Why Indian Politicians Are So Hard to Place on a Spectrum

On a standard economic left-right axis, the BJP should be right-wing: it talks about reducing the 'inspector raj', has privatised several public-sector firms, champions foreign investment, and its 2014 election slogan was 'minimum government, maximum governance'. But the BJP in office has also run PM-KISAN (a direct income transfer to farmers), massively expanded MGNREGA funding during the pandemic, retained food subsidies for 800 million people, imposed import tariffs at rates that would embarrass a Nehruvian planner, and conducted demonetisation, an unprecedented state intervention into the economy.

The explanation is not hypocrisy. It is that the BJP's core identity is cultural and nationalist, not economic. Economic policy is instrumental, serving the goal of national consolidation and Hindu welfare, rather than ideological in the way that Thatcherite Conservatism or Scandinavian Social Democracy are ideological. The BJP will be market-friendly when markets serve Indian manufacturing and Hindu business interests, and interventionist when markets threaten them.

Congress has the opposite problem. It is historically the party of Nehruvian state planning, bank nationalisation, and 'Garibi Hatao', firmly left on the economic axis. But it is also the party of P. V. Narasimha Rao and the 1991 reforms, among the most significant market liberalisations in post-war history. Manmohan Singh as Finance Minister dismantled the License Raj; the same Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister passed MGNREGA, the Food Security Act, and the Right to Education, a rights-based welfare architecture that sits left of most European social democracies.

Congress's ideological range is so wide because it was designed as a big-tent anti-colonial coalition, not an ideological party. It contains economic reformers and socialists, secular modernists and Hindu traditionalists, centralists and federalists. That breadth made it the natural governing party for the first four decades. It also means no single axis placement captures it.

Regional parties resist national labels even more stubbornly. The DMK is economically welfarist (left), socially radical (reform), and federalist, which gives it a broadly left-libertarian profile. But it has governed Tamil Nadu in alliance with the BJP (under Karunanidhi's later years), which national left politics finds incomprehensible. The Trinamool Congress is welfarist and federalist but has governance practices associated with political violence and patronage that fit no clean ideological category.

The Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, before its 2024 defeat, ran an effective state government on welfare delivery and investment attraction simultaneously, while maintaining studied neutrality between the BJP and the opposition nationally. The AAP describes itself as beyond left and right, which is partly accurate and partly evasive: its welfare model is left, its anti-corruption posture is liberal, and its occasional Hindu symbolism is conservative.

The deepest reason Indian parties resist simple placement is that caste operates as a structural force that cuts across the economic left-right axis. Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD is economically left (pro-poor, anti-elite), but its primary identity is OBC community representation, a form of group solidarity that has more in common with identity politics than with class-based socialism. The BJP has, in recent years, absorbed large sections of the OBC vote through its own community-identity appeals while simultaneously being associated with upper-caste business interests.

The result is parties that are simultaneously left (on redistribution toward their community) and right (on market freedoms for their community's businesses), secular (to appeal to minorities who are part of their coalition) and religious (to mobilise majority sentiment), federalist (when in opposition at state level) and centralist (when in power at the Union). This is not inconsistency; it is the structure of competitive politics in a society where community identity, economic interest, and ideological conviction all pull in different directions.

The reason the Indian Political Compass uses four axes is precisely this complexity. A single axis forces an artificial choice: is the BJP left or right? The answer is: right on authority, ambiguous on economy, high on tradition, high on nation. That four-number profile is more useful than a single placement.

The same applies to you as a voter. You might hold a position that is economically left (support MGNREGA, oppose farm law liberalisation), authority-right (support strong anti-terror law, accept surveillance), tradition-mixed (secular but culturally rooted), and federalist (want more state autonomy). No Indian party exactly represents that combination. The compass cannot resolve that mismatch, but it can make it visible, which is where honest political thinking starts.