further eastwards, when it comes to post-colonial societies like India, this left-right or liberal-conservative paradigm barely fits at all. Just to set the record straight, all Indian parties are to some extent economically pro-poor, interventionist and protectionist, all of them are to some extent socially conservative with nationalist tendencies.

Who Is Left-Wing And Who Is Right-Wing In india?

The Overton Window of acceptable politics within India is so skewed on account of the enduring socio-economic legacy of colonialism, that even the Indian ‘right-wing’ would be considered to the left of the Democratic Party, German SPD, or Australian Labor Party. Despite decades of economic growth, the vast majority of Indians are still incredibly poor, often one medical crisis or failed harvest away from penury. In this light, providing material prosperity and stability is something that every party needs to focus on, if it wants to be taken seriously.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), when it comes to economic issues, suggests a middle ground between socialism and capitalism, historically with protectionist, dirigiste elements. Yet when in power, it had a track record of privatisation and neoliberal reforms between 1999 and 2004, but between 2014 and 2019, has a pro-poor focus on basic infrastructure development such as electricity and sanitation in villages, and offering access to medical insurance for the poorest sections of society. Just this week, two days before the beginning of the elections, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, one of the most visible leaders of the BJP, tweeted, a whole new term for this approach – “Modian socialism”. Although, perhaps, a missed opportunity to invoke Deng Xiaoping by calling it “socialism with Modi-fied characteristics”.