In Review: Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva. Janaki Bakhle. Princeton University Press, 2024. 512 pages.

Introduction

A century after Essentials of Hindutva (1923), Vinayak Damodar Savarkar has moved from the margins of Indian political discourse to its epicentre. This has led to a fillip in scholarly reassessments, both sympathetic and critical, of his legacy, reflecting a broader impetus to capture the dominant narrative of national discourse. Critics read Savarkar as a compromised freedom fighter who wrote mercy petitions, became subservient to the British government, and incentivised divide-and-rule by devising the so-called exclusionary ideology of Hindutva. Sympathisers defend Savarkar as a symbol of sacrifice, a thinker who was the fountainhead of both the revolutionary movement and Hindutva, an ideology representing the impulse of the Indian civilisation. The subject at hand is currently torn between the two portraits.

Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (2024) by Janaki Bakhle is conceptualised as an attempt to surpass the intellectual deadlock. Bakhle aims to ‘bypass the partisanship’ and ‘bring Savarkar to the reader as much as possible’ through his own words. The literature produced by and on Savarkar is primarily in two languages: English and Marathi. However, Savarkar’s writings in Marathi have seldom been analysed for the larger audience that reads in English. Bakhle contends that the Marathi corpus has largely eulogised Savarkar, while scholars working in English have largely condemned him. This is where the author, with her Marathi background, brings the erstwhile obscure corpus to the fore. In doing so, she attempts to bring the global and regional discourses onto the same plane. Bakhle’s ambition with the book is to explore Savarkar as ‘a major contributor to modern Indian intellectual and political history’, focusing on the ideas he set in motion, moving beyond the statics of history (p. 10).

Apart from the dominant English narrative, the Marathi corpus unlocks access to other important facets of Savarkar: the poet, the playwright, the columnist. Bakhle argues that a figure of this range cannot be reduced to a single label without losing the whole. To resolve this, she adopts the ‘kaleidoscopic gaze’, a method that looks into all the contradictory pieces simultaneously rather than isolating them one facet at a time. The object is to keep ‘turning the kaleidoscope’, watching how contradictory ideas and contexts rearrange themselves as new patterns emerge. Each mode of expression of Savarkar carries its own idiom, and in the passage of ideas between them, the structure of his thought becomes legible. The contradictions that emerge are accepted as constitutive of Savarkar’s identity.

The six chapters across the book examine the six different Savarkars. The first reconstructs the revolutionary through the colonial police archives. The second follows the so-called anti-Muslim and anti-Gandhi polemicist who found his cause in the Khilafat agitation. The third turns to the caste reformer battling orthodoxy as a Brahminical insider. The fourth reads the nationalist poet whose poetry permeated all his works. The fifth examines the nationalist historian who wrote for teleological ends rather than academic rigour. The sixth traces the obscure Marathi hagiographic corpus, consisting of memoirs, biographies, and devotional writings, which elevated the man to legend. The narrative stops in 1937, when Savarkar was released from detention. The timeline clearly concerns itself with ‘the making of Hindutva’ rather than its mechanics through the post-1937 Hindu Mahasabha politics.

Bakhle’s methodological intervention is ‘critical distance’, an approach she contends is found wanting in Savarkar’s hagiographical assessments. This also defines the standard against which the book should be assessed, and against which, in my judgement, its central arguments lack precision. The difficulty lies in the uneven application of distance. The examination is thorough and rigorous towards Savarkar and his biographers, at times less so towards the book’s own inferences. At the crucial load-bearing junctures, suspicion is steelmanned as a dictum, and motives are loosely ascribed to the subject. These problems are best described not sequentially, chapter-wise, but as four themes that capture the consistent output of each kaleidoscope turn and recur, often with their own share of problems.

The first is ‘The Gandhian Antithesis’, in which Bakhle’s Savarkar is constructed in opposition to Gandhi, who throughout the book serves as its coordinate against which the deviations are measured. The opposition to Gandhi, the representative of predominantly humanist values, serves as a phenomenon that marks what Savarkar deviates from and becomes a method of judgement. This is not a simple lionisation, as Bakhle is critical of Gandhi on caste and his historiography. But on the axis that carries more moral weight in the book, which is the treatment of Muslims and the destiny of secularism in India, the asymmetry gets stark. The second is ‘The Anti-Muslim Polemicist’, where the book’s method of reading through Savarkar’s own words lives alongside her consequential omission: Muslim politics as an independent actor, with its own goals and ambitions, and not as mere simpleton objects of British divide-and-rule. The third is, ‘The Caste Paradox’, which the book concedes with one hand and takes away with the other through its boldest and least supported argument around the terms of Savarkar’s release and detention. The fourth is ‘The Anti-Colonial Legacy’, the smallest of the four in the book’s economy, but a definitive exhibit of the book’s methodology. Taken in turn, these capture the longitudinal constants that emerge on each rotation of the kaleidoscope.

The Gandhian Antithesis

Though Gandhi’s name appears in no chapter title, he is the book’s silent benchmark. In the introduction, Bakhle argues that Savarkar wrote Essentials of Hindutva in 1923 in response to Gandhi, assuring the larger Hindu community that ‘even if Gandhi was gone, a finer, better, more authentic man was ready to lead, from a region with prior experience of having struck the first blow against three different foreign invaders: Muslims, the Portuguese, and the British. Maharashtra’s history, he wrote, offered a better model for an ongoing nationalist struggle than what Gandhi was offering’ (p. 16). But that is looking at Savarkar in 1923 through the lens of who he became by 1937. The truth is, when he wrote this tract, he published it under a pseudonym, ‘A Maratha’. He was still a convict, staring down nearly 40 more years in prison, and about to promise that he would stay out of politics for good. This is not exactly someone lining up to take Gandhi’s place, and he never puts his name behind the claim either. Essentials of Hindutva reads like an ideological answer to Gandhi, a different vision of the nation put forth when actual leadership was not possible. Savarkar was probably the last person who could act on such a manifesto, under the uncertainty of captivity, which is why he wrote it as one.

The benchmarking continues to surface at various stages in the book. In the first chapter, Bakhle argues, ‘One of the ways Savarkar was useful to the British government was in his consistent attacks on Gandhi, who was the most prominent political figure advocating Hindu-Muslim unity’ (p. 68). In the second, she writes, ‘Khilafat was in some respects a gift for him, providing him with a political cause he could use to intervene in the nationalist debate, rebuild his name, and quickly make up for the time he had lost when imprisoned in the Andamans. The Khilafat movement gave him something concrete with which to confront Gandhi’ (p. 114). Again, she asserts that while Gandhi was trying to soothe communal tensions, Savarkar was willing to keep them inflamed (p. 116). In the conclusion, she charts the displacement of the ‘Gandhi-Nehru Vision of Secularism’ or the sarva dharma sambhava by Savarkar’s ‘dread-secularism’ (p. 415).

The antithesis is normative in structure. In Bakhle’s framing, opposition to Gandhi runs through Savarkar’s colonial usefulness. His attacks on Gandhi are named as one of the ways he was useful to the British. The assumption that any critique of Gandhi automatically serves British interests casts all figures critical of Gandhi in a negative frame. By this standard, the revolutionaries who opposed Gandhi from a still more radical position would have been the natural beneficiaries of British patronage. They were not. The reason is obvious: the quarrel between the revolutionaries and Gandhi was not over whether to combat the British Raj, but how it should be done. Their existence definitely divided the nationalist camps, but the reason was ideological, and the differences were not neatly zero-sum for the freedom movement.

After his release from jail in 1924 and the commencement of his detention in Ratnagiri, Savarkar wrote caustic articles against Gandhi, freely available online as The Gandhian Confusion. In the articles, Savarkar’s accusations were clear: Gandhi was useful to the British and single-handedly responsible for blunting the freedom movement (Gandhian Confusion, p. 15). Even a single article from his collection, ‘The Sympathiser of the British’, can encapsulate it, where Savarkar writes, Gandhi alone ‘can dissuade the people from the path of the revolutionaries, which the government fears like a deadly poison, and protect the British Empire socially, religiously, industrially, and educationally in a way of relatively minimum loss and maximum convenience’ (Gandhian Confusion, p. 15). In a curious turn of events, almost a century later, the charge has been inverted onto its author. Bakhle levels the same accusations, and does so without engaging the articles that opposed Gandhi.

The evidence in itself is antithetical to her framing. The same essays that attacked Gandhi were openly anti-British and supportive of the revolutionary movement. In the series, he celebrated the Congress’ adoption of the resolution for complete independence, despite a hesitant Gandhi (Gandhian Confusion, p. 17). The government later banned his anonymous outlet, Shraddhanand, in 1930 for its seditious content and open defence of the revolutionaries. In 1929, the newspaper was already listed by the Home Department of the British government as ‘anti-Government in tone’ (National Archives, Home Political, 1930). Then, in 1934, in the Sweetland Case, Savarkar was taken into custody for two weeks but was released for lack of evidence. It is difficult to comprehend how Savarkar was useful to the British by being more virulently anti-British, which consequently led to the banning of his newspapers. Was it a lack of assessment by the government, or a miscommunication between the two parties on the ‘incentive’ behind the release? What is left is a reading that attributes motive to fit a predetermined conclusion, notably by skipping the Marathi articles, which Bakhle claims are a distinctive feature of her book.

In the second accusation, the Khilafat movement is framed as Savarkar’s opportunity, while airbrushing any discussion of Gandhi’s experiment and its consequences. Savarkar is portrayed here as strongly motivated by personal ambition with a desire for career rehabilitation rather than by intellectual, ideological, and civilisational reasons. The consequences of the Khilafat movement were stark. Gandhi’s decision to anchor the non-cooperation movement on the Khilafat cause achieved three things in effect: it conceded that the Indian Muslim political loyalty had a legitimate extraterritorial dimension; it lifted the ulama into mass politics on terms that enhanced their religious and political authority while repelling the moderate Muslim leaders; and it released an insurmountable religio-political energy which was difficult for the Congress to contain or direct. The Moplah violence of 1921 and over 100 communal riots in the 1920s were not incidental to that gamble but among its consequences. Reading Gandhi as attempting an experiment to defuse communal friction is defensible, but to treat the collapse of his experiment as incidental rather than as the political rupture that Savarkar was responding to is to decide in advance that his response can only look like opportunism.

The reasons for such speculations are unclear. This framing is more clearly articulated by Bakhle in her journal article ‘Country First?’ (2010), where she writes, ‘If we are not to allow the Hindu Right to take, own, and use the historiography of Savarkar, we need to take seriously his skill in the marshalling of arguments that had perhaps more elemental power than Gandhi’s, that could be read as more or less benign or dangerous, depending on context, interpretation, and the colonial conditions of India’s national history’ (Bakhle, Country First, p. 186). The passage is candid about its motive. There is a ‘we’, and there is a Hindu Right that the ‘we’ is set against. The purpose of engaging with Savarkar is to keep the other side from claiming him. Which side, then, is the ‘we’? The passage suggests that it is the Gandhian side whose historiography is to be protected. If the pieces were set from the beginning, this would not be ‘critical distance’ but a position that is clearly taken. Bakhle’s declared intent to stand outside the ‘binary’ camps would be more credible if the kaleidoscope were itself neutral. The kaleidoscope she offers as guarantor of that stance is apparently not.

The Anti-Muslim Polemicist

The second chapter, ‘The Fearful Demagogue’, is based on Savarkar’s own writings as they dictate the movement of the chapter. It builds on the first chapter, which asserts that it was useful to release Savarkar, partly because he could further the British government’s divide-and-rule agenda. The Khilafat movement, it is claimed, allowed Savarkar to unleash his rage against the Muslim community. The ‘opportunism’ is the core charge against Savarkar here. This claim is predicated on the assumption that Savarkar was also already a devoted anti-Muslim ideologue since his London days.

Bakhle cites Syed Haidar Raza, Savarkar’s fellow resident at India House, as having deposed to the British police that the latter could not keep the ‘anti-Mohammedan’ note out of his speeches (p. 47). This is offered by Bakhle as evidence that Savarkar was never a votary for Hindu-Muslim unity. The effect is to render Savarkar as an anti-Muslim ideologue from the beginning, one for whom the Khilafat was merely the awaited occasion. Raza’s account is only partly accurate. Savarkar, as studied from other accounts, did carry an early scepticism towards the Muslims. Whether he entirely believed in it is questionable given the numerous incidents around it. The recurring themes of Savarkar’s speeches were the Marathas and the Sikhs against the Mughal Empire, and the subsequent 1857 ‘War of Independence’. His idea was that the Hindus and the Muslims were involved in a constant cultural tussle throughout the Mughal period, which peaked during Aurangzeb’s rule. But after the end of his reign, the communal friction eased, leading to the Hindu-Muslim unity epoch of 1857. Savarkar’s 1857 book, on which he worked from 1907, is conceptualised precisely as a historical precedent for Hindu-Muslim unity. Its thesis is explicitly a case for Hindus and Muslims having fought as brothers-in-arms in 1857, and that Bahadur Shah Zafar, chosen by both communities, was therefore a legitimately Indian sovereign rather than a Mughal one. To Savarkar, 1857 marked the end of all Hindu-Muslim friction and served as an ideal template for their togetherness. The argument was offered in good faith against the establishment of the Muslim League and their lobbying for separate electorates, citing distrust of the Hindu majority. It would serve to bridge the gulf between the Hindus and Muslims who had largely taken a separate political course.

Savarkar highlighted the 1857 model in his article ‘Wake Up Sons of Islam’, published in The Gaelic American on 8 December 1906, to persuade Muslims to abandon the separate path and join hands with the Hindus as brothers against the British. The article urged Muslims to abandon their fear of a civil war from the Hindu side since the 1857 war implied that the Hindus and Muslims could see each other with a spirit of trust and brotherhood. Another crucial piece of evidence that completely negates Raza’s accusation is the episode of 13 September 1908, when Lala Har Dayal, in a speech at the India House, declared that he was working for a Hindu India and that Muslims who wished to remain in the country would have to worship Hindu gods (National Archives, Home Political, 1908). Savarkar publicly opposed Har Dayal’s speech, called it dangerous to the national movement, and proposed a formal discussion of the question. If Savarkar was agreeable to the idea, he could have remained silent. Instead, he opposed this position within his circle to defend the place of the Muslims in Indian polity.

This is not to say that the pre- and post-Andaman Savarkars cannot be reconciled ideologically. Much of the recent scholarship, most notably by John Pincince, Vikram Visana, and Vinayak Chaturvedi, connects the two phases. The above argumentation intends merely to highlight that Savarkar was willing to change his opinions on the matter. It suggests the larger possibility that Savarkar’s intellectual salvo of Hindutva emerged as a by-product of the fractures he saw in the Indian polity over the next decade, be it the Morley–Minto reforms in 1909, the Lucknow Pact’s assent to separate electorates in 1916, and, above all, the Khilafat and the Moplah.

There is another side to the ‘Khilafat as a gift’ framing. Bakhle writes that ‘Savarkar wrote to keep the memory of Khilafat, and thus communal feeling, alive’ (p. 116). Two inferences follow from this reading: first, Khilafat becomes a ‘one-off’ episode of communal enthusiasm that the Muslims briefly indulged and then moved past; and second, it erases Muslim political agency from the picture. It is thus only Savarkar’s writings that keep fanning the fire. However, it must be understood that the political history of Indian Islam, though not without its diversity, is not inert. From Ziauddin Barani to Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi to Aurangzeb’s Fatawa-e-Alamgiri to Shah Waliullah Dehlawi to the Third Battle of Panipat to the 1857 rebellion, Muslim political agency showed clear will and purpose. After 1857, from the Hindi-Urdu controversy to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s ‘two-nation theory’ to the backlash against placing Hindi on an equal footing with Urdu in 1900 to the backlash against the revocation of Bengal’s partition in 1911, Muslim political agency recalibrated itself strategically, shaped by memories of its pre-1857 supremacy. The politics of separate electorates had become non-negotiable and synonymous with Muslim politics.

After 1923, Savarkar was responding to a real and dominant stream within Muslim politics, even if it was not the only one. However, the Muslims in both Savarkar’s and Bakhle’s writings are flat and monochromatic, albeit from opposing standpoints. Savarkar’s Muslims are attributed agency but generalised negatively; Bakhle’s Muslims are stripped of agency but generalised positively. Savarkar’s Muslims act with intent; Bakhle’s Muslims are acted upon by circumstances. Both portraits are single-cause readings of a community that was, in fact, divided over its own future in ways neither writer can quite capture without sacrificing the polemical force. History settled the question in a direction Bakhle’s framework cannot explain: the Muslims of Savarkar’s imagination secured their Pakistan, while Bakhle’s Muslims lacked the dominant agency to argue their community out of it.

The Caste Paradox

In the third chapter, Bakhle lays out the social backdrop against which Savarkar was set to implement his social reform ideas. Here, the author contends that Savarkar’s caste critiques were radical for his time. He spoke critically of cow worship, ritualism, and religious orthodoxy. The load-bearing part is her distinction between Ambedkar’s external critique of Brahminism and Savarkar’s internal one, which forms an enriching read. Here, she contends that Savarkar never engaged caste as a structure of power, and he never challenged Brahminism enough to dismantle it. The contention is that Savarkar was a Brahminical insider, as Bakhle writes, ‘Savarkar attempted to have it both ways: to enact radical reform without completely alienating the privileged elite. By suggesting a radical reduction of Brahminism—by bringing down the necessary rituals (saṃskāras) from the mandated 16 to only the essential three (naming ceremony, thread ceremony, and mourning), advocating marrying in a registrar’s office, and conducting one’s own rituals in Sanskritised Marathi—Savarkar believed it was possible to reconfigure and update Brahminism for the twentieth century’ (p. 170). Hence, she contends, Savarkar could project himself as a staunch reformist by radically reducing Brahminism, while simultaneously reconfiguring it for the twentieth century.

Bakhle wonders why Savarkar did not launch an anti-Brahmin campaign, as was the norm during those days. We will find, however, that Savarkar’s reading of caste was different. He considered it a system of graded inequality that predated the Brahmins and had already taken shape by the time they codified it, terming the phenomenon pothinisht jatibhed (Scripture-based caste discrimination). The evolution of caste, on his account, was natural: a spread of common practices adopted by all Hindus, and divided among them, for socio-economic reasons. Hence, the caste system was a feature independent of Brahmins or Hinduism as a religion. For Savarkar, the sin of retaining caste practices was on every community, even the lower castes. The empirical observation was accurate. The lower castes themselves had hierarchies, and the practice was pervasive enough that Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims had their own castes. These communities were not governed by Brahmin authority, and yet developed the same graded structure. The undoing of the seven shackles that Savarkar prescribed was therefore not addressed to any particular caste but to the entire Hindu fold, since the fold shared the problem in common. Savarkar went so far as to reject his own caste identity, asserting he belonged to only one jati—Hindu.

She poses a question to conclude the chapter (p. 230), ‘Was his agenda of caste reform of any real use to the victims of caste oppression, prejudice, and violence, or was it a way of establishing his progressive credentials in provocative but ultimately nonconsequential ways? And was his real intention to subordinate caste distinctions to a broader category of Hindu for the major reason that he thought this was the only way to take on the Muslim threat?’ She proposes an answer. For her, Savarkar wishes away the problem of caste through ‘a unique mixture of outrageousness and rhetorical bluster’ (p. 230). On close reading, Bakhle offers the reader two possibilities and invites them to choose. The first meant that the reform was undertaken for Dalits themselves, with the intention of giving them real relief. The second meant that the reform was just a cover for consolidating the Hindu community against the Muslims. Bakhle’s insistence is towards the latter, as he and his ‘followers carried the vestiges of an ineradicable Brahminism along with his ever-present anti-Muslim refrain. Like him, they downplayed the structural significance of caste while naturalising everyday prejudice against Muslims’ (p. 231). The reading is supported by her selection of passages, which favours those where the Muslim theme is proximate.

Savarkar’s actual position, on an exhaustive reading of his social reform corpus, fits neither of Bakhle’s two boxes. Her binary framing, which treats ‘for Dalits’ and ‘for the whole’ as separable purposes, is what Savarkar denies. The Muslim strand only intensifies the urgency by adding an external stake. It is not supposed to be the primary rationale for reform. Savarkar was essentially answering a larger question, of which social reform became an important and radical element, which was: what makes the national organism whole, in a polity whose basis is an integrated body of the nation? The dissolution of jatis into a single Hindu identity would have to pass the hard test of ameliorating the Dalits. Savarkar is pitted against Ambedkar, whose essential question is: what makes citizens equal, given that the moral standing of persons is before and independent of the collectives to which they happen to belong? His answer was a civic-egalitarian approach in which the nation is constituted by equal citizens whose worth does not depend on their membership in the collective. The mechanics were ‘the annihilation of caste’ and later an exit from the Hindu fold, since caste was difficult to annihilate from within. That Ambedkar’s Navayana Buddhists are still tied to their ancestral jatis, and still identified with their legal caste in the modern state, does not make the approach radically powerful against Savarkar’s gradual approach to ‘caste agnosticism’. Both are gradual, not immediate, approaches to making caste irrelevant.

Savarkar’s failure to meet the civic-egalitarian standard is presented by Bakhle as a downside. It is deemed ‘superficial’, ‘instrumental’, ‘co-optation’, with no acknowledgement that the standard itself is contested. Savarkar did not value Dalits as ends in themselves, as he was answering a different question. This is a standard of Ambedkar’s moral world. In his worldview, Savarkar would have to reform caste in the desire of national vitality predicated on Hindu fraternity, regardless of whether there was a Muslim threat. Reading Savarkar as an anti-Muslim polemicist strengthens Bakhle’s conclusion. The complete corpus complicates the reading. If Savarkar’s words are to be taken as honest, in his last interview in 1965, he imagines a future India where ‘The Hindus would be a casteless society, a consolidated and a modern nation’ (Sampath, 2021).

The Anti-Colonial Legacy

Bakhle acknowledges, contrary to much of the prevailing literature, that Savarkar’s mercy petitions were strategic rather than tokens of subservience, and that his anti-colonial credentials never withered. But his legacy, according to her portrayal, is blemished. By detaining Savarkar, the British government was able to curtail the anti-colonial aspect of his politics. What was left in him, henceforth, was the useful part: an anti-Gandhi and an anti-Muslim polemicist. Such a man was better off detained and allowed to write articles which would ultimately benefit the British. We have dealt with the claims in the preceding sections. The contradictions are already laid bare, but they have not been discussed directly as Bakhle wants to explain them.

She writes (p. 66), ‘The Ticket of Leave would have been the perfect solution for Savarkar and his brothers. Leaving them in the distant Andaman Islands would have let the government claim it had given him clemency while simultaneously removing him from Indian political life. Why then would they release him into house arrest in his native state of Maharashtra when his most incendiary writings were all in Marathi and, since Savarkar wrote under assumed names and published widely in his associates’ journals, he would be very difficult to monitor? Indeed, by the time watchers and translators had confirmed that those incendiary writings were penned by him, the damage had been done.’

Bakhle raises grave questions which need thorough examination. She is making a case for ascribing motive to the British government in releasing Savarkar to his native state, Maharashtra. However, firstly, Savarkar’s transfer to Indian jails in 1921 was not due to clemency. He was still to continue with his life imprisonment sentence. The release happened due to the reforms suggested by the Jails Committee Report, following which the communique from the Secretary to the Government of India on 12 March 1921 was, ‘The Government of India have now decided that in view of the criticisms of the Jails Committee regarding the conditions obtaining in the Andamans, it is no longer possible to retain political prisoners there. All local Governments are accordingly being instructed that their political prisoners must be removed as soon as practicable’ (National Archives of India Home Department, 1921). Why was he brought to Maharashtra, then? The answer is simple: his case was administratively under the Bombay Presidency and was the responsibility of the Government of Bombay. Whenever Savarkar’s mercy petitions and the question of remitting his sentence had come up in earlier years, especially around the 1919–1920 Royal Amnesty, it was the Government of Bombay that constantly refused his release, citing him to be ‘dangerous’. This position was held until 1921, when the Government of India strictly pressed for implementation of the Jails Committee’s reforms. Even then, the transfer to the province of origin was to be a cumbersome exercise, since several dangerous political prisoners remained in the Cellular Jail after being omitted from the Royal Amnesty. The June 1921 Home Department record shows the enormity of the exercise: the political prisoners then awaiting transfer from the Andamans were 2 from Maharashtra (the Savarkar brothers), 13 from Bengal (primarily Jugantar and Anushilan Samiti revolutionaries), 18 from Punjab (primarily Ghadarites), 13 from Burma, and 2 from the North-Western Frontier Provinces (National Archives of India Home Department, June 1921).

Vikram Sampath’s biography, the book Bakhle, criticised for lacking critical distance, is clear on this. The choice of Ratnagiri was again to hinder Savarkar. Sampath mentions that Bombay, Poona, and Nashik were ruled out due to their political sensitivity. Ratnagiri was selected because it was small, remote, and offered the least scope for political activity. The conditions of release, that is, confinement to the district and abstention from political activity, were not just token. In Savarkar’s case, they were reinforced repeatedly over five terms, spanning 13 years.

The speculative leap could have been avoided if not for the book’s uniform teleological structure, which rested on Savarkar’s utility against all the good things of the freedom struggle: Gandhi, the Congress, the Muslims, and the fabled Hindu-Muslim unity. Hence, coherently enough, the speculative approach is continued. Bakhle alleges, ‘We cannot tell what use the government might have made of him, forestalled as it was by Savarkar’s claim that he would no longer engage in political activity. But we can suspect that they had plans to use him or would have liked to have used him’ (p. 68). The ‘utility’ is already established. She continues, ‘The result was that Savarkar wrote and said whatever he wanted, then argued with the police when challenged. The police could have rearrested him, moved him, watched him more carefully, but instead, as we will see, they simply wrung their hands. They enabled Savarkar to continuously attack Gandhi, Khilafat, and what it meant to Muslims, and everyone who did not support his agenda’ (p. 69).

The way the 13-year detention played out is contrary to Bakhle’s thesis. If the British had wanted Savarkar’s incendiary output, their conduct is difficult to explain. When he published ‘The Suffering Moslems of Kohat’ in 1925, he was warned that his life imprisonment sentence would be resumed. The reason is counterintuitive if divide-and-rule is kept as the norm: the article was ‘bound to inflame the feelings and increase the tension between Hindus and Muhammadans’. When his play Sangeet Ushap (1927) was found to carry anti-Muslim undertones, he was warned again. After the second warning, he stopped publishing so-called anti-Muslim material under his own name.

From 1927, Savarkar continued to write articles against Gandhi and the Muslims pseudonymously through a newspaper, Shraddhanand, which his younger brother, Narayan Savarkar, was entrusted with operating. This was his last resort to continue voicing his opinions, albeit without his name on the articles. Now, the government could not be charged with encouraging Savarkar to write incendiary articles, and the latter could continue writing under the veiled outlet. But as we know, the newspaper was banned within three years. Savarkar lost his anonymous outlet, and his anti-Gandhi and so-called anti-Muslim writings ceased.

For a man Bakhle describes as useful to the British, Savarkar had a difficult time of it. He was warned repeatedly, denied the ability to write under his own name, had his detention renewed across five successive terms, had his newspaper banned, and was left with social reform as the only subject he could openly discuss. This raises a question: if the British were so certain of Savarkar’s utility, why did they withhold his full release for 13 years? A politically active Savarkar, free to build an organisation and address audiences directly, would have opposed Gandhi and the Muslims to far greater effect than by writing pseudonymous articles in a small Marathi paper. If the government was pleased with his output, which included the revolutionary standpoint in his articles, it could have accepted, even welcomed, an out-in-the-open Savarkar. It did not. The full release came only in 1937, at which point Bakhle’s narrative ends.

Conclusion

The four themes tracked in this review point to a single pattern. The resulting portrait is reminiscent of earlier critical works on Savarkar, which centred on his opposition to Gandhi and Muslims. However, unlike other such works, Bakhle is clear about Savarkar’s anti-colonial commitment. She also does not perpetuate the ‘Savarkar lived on British pension’ debate, clearing the blemishes from his commitment. This brings her to the three core characteristics of Savarkar’s ideological axis: anti-British, anti-Muslim, and anti-Gandhi.

Bakhle’s work on Savarkar is valuable because it offers glimpses of what a good book on Savarkar would look like. It engages with his complete corpus, including the much-neglected works in Marathi, digs the archives, understands the importance of Savarkar’s poetry, concedes him a primary-source-backed continuous anti-colonial credential, brings a scholarly lens to analyse Savarkar’s social reform, and attempts an intellectual analysis of ‘the Making of Hindutva’. The kaleidoscope, despite its biases, has been an innovative tool for analysing Savarkar and for accepting all his diverse facets, which is why the book’s scope is enormous and possibly unparalleled, albeit limited to the pre-1937 phase. Bakhle’s instinct to bypass the binaries around Savarkar and trust the primary sources deserves appreciation. An improvement on this work will have to surpass the great methodological rigour displayed in Bakhle’s work. But a fresh corrective would have to inculcate greater discipline in examining the faulty hypotheses.

In Review: The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957. Frank Dikötter. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2017. 376 pages.

Introduction

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) describes the Communist Revolution of 1949 as a ‘liberation’, but for millions of Chinese, it was nothing of the sort. When we think of regime change after a civil war, our imagination turns to violence inflicted upon belligerents or the collateral damage to civilians caught in the crossfire. In China’s case, however, Communist victory itself was a devastation as the implementation of Maoist ideology exacted a human cost as staggering as an active conflict. Frank Dikötter’s The Tragedy of Liberation recounts the everyday suffering of ordinary Chinese during the early years of Communist rule.

While the atrocities in Maoist China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are relatively well known, the author illuminates the formative years of Communist rule, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) transformed itself from a revolutionary movement into a party-state. Reduced to statistics in historical memory, the Chinese masses emerge in his account as individuals navigating fear, dispossession, and debasement. The author writes that roughly five million perished prematurely in the first decade of Maoist rule, while tens of millions more endured lives marked by despair.

The book traverses the period between Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945 and the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956–1957, when Chairman Mao encountered his first serious intellectual backlash. Moving chronologically across four parts, Dikötter opens with the devastation of the civil war: the brutal siege warfare in Manchuria, desperate scavenging to sustain the war effort, Shanghai’s financial collapse under a faltering Nationalist regime, and the swift Communist takeover of southwestern China. As the CCP consolidates power, the narrative shifts to the remaking of socio-political life through land reform, agricultural collectivisation, and strict information control, while tracing the consequences of the Korean War. The story darkens further with campaigns of ideological purification, such as internal anti-corruption purges, thought reform, and the spread of gulags. The author concludes with Mao’s response to De-Stalinisation, his suppression of dissent, and the careful cultivation of his image as the Great Helmsman.

State-Making in Communist China

While reading this book, I found myself reflecting on how a political scientist might engage with a work so rigorously grounded in archival evidence. Without a conceptual hinge, Dikötter’s account risks reading as an unrelenting catalogue of suffering so brutal that the agony of life in 1950s China numbs more than it expresses. At its core, The Tragedy of Liberation is a story of state-making. Since the People’s Republic was forged in violence, Charles Tilly’s seminal essay ‘War Making and State Making as Organised Crime’ offers a compelling lens. As he writes, ‘if protection rackets represent organised crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making [...] qualify as our largest examples of organised crime.’ For Tilly, nation-states emerge through organised violence: mobilising resources for war, cultivating clients for protection, and eliminating rivals both beyond and within the territory. Though derived from European experiences, the framework fairly maps onto how the CCP consolidated power in its first decade of rule.

The arrival of the People’s Liberation Army in Chinese towns was ‘a carefully choreographed procession’ (p. 39). For many, it brought relief from the misery of Western exploitation, Japanese invasion, and the civil war. Many Chinese expatriates, such as Li Zhisui, who would later become Mao’s private doctor, were pulled home by the promise of a new China (p. 41). Millions who feared communism fled to Hong Kong or crossed the Taiwan Strait, and countless families were torn apart as ‘soldiers and government officials had left some of the women and children behind in the rush to escape’ (p. 45).

The first task in state-making was to instil the dogma of class struggle among the masses, which until then remained confined to Communist cadres. This required imposing a rigid social divide. The new state identified the constituencies to be protected and then schooled them in the grammar of revolution. As Dikötter notes, ‘every individual was given a class label’, categorised according to ‘their presumed loyalty towards the revolution’ (p. 47). Society was reduced to two categories, red/friend or black/foe, labels that ‘would determine a person’s fate for decades to come, as children inherited the status of the head of the household’ (p. 48). Re-education centres proliferated to indoctrinate sympathisers into Communist dogma, while non-Communist parties and selected businesses were folded into a broader coalition under the rhetoric of New Democracy. Ideological purity demanded sacrifice as people were urged to reduce consumption, embrace frugality, and renounce material pleasure. The systemic shock jolted everyday life, altering livelihoods, appearances, and even the way people dressed.

Land reform merged the twin processes of extraction and protection at the heart of state-making. The radicalisation of peasants cultivated the conviction that ‘anyone who has land is a tyrant, and all gentry are bad’ (p. 63). When cadres unleashed all-out class struggle in the countryside, it served a dual purpose. Land was confiscated from landlords and rich peasants and redistributed, while the state simultaneously cultivated a loyal political base. The violence of forced dispossession also fractured the traditional fabric of village life. People were taught to despise the wealthy, and class struggle became a vehicle for settling familial feuds and personal scores. The campaign’s reach was staggering as ‘by the end of 1951, over ten million landlords had been expropriated, and more than 40 per cent of land had changed hands’ (p. 83). Extraction and state capacity grew together. The campaigns that destroyed one class built the base of another.

As Max Weber would argue, the state is a political entity that has a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Though violence lay at the heart of Communist state-making, its legitimacy remained contested in the early 1950s. Capitalists were wary of the Party cadres, youth disillusioned by economic stagnation, and government officials afraid to lose their jobs. The CCP had not secured the broad base of clients whose protection would justify the state’s authority. The Korean War changed the calculus. Domestically, Mao authorised a sweeping campaign against ‘remnant nationalist forces, secret agents, bandits, and counter-revolutionaries’ (p. 85). What followed was a reign of terror that cemented the Communist monopoly on violence, though legitimacy was forged less through accommodation than elimination. The methodical scale of this terror is evident in a single fact: Mao issued death quotas across the country, sanctioning the killing of one in every thousand people (p. 87).

A bamboo curtain descended on China’s borders. Traditionally exotic to foreigners, China under Communist rule came to regard everything foreign as a reminder of imperialism. As Dikötter writes, ‘every trace of foreign involvement in the economy, religion, education and culture was considered incompatible with the goals of a new China—from missionary schools, democratic institutions, international banks and foreign films down to legal language and street signs in English’ (p. 109). Quotas were imposed on departing foreigners, cadres grew hostile to outsiders, and the state censored foreign correspondents. The CCP thus consolidated a monopoly over the flow of information, with propaganda becoming the sole medium of political communication.

The Korean War further revealed the extractive character of the Communist state. More than 55 per cent of the 1951 budget was diverted towards war financing, while grain extraction from farmers intensified to sustain the war effort (p. 142). As the principal staging ground for intervention, the region of Manchuria descended into misery. Food shortages triggered starvation, and some families were forced to sell their children. The United States’ embargo on the PRC in 1950–1951 deepened the pressure. Meanwhile, rumours of bacteriological warfare allegedly waged by American pilots produced a man-made ecological disaster. Sick people were dipped in pesticides, public gardens set ablaze, rat-hunting quotas imposed, and dogs culled en masse (pp. 147–150). Though the war ended in a stalemate, the mass hysteria it unleashed demonstrated the extraordinary capacity of the state to shape belief and mobilise an entire population around irrational fear. The making of the Chinese state now seemed complete.

From State-Making to Thought Engineering

Though a functioning state had emerged by the early 1950s, consolidation remained elusive. It is here that Tilly’s framework reaches its limits in explaining state-making in the PRC. He explains how states are made, but offers no account of when formation ends, or of what happens when the state turns against the very constituencies it once claimed to protect. Dikötter hints at this through Mao’s anxious invocation of Li Zicheng, the folk hero who conquered the capital but failed to hold it (p. 156). In the mid-1950s, Mao launched an anti-corruption campaign to stem the embezzlement corroding the Communist state. What began as a purge of corrupt officials soon engulfed society, breaking the back of the politician-business nexus and extinguishing the last remnants of private capital. Party members were not spared, as even minor transgressions from the distant past were unearthed and punished.

In Maoist China, ideological purity demanded conformity in public life and submission in the innermost realm of thought. Economic life followed the same logic. Tools, seeds, and farm animals were declared communal property; collectivisation dissolved the boundary between the individual and the state (pp. 208–210). The economic ruin this produced was severe, but the deeper consequence was the death of the will to work. When individual desire is extinguished, only fear remains. Fear, as a motivator, produces a society governed by the zero-sum instincts of survival, where denouncing a neighbour becomes rational, loyalty becomes performative, and no one steps forward who does not have to. No degree of state coercion could substitute for the motivation it had destroyed. Slackness and defection became endemic. Farmers fled the countryside when they failed to meet assigned quotas, and Party officials preyed on the masses they were meant to serve.

Then came what seemed a more fundamental solution. Rather than policing lapses in state machinery, why not shape the thoughts of the people themselves? The regime turned inward, towards the minds of the people. Thought reform expanded into a sweeping project of social engineering, reaching into books, music, cinema, and religious belief. Beethoven and Mozart were condemned as bourgeois (p. 192), Buddhism and Confucianism dismissed as relics of a feudal past (pp. 198–201), and Hollywood denounced as reactionary (p. 195). The assault moved beyond private property to private belief itself. Intellectuals became de facto enemies, for they represented the one thing the state could not collectivise: the freedom to think. By 1956–1957, the accumulated weight of this suppression had quietly turned intellectual sentiment against Mao. The Hundred Flowers Campaign, ostensibly an invitation to speak freely, revealed the depth of that resentment.

Why Should India Read This Book?

India and China are two populous civilisational giants that came to their modern-day nation-state avatars at similar times. Thus, it is natural to compare their journeys, given the significant divergence they have undergone over the last eight decades. While China delivered majestic economic growth, India achieved an astonishing feat in successfully preserving a pluralist society. The essay reminds us that war-making and the use of violence are an inherent part of state-making.

As Tilly would argue, wars make states and states make wars. The establishment narrative of India’s state-making revolving around ideas of Nehruvian socialism and the Gandhian legacy of non-violence provides an incomplete picture. However, the state-making project in India was more than what it was projected—more than adhering to the democratic ideals and the story of unity-in-diversity. When one thinks about state-making in India from this perspective, one would realise that India also used violence to support its unification in getting some regions on board.

Episodes like the annexation of Hyderabad and the liberation of Goa remind us that India was not a soft state as it has been projected in the establishment historiography. The recent achievement in eradicating Left-Wing Extremism and India’s vast experience in tackling counterinsurgencies successfully further push the argument home. At the same time, the state-making project in India remains incomplete as it is yet to become a Westphalian state in the truest sense, to have defined territorial borders, especially in the west and in the north. Going by Tilly’s logic, it is because the Republic of India has not fought wars that have required large sections of society to step up in the war effort. The Tragedy of Liberation reminds us of the price that China paid for taking its state-making project to the extreme. Therefore, to what extent are we, in India, ready for the trade-off to finish the state-making project and endure its societal consequences? To what extent can we trade our personal comforts for building a national character? War has made the Indian state, but is the Indian state ready to make war?

Conclusion

The Tragedy of Liberation draws on a rich archive of official records, memoirs, and local accounts to reconstruct the day-to-day experience of living under Communist rule. Read as an exercise in state-making, it systematically unravels the first decade of Communist rule: mobilisation of violence, extraction of resources, manufacture of loyalty, and elimination of rivals in the pursuit of order. Nonetheless, the CCP did not stop once it had secured a monopoly over violence and information. It turned inward, seeking to discipline thought itself. In doing so, the revolution crossed the boundary between governing society and remaking human nature. The deeper tragedy of this liberation was that the more it sought to free the masses, the more it stripped them of the liberty to think, choose, and live as individuals.

This brings us to the book’s most significant limitation, and here Dikötter’s own ideological priors deserve scrutiny. His libertarian anti-statism makes him instinctively alert to extraction, coercion, and the predatory character of state power, which is why the Tilly framework maps so naturally onto his account. But it also produces a history that is prosecutorial rather than analytical. Despite being a totalitarian, Mao is accorded an almost godlike agency in Dikötter’s account, appearing responsible not only for major policy decisions but also for their most distant and unintended consequences.

The book opens with the presumption that Communist China was a story of ‘calculated terror and systemic violence’ (p. xi) and proceeds to demonstrate what it has already decided. The evidence serves only to confirm the thesis rather than stress-test its assumptions. The result is an enormously rich archive of human suffering, narratively compelling and morally serious, yet short of the dispassion that historical scholarship demands.

In Review: The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Steven Teles. Princeton University Press, 2008. 360 pages.

Introduction

Post-war America saw conservatism relegated to the margins of mainstream legal thought. Widely dismissed as a movement whose intellectual well had long since dried up, it found itself banished from the commanding heights of the legal profession, ranging from elite law schools and bar associations to the federal bench. The movement at this point could do little but simply watch on from the periphery as institutions that manufactured legal authority no longer spoke its language, trained its successors, or regarded its ideas as worthy of serious attention.

Yet within little more than a generation, the entire landscape underwent a major reversal. By the early twenty-first century, originalism, a theory that sought to understand the Constitution according to its original public meaning, had managed to evolve from a peripheral academic curiosity into a jurisprudential framework that no serious constitutional debate could afford to ignore. The movement’s growing influence became evident in landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion established under Roe v Wade; District of Columbia v Heller, which affirmed an individual’s constitutional right to possess firearms; and more recently Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, which brought an end to race-based affirmative action in university admissions.

The transformation extended well beyond the courtroom, with law and economics securing a permanent place within the curricula of leading institutions such as Harvard and Yale. The Federalist Society too emerged as the dominant network for cultivating jurists and influencing federal judicial appointments, while conservative public interest law firms increasingly set the constitutional agenda, a transformation so profound that by the 2020s six of the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court had either been members of, or maintained significant professional ties with the Society.

The story of this very transformation is the subject of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement by Steven Teles. Far from a partisan eulogy, the book offers a dispassionate analysis of the mechanisms through which conservatives executed a long-term institutional coup within the American legal profession, drawing on extensive interviews with the principal actors involved and meticulous archival research into the foundations, organisations, and law schools that underpinned the effort. It is precisely this, rather than the debates surrounding specific American legal questions such as originalism versus living constitutionalism, that makes Teles’ book urgently relevant to anyone concerned with the institutional predicament of Indic nationalism.

The predicaments are strikingly similar in several respects. Where American liberals had the Warren Court, Indian courts produced the likes of Justices Bhagwati and Krishna Iyer, who transformed Public Interest Litigation (PIL) into an instrument of judicial policymaking while Kesavananda Bharati asserted the judiciary’s authority to determine the limits of constitutional amendment itself. Similarly, where American conservatives at least confronted a politically appointed bench, the Indic nationalists face the collegium system, a self-appointing judiciary that, in 2015, struck down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) to preserve its own prerogatives. And much like the Richard Nixon and early Ronald Reagan administrations, the Indic nationalists, despite commanding a formidable electoral machine, have struggled to decisively shape the institutions that mediate between political power and social reality—namely the judiciary, the legal academy, the regulatory bureaucracy, and the culture-producing apparatus of universities and the media.

At the same time, it is important to recognise that what succeeded in America did so because it was adapted to the particular pathologies of American legal liberalism and the specific resources available to American conservatives. Teles, himself, repeatedly warns that the most dangerous lesson one could draw from the conservative legal movement is the temptation to imitate its organisational forms. The success of the Federalist Society has already inspired a range of institutional analogues, including the Benjamin Rush Society in medicine (2008), the Alexander Hamilton Society in Foreign Policy (2010), and the Adam Smith Society in business education, each seeking to replicate its achievements within their respective fields. Even the Left sought to mirror the model through the American Constitution Society in an effort to recover lost ground, but its results remained modest, demonstrating that institutional mimicry alone was no guarantee of success. The most valuable lessons therefore lie not in reproducing the movement’s exoskeleton, but in understanding the deeper structural and conceptual principles that underpinned its success. This review seeks to examine the evolution of the American conservative legal movement and assess the extent to which its institutional experience offers lessons for the development of a conservative legal movement here in India.

The Architecture of Liberal Legal Entrenchment

Teles’ initial narrative is devoted to a careful archaeology of the forces conservatives were up against, namely a legal establishment that Teles characterises as the Legal Liberal Network (LLN), so deeply embedded within American professional life that, by the 1970s, its dominance came to be regarded as the natural order of things. The LLN emerged from a series of broader structural transformations in American society that trace their origin to the New Deal, initiated by President Franklin D Roosevelt in response to the economic devastation of the Great Depression and growing public demand for relief and reform. In the process of institutionalising these reforms, the Roosevelt administration dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in managing economic and social life, creating a host of new administrative bodies often referred to as the ‘alphabet agencies’. These included agencies like the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), National Recovery Administration (NRA), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), which increasingly brought the federal government directly into people’s economic and social lives.

Roosevelt’s dramatic expansion of the administrative state opened up an enormous new market for lawyers skilled in regulatory and administrative law. These institutions provided opportunities for a generation of younger lawyers, particularly those from ethnic and religious minority backgrounds who had often been excluded from the elite “white-shoe” law firms that dominated the profession, for whom public service represented not only a path to professional advancement but also an opportunity to participate in the broader project of liberal reform. As Jerold Auerbach observed, the New Deal was a ‘lawyer’s deal’, a moment in which lawyers, ‘trained to govern’ within the ‘modern liberal activist state’, ‘enjoyed direct access to its newest and most critical levers of power’.

The judiciary initially resisted this expansion, as the Supreme Court and lower federal courts remained dominated by Republican appointees committed to states’ rights and laissez-faire constitutional doctrines, with the 140 judges appointed by Roosevelt’s three Republican predecessors constituting one of the principal institutional obstacles to the New Deal. At the Supreme Court, the ‘Four Horsemen’ (Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter) consistently struck down New Deal programmes, invalidating the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp v United States (1935) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act in United States v Butler (1936).

In an attempt to overcome this judicial resistance, Roosevelt proposed a court-packing plan that would have allowed him to appoint one additional justice for every sitting member of the Supreme Court over the age of 70, potentially expanding the Court to 15 members under the pretext of easing judicial backlogs. Although the plan ultimately failed in the face of strong political opposition, the Court itself soon underwent a significant ideological shift, precipitating what would later be known as the Constitutional Revolution. In March 1937, the Supreme Court’s decision in West Coast Hotel v Parrish upheld minimum wage legislation that was virtually identical to laws it had invalidated only months earlier. A month later, in NLRB v Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp, the Court further signalled its new direction by sustaining the constitutionality of the National Labour Relations Act. Both decisions hinged on Justice Owen Roberts’ change of vote, though historians still debate his motives since he had reconsidered minimum-wage laws before Roosevelt announced the court-packing plan. Combined with Justice Van Devanter’s retirement, the result was that the New Deal gained a decisive constitutional foothold, opening space for a new generation of lawyers and judges to consolidate liberal governance.

Peter Irons’ survey of 82 New Deal lawyers illustrates this pattern quite clearly. As demand for legal academics expanded, about a dozen New Deal-trained lawyers entered academia, helping staff a rapidly growing legal education system. Two became deans at Harvard, while five secured tenured professorships there, embedding progressive influence within the upper reaches of American legal education. At the same time, roughly two-thirds of the lawyers Irons surveyed moved into private practice, where they advised corporations on the very statutes and regulatory frameworks they had helped create. The profitability generated by this work enabled major law firms to underwrite liberal causes. During the McCarthy-era loyalty investigations associated with the Red Scare, for example, firms such as Arnold, Fortas and Porter devoted between 20 and 50 per cent of their billable hours to defending former government colleagues, charging only expenses (pp. 25–27).

The Ford Foundation, particularly under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, played a pivotal role in consolidating this transformation. Through the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, it invested 6 million dollars over five years to promote clinical legal education. In 1968, only 12 law schools awarded academic credit for clinical work; by 1972, that figure had risen to 125 out of 147 law schools nationwide. Meanwhile, Charles Hamilton Houston at Howard University established what might be regarded as the first public-interest law school, pioneering a politically engaged vision of legal practice that became a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), once viewed as a haven for labour radicals, had become thoroughly mainstream by the mid-1940s, and by 1974 its membership had grown to 275,000. At the same time, the Legal Services Program dramatically expanded access to legal aid, employing 2,000 lawyers on a 40 million dollar budget by 1968, while achieving a rate of Supreme Court review that surpassed even that of the Solicitor General (pp. 31–37).

The ideological returns on these investments were phenomenal. At Harvard, the share of students identifying as Republicans fell from 31 per cent in 1967 to just 11 per cent by 1972. A 1972 Carnegie Commission survey found that a mere 35 per cent of law faculty had voted for Nixon and by the 1990s more than 89 per cent of faculty political donations flowed to Democrats. The organised bar evolved in the same direction (p. 24). The American Bar Association (ABA), once a bastion of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) conservatism, came under liberal dominance, and its ostensibly neutral professional standards increasingly functioned as a mechanism for enforcing liberal orthodoxy. As a 1983 Federalist Society proposal noted, ‘under the guise of nonpartisan and even non-controversial law reform proposals, both the state bar associations and the ABA have played crucial roles in developing a legal agenda which sometimes strangles dissent’ (p. 167).

The LLN functioned as a self-reinforcing ecosystem rather than a centrally directed organisation. Progressive law schools trained lawyers in liberal legal norms who went on to staff government agencies, public interest firms, and eventually law faculty of their own. Those faculty then educated the next generation, while the ABA conferred professional legitimacy on the broader structure. The result was a system that threatened to continuously reproduce itself across institutions and generations and become the “new normal”. This is what makes Teles’ observation that ‘what is insurgent in one generation becomes entrenched in the next’ one of the most instructive lines in the book (p. 14).

The Education of Failure

The most intellectually compelling portion of the book concerns conservatives’ painful education in the limits of political power. The Nixon administration assumed that four new Supreme Court appointments would be sufficient to reverse the constitutional revolution of the Warren Court. Instead, the Burger Court largely disappointed those expectations, demonstrating that judicial outcomes could not be transformed simply through electoral victory and appointments. A similar problem confronted Ronald Reagan in California, where his welfare reforms were repeatedly challenged and obstructed by liberal public interest firms. His deputy legal affairs director recalled the experience: ‘We were all by ourselves, with nobody to defend the programme other than ourselves’ (p. 60).

Efforts to neutralise public interest law through political or financial pressure failed repeatedly. After a lawsuit by the prominent liberal PIL firm, Centre for Law in the Public Interest (CLIPI) halted oil drilling by oil tycoon Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum, Hammer attempted to cut CLIPI’s funding, pressured its trustees, and sought to revoke its tax-exempt status. Despite extraordinary wealth, influence and democratic leaning, he was unsuccessful. Nixon’s attempt to strip public interest law organisations of their tax exemptions likewise produced nothing. Both Nixon and Reagan sought to ‘defund the Left’, yet their efforts resembled a game of whack-a-mole yielding only marginal and temporary gains (p. 57).

The first-generation conservative public interest law firms, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), and the regional network under the National Legal Centre for the Public Interest (NLCPI), were created in the 1970s as a direct counter to liberal legal activism. They suffered from three fatal defects. To start with, they were driven by corporate money rather than ideological commitment, choosing cases that served donor interests rather than building legal doctrine. In Mountain States Legal Foundation v City of Denver, aligning legal work with wealthy backers’ interests conflicted openly with the staff’s ideological principles. Secondly, they pursued cases in an ad hoc and reactive manner rather than according to a coherent long-term strategy, defining themselves largely by what they opposed rather than by a clear affirmative vision of their own. And lastly, there was the disconnect with the academy robbing them of a pipeline of idealistic young lawyers.

Former NLCPI president Michael Uhlmann’s description of the majority of conservative firms as (p. 63) ‘feeble operations, big on rhetorical enthusiasm [...] but otherwise lacking anything resembling strategic vision or a way to achieve it’ is illuminating in this regard. A 1992 Olin Grant Proposal Report confirmed the notion, stating (p. 73) ‘The bright hopes of ten years ago that conservatives could create effective counterparts to the liberal groups that have taken their policy agendas to the courtroom, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Sierra Club, have produced more disappointments than successes. The loose network of law firms has not been conspicuously effective, well-organised or stable.’

The document that catalogued these failures, the Michael Horowitz Report, marked one of the pivotal turning points in the conservative legal movement. Commissioned by the Scaife Foundation amid what Teles describes as ‘a prevailing sense that the foundations had not gotten their money’s worth’, the report landed as a bombshell, offering a devastating diagnosis of why conservative legal philanthropy had failed to translate financial resources into lasting institutional influence. Horowitz identified the university, rather than the corporation, as the central arena of competition in law. The report noted that the liberal public interest movement placed ‘its efforts on a higher moral plane than those of its adversaries’, and was candid in acknowledging the fact that conservative lawyers were ‘appallingly mediocre’. Without competing for moral legitimacy and challenging the ‘moral monopoly enjoyed by liberal public interest lawyers’, he warned, ‘the conservative public interest law movement will at best achieve episodic tactical victories which will be dwarfed by social change in the infinite number of areas beyond the reach of its case agendas.’ (p. 70).

The report also highlighted how the dominant role of business within the conservative legal movement undermined its ability to claim the moral high ground. The firms’ heavy reliance on business-related cases reinforced the perception that they were ‘shills for conservative business interests’. Businesses’ risk aversion produced, in its words, ‘an adversarial confrontation between one party seeking principled, ideological gain, while the other, from the outset, seeks to limit losses, is inherently one-sided insofar as issues of precedent are concerned’ (p. 69). The report recommended that business limit itself to a purely financial role, allowing ideologically driven lawyers to lead.

The movement’s emphasis on regional rather than functional organisation was another structural flaw pointed out. By mimicking PLF’s geographically dispersed model, programmes overlooked the centrality of Washington, where policymaking, media influence, and informal networks actually shape power. As Institute for Justice (IJ) founder Chip Mellor later reflected on his experience at MSLF (p. 66): ‘The most important lesson was that, first, any organisation worth its salt has to be dedicated to principle and not to expediency and political forces [...] and, that fund-raising must never drive case selection, and you should never be beholden to anyone.’

Rather than merely diagnosing failures, Michael Horowitz proposed a framework for evaluating cases according to whether they could attract potential constituencies to conservatism, undermine the claim that liberals represented a trans-political public interest, be plausibly framed as serving the public interest rather than wealthy private interests, demonstrate idealism and place conservatives on the side of the “good guys”, and contribute to desirable policy outcomes. Moreover, he recommended that conservatives strategically choose cases casting them as defenders of the underdog against large, unresponsive institutions, representing ghetto schoolchildren seeking discipline or public housing residents restoring order rather than corporate clients. This approach would counter accusations of racism, engage with emerging scholarship on race, poverty, and crime, and produce a credible alternative to liberal legal activism.

What followed was perhaps more significant than the report itself. Faced with a document arguing that much of their previous spending had been ineffective, conservative foundations responded not by dismissing its findings but by fundamentally rethinking their strategy. Teles treats this as evidence of a capacity for institutional self-correction that is far rarer than it appears, and far more consequential than any single organisational innovation.

The Federalist Society and the Conquest of the Bench

The Federalist Society is the centrepiece of Teles’ account. While the conventional view portrays it as little more than a networking organisation for conservative lawyers, Teles shows that this interpretation captures only part of the story. Networking was certainly an important function, but reducing the Society to that role fundamentally misunderstands both its purpose and its modus operandi. Its founders, Steven Calabresi, David McIntosh, and Lee Liberman Otis, were law students at Yale and Chicago in the early 1980s who diagnosed the core problem of American legal conservatism not as a shortage of money or political will but as an intellectual vacuum. The Society’s first event, a symposium on federalism at Yale in 1982, was an academic conference, and this was by design. Coverage in the National Review sparked spontaneous interest, prompting conservative students from other schools to seek to form chapters of their own. The founders began expanding nationwide even before establishing a national office, distributing a guide emphasising the Society’s core intellectual mission: to ‘stimulate thought and discussion about the applications of conservative principles to the law’ (p. 142). At Yale, Professors Ralph Winter and Robert Bork assisted Calabresi, while at Chicago, Liberman Otis and McIntosh were advised by Antonin Scalia, Richard Epstein, Richard Posner, and Frank Easterbrook.

Several features of the Society’s design merit close attention. The first is its commitment to debate rather than orthodoxy. Unlike the Dartmouth Review, which adopted extreme positions, the Society routinely invited liberal scholars, encouraged adversarial argument, and cultivated a culture of intellectual seriousness. This is reflected in Calabresi’s own journey as he later recalled, ‘I was originally a moderate Democrat [...] we tended to assume that if we could make the transition, other people could also, so long as we made a good persuasive argument’ (p. 143). Eugene Meyer, the Society’s long-time executive director, explained the organisation’s philosophy in characteristically pragmatic terms: ‘We think in a fair debate these ideas are really strong and we will win. Two, if it is really a fair debate and you keep losing, you sure better figure out why’ (p. 144). Learning from Young Americans for Freedom’s self-destruction through factional disputes, the founders advised chapters against labelling themselves ‘conservative’, allowing broader participation.

This approach also forced a process of intellectual refinement within conservative ranks. Through decades of sustained engagement, particularly within Federalist Society conferences and scholarly networks, conservatives gradually abandoned judicial restraint, strict constructionism, and original intent as their primary interpretive frameworks, eventually converging, albeit provisionally, on original meaning. The evolution reflected both intellectual seriousness and a willingness to revise positions in response to criticism and debate. Externally, this commitment to open inquiry and rigorous argument endowed the Society with a level of credibility that purely advocacy-oriented organisations could never achieve.

The second feature is what Teles terms ‘boundary maintenance’. The Society is neither a litigation firm, a lobbying group, nor a think tank, yet its members engage in all of these activities in their personal capacities. As Steven Calabresi explained in 2015, the ambition was to build ‘a network of alumni who have been shaped in a particular way’. A former member similarly recollected Calabresi emphasising the need to ‘credential young conservatives [...] and to build an alternative elite because [at] Yale Law School [...] it was not just a point of view, it was a way of life; it was a network, it was a group of people, it was a way to talk, it was a set of books to read. [...] On the other hand, the conservatives did not have that. They were this sort of rag-tag group’. By limiting itself to education and socialisation, the Society avoided regulatory constraints while ensuring its members carried its intellectual imprint into every institution they entered.

The third feature is its role as a pipeline and signalling mechanism. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese grasped the Society’s strategic importance and ensured its members were placed in influential roles immediately after law school (pp. 141–142). Under Meese, these young Federalists exerted disproportionate influence. Calabresi clerked for Judges Bork and Scalia on the DC Circuit before serving in the White House and Department of Justice (DOJ) from 1985 to 1990. Liberman Otis clerked for Scalia on both the DC Circuit and the Supreme Court, then worked in the George HW Bush White House under C Boyden Grey, overseeing judicial vetting. Federalist Society members held key roles across the department: Charles Cooper at the Office of Legal Counsel, Stephen Markman at the Office of Legal Policy, John Bolton in Legislative Affairs, Douglas Ginsburg in Antitrust, Terry Eastland in Public Affairs. A member characterised the Meese DOJ as a ‘Federalist Society shop’; another account described it as ‘a giant think tank where these passionate young conservative legal activists developed new legal theories’ (Avery and McLaughlin 2013, pp. 7–27). A former Supreme Court clerk noted that membership in the Society was ‘a prerequisite for law students seeking clerkships with many Reagan judicial appointees as well as for employment in the upper ranks of the Justice Department and the White House’ (Avery and McLaughlin 2013, p. 23).

Under George W Bush, both Supreme Court appointees (Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito) were Society members, as were nearly half of appeals court nominees. The administration’s key judicial selection lawyers, Brett Kavanaugh and Viet Dinh, were themselves members. Leonard Leo took leave from his Federalist Society post to advise the president directly. The influence became an open secret with a senator recounting a nominee who testified that although he had ‘not really heard of the Federalist Society’, he was told that if he wanted to be a judge, he should join. He did, and was appointed. Another remarked: ‘It seems to be the secret handshake here on the way to the Federal bench’ (Avery and McLaughlin 2013, p. 35). Of the current nine Supreme Court justices, at least five are current or former members.

The Society also reduced search costs for the broader movement. By making conservative legal views more accepted and building lasting connections, it made it far easier for organisations like the Institute for Justice to find skilled lawyers. Moreover, despite its symbiotic relationship with Republican administrations, the Federalist Society’s vitality was never contingent on executive power. As Steven Teles observes, the organisation experienced some of its most significant growth during the Clinton administration, when it served as the institutional memory and connective tissue of a conservative movement operating from the political wilderness. One of the Society’s more subtle operations was its campaign against the ABA. Initially, the Society tried to influence the ABA directly, but by 1984, these efforts proved ineffective. Many Americans, and even conservative donors, viewed the ABA as relatively conservative, unaware of its capture by the LLN. Thomas Main, a programme officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, even expressed surprise at claims of liberal bias. Acting as intellectual entrepreneurs, the Society sought to “denaturalise” the existing regime by exposing the hidden assumptions behind ostensibly neutral professional standards. Shifting strategy, it repeatedly criticised the ABA and law schools to erode their legitimacy as representatives of the legal profession, while simultaneously reproducing key bar functions such as networking and professional development. It even created specialised practice groups modelled on the ABA’s Sections. The Society has since challenged the ABA’s reputation enough to halt the Bush administration’s cooperation with its judicial reviews, though it remains far from a true alternative.

This denaturalising impulse extended beyond the ABA. Conservatives confronted the assumption that ‘public interest law’ was inherently progressive, rendering conservative public interest litigation a contradiction in terms. Rather than accept this framing, conservative firms exposed the ideological biases embedded in institutions and movements that claimed neutrality, such as Critical Legal Studies (CLS). At the same time, they consciously reshaped their public image, positioning themselves as underdogs confronting entrenched elites. By the 1960s, legal liberalism had come to be associated with civil rights and moral purpose, while conservatism was perceived as aligned with corporate power and indifferent to social justice, costing the movement access to a large pool of talented young individuals it might otherwise have attracted by appealing to their idealism. Therefore, the strides made by the conservative legal movement and its ability to turn its reputation around underscore that institutional power is inseparable from striving to achieve moral and intellectual legitimacy.

Strategic Philanthropy and the Battle for the Academy

Second-generation conservative public interest law firms, like the Institute for Justice and the Centre for Individual Rights (CIR), consciously internalised the Horowitz Report’s lessons. They severed dependence on corporate money, chose cases for doctrinal impact rather than donor satisfaction, and built deep relationships with legal academia. IJ’s founder Chip Mellor distilled the principle ‘Any organisation worth its salt has to be dedicated to principle and not to expediency. [...] Fund-raising must never drive case selection’ (p. 66). They moved from reaction to initiation, selecting clients (small business owners, property holders, students, racial minorities) whose cases disrupted the expected alignment of conservative law with corporate power. Internal planning documents explicitly observed that liberal public interest firms advanced their causes by working closely with prominent scholars, thereby gaining access to legal and social-scientific expertise, developing sophisticated litigation strategies, and maintaining a pipeline of law graduates. Conservative firms deliberately rebuilt their base within academic and quasi-academic networks in the form of conservative intellectuals, Federalist Society members, and supportive foundations.

CIR’s Academic Freedom Defence Fund targeted campus “political correctness” as a mobilising issue, building a specialised reputation that allowed it to operate in a ‘target-rich environment’, selecting promising cases, rapidly testing legal theories, and scaling up where early victories suggested broader impact. The model was later extended to affirmative action, enabling CIR to litigate precedent-setting cases such as Morrison and Rosenberger, and ultimately to challenge affirmative action in university admissions. The new firms also became repeat players in narrow doctrinal areas, acquiring the expertise, judicial credibility, and scholarly networks that general-purpose litigation could never produce.

These firms borrowed from left-liberal organisations (the ACLU, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights) the model of strategic litigation that identifies cases centrally while outsourcing costly legal work to pro bono lawyers in elite private firms. This model only became scalable with the Federalist Society, which supplied a dense, nationwide network that reduced transaction costs by circulating information, identifying ideologically aligned attorneys, and matching cases to expertise. The Society also activated Reagan-era alumni returning to private practice, allowing groups like CIR to mobilise experienced, policy-oriented lawyers without building large staffs.

The Olin Foundation played a role for the conservative movement analogous to the Ford Foundation’s role for the liberal network. John Olin designed the foundation with a clear purpose rather than as a typical family charity. He appointed like-minded board members aligned with his vision and philosophy and instructed them to ‘spend the money in a generation’, primarily on individuals doing consequential work in ideas. This approach ensured continuity in leadership and allowed the foundation to remain true to its mission even 23 years after his death. A 1982 internal report recommended the foundation operate like a ‘venture capitalist’, actively seeking ‘high-quality projects’ and turning ideas into reality. Internal assessments were regular and unsparing (the Horowitz Report being the most famous example), with underperforming initiatives being defunded and promising ones receiving concentrated support (pp. 184–187). This discipline ensured that resources produced maximal long-term impact rather than the symbolic expenditure that characterises most political philanthropy.

The foundation used law and economics to gain a “foothold” or “beachhead” at elite law schools, placing conservative-leaning faculty in universities where other forms of legal conservatism faced insuperable barriers to entry. An Olin official’s candid admission to Teles captures the strategy: ‘I would have preferred to do something in constitutional law but [...] if you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. [...] Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral, but it is not in fact’ (pp. 188–189). Over time, the faculty funded through these programmes collaborated with Federalist Society chapters, advised conservative students, and shifted the intellectual centre of gravity within their faculties.

The effort had modest beginnings at Henry Manne’s Law and Economics Centre at the University of Miami, where Liberty Fund conferences had tangible effects on individual careers (George Priest moved from obscurity at the University of Puget Sound to a position at Yale through these networks). But by 1981, the board observed that ‘many of Manne’s Olin Fellows were entering private law practice rather than the academy’, and by 1983 concluded that funding smaller schools had little national impact (p. 185). The foundation adopted an elite-focussed strategy, reasoning that top-tier institutions were ‘emulated by other colleges and universities of lesser stature’.

Harvard was the primary target. By the early 1980s, CLS had established a significant presence there; an article from The New Yorker claimed that CLS even managed to block appointments. Minutes from the Olin Foundation’s May 1984 board meeting show the board resolved to back scholars who could challenge CLS through research, publications, and public engagement. Olin funding arrived when traditionalist faculty were intellectually exhausted and unable to counter CLS. Law and economics scholars, backed by the foundation, offered a credible alternative. The Federalist Society ran a parallel high-profile campaign portraying Harvard as ‘out of control’, including a widely publicised panel at the New York City Harvard Club that highlighted CLS’s radicalism and warned alumni of its damaging influence. By circulating transcripts and publicity materials, conservatives generated external support that expanded the zone of conflict beyond the Law School itself. Inside Harvard, conservative allies were aided by President Derek Bok, who distrusted the faculty appointments process and imposed unprecedented ad hoc reviews using outside scholars. Bok’s concern was reinforced by fears that respected anti-CLS faculty would leave and that the school’s prestige would be ‘greatly diminished’. After Dean Vorenberg’s resignation in 1989, Bok appointed Robert Clark as dean. Clark’s intellectual sympathy with law and economics and his support for the Olin Program marked a decisive institutional shift. Aided by figures like Louis Kaplow on the appointments committee, Clark rapidly expanded law and economics through sustained hiring, allying with traditionalists who stripped CLS of effective power and reduced it to a permanent minority (pp. 196–198).

Olin-backed programmes spread swiftly to Penn (1986), Stanford, Berkeley, and Virginia (1987), Columbia, Duke, Georgetown, and Toronto (1989), Cornell (1992), and Michigan (2000). Between 1985 and 1989, conservative foundations gave 4.45 million dollars to the field, with only 736,000 dollars from non-Olin sources. The foundation deliberately concentrated funding in elite schools, convinced that they shaped the discipline through the production of teaching faculty and that influence would ‘trickle down’. By 1986, the programme had placed graduates in faculty positions at Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, and Michigan, ensuring the field’s reproduction across the legal academy.

The Unfinished Business: Limitations of the Conservative Movement

Teles is careful to note that the conservative legal movement, despite its triumphs, remains fundamentally incomplete. They remain a minority on elite faculties, while attempts to build flagship institutions such as George Mason University’s law school have not yet rivalled the established elite. The ABA continues to retain its structural role and liberal public interest organisations (the ACLU, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, Legal Defence Fund, the Environmental Defence Fund) remain ever so resilient. The Federalist Society commands a fraction of the ABA’s budget, roughly 20 million dollars against the ABA’s 98 million dollars, though the gap was far wider when Teles wrote in 2008. Conservative PIL firms too, despite better access to talent, struggle to retain them and compete with private sector salaries.

Teles’ diagnosis is structural rather than circumstantial. A series of deeply embedded asymmetries prevented the movement from converting its ascendancy over the Left into unchallenged supremacy within the legal profession. To begin with, liberal legalism enjoyed a 40-year head start, and its institutions had become constitutive of what professional respectability in American law looked like. It functioned as the unmarked default, while conservatism remained the deviation that required justification. This imbalance was reinforced by the network economics of elite credentialing. George Mason, however brilliantly Henry Manne built it, could not synthetically reproduce the prestige cascade generated by a single Harvard appointment. The influence of elite institutions flowed through established reputational networks that were extraordinarily difficult to replicate from the outside, making it difficult for conservatives to build alternative centres of authority even when they succeeded in creating intellectually vibrant institutions of their own.

Compounding these difficulties was conservatives’ limited influence within central professional bodies such as the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), institutions that continued to retain influence when it came to norms and credentials in the legal establishment. Yet despite these lacunae, the larger fact remains that the conservative movement’s partial success has been no less consequential, because it has made visible the very contest over legal ideas and institutions. The liberal legal network can no longer operate as though its positions are the natural default of professional seriousness. It must argue for them, defend them, compete for the allegiance of young lawyers who now have an alternative. The liberal legal movement too has failed to make inroads into new institutional terrain, precisely because of the effectiveness of conservative organisational mobilisation. The transformation of American law from a monopoly into a contested field is, in Teles’ assessment, the movement’s most consequential achievement.

The Left’s Capture of India’s Legal Institutions

Why are lessons from the American conservative legal movement relevant for India? In India, legal academia, rights-based advocacy groups, advocates and judges, who were or are aligned with the Left, have been developing and promoting a jurisprudence broadly aligned with Marxist, socialist, Gramscian frameworks. The frameworks are so deeply entrenched in the institutions that curricula in legal academia, PILs, and judgments make it glaringly apparent. This warrants a detailed exposition as to why they did it, how they did it, and who did it.

To understand the ‘why’ framework, it is essential to go back to the theory of cultural hegemony, developed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. He believed that the ruling class is dominant because it uses social institutions in society to spread its ideology, and due to which norms, beliefs, and values of the ruling class become the dominant ideology of the Society. Therefore, social institutions in the form of universities, courts, and media play key roles in spreading the ideology of the ruling class. How then could this be challenged if the working class were ever to challenge the ruling class and become the dominant force in society? He adopted two strategic concepts, namely the war of manoeuvre and the war of position. Both are fundamentally different concepts but are aimed at one objective: the overthrow of the ruling class. The war of manoeuvre is a rapid, direct, and sudden insurrection aimed at seizing state power, while the war of position is a prolonged ideological and cultural struggle aimed at ideological dominance by reshaping societal norms and beliefs with the help of social institutions and civil society. Gramsci realised that the war of manoeuvre cannot succeed in modern societies because social institutions and civil societies manufacture consent, and until and unless these institutions are captured and used for manufacturing Marxist ideas and consent, they can never become a dominant force and seize power. This means slowly embedding their own values and norms in society, shifting public opinion, changing societal institutions, and ultimately winning the war of position.

The war of position became a dominant strategy of the Left across the world, and India was not an exception. The strategy not only shifted in terms of means but also in identifying and exploiting fault lines existing in a modern society. They widened their scope from class to bring other micro identities into their fold and roll out their plan for winning the war of position. The Left in India identified many fault lines, from caste and class to gender and religion, and there was no better means than law to exploit the fault lines. This is where the ‘how’ framework of the Left comes in. The three fundamental pillars on which the ‘how’ framework of the Left rests are legal literature, people who contribute to intellectual banks, and institutions which sustain the legal literature and people who carry them. The whole strategy is broadly based on identifying, exploiting, and deepening the fault lines in Indian society by integrating them into legal institutions. Universities, civil society, advocates and judges become dominant players for ideological entrenchment. Expansive interpretation of fundamental rights, use of PILs in matters of caste, class, gender, religion, tribals and environment, cases against culture and traditions of Hindus, and petitions challenging national sovereignty and national unity have always frequently surfaced in legal curricula, agendas of civil society, advocates’ petitions and judgments of the judiciary.

The Left focussed on building an ecosystem which could simultaneously embrace and enhance the three pillars on which its ‘how’ framework rests, the framework which is also coterminous with the ‘who’ framework. And the ‘who’ framework encompasses the people who contribute to legal jurisprudence, advocates who contribute by filing petitions and PILs, judges who contribute through judgments, and civil society which contributes by amplifying the narratives and also acting as rights-based advocacy groups by filing cases. To begin with, the higher judiciary was never a neutral ground as judges with political backgrounds were appointed in both the high courts and the Supreme Court. The judiciary became an arena of crystallising the war of position that the Left always wanted. Several judges of high courts and the Supreme Court were appointed despite their political background or later joined politics. The list is long, as reported by Raju Ramachandran in ThePrint—Justice Bachu Jagannadhas, Justice Jeevan Lal Kapur, Justice KS Hegde, Justice VR Krishna Iyer, Justice PB Sawant, Justice S Ratnavel Pandian, Justice Aftab Alam, Justice V Gopala Gowda, Justice Baharul Islam, Justice VM Tarkunde, Justice Rajinder Sachar, Justice K Chandru—all were part of politics from the Left and their judgments, more or less, reflect the entrenchment of those very ideas.

Justice VR Krishna Iyer, considered to be one of the most respected jurists in India, served as the judge of both a high court and the Supreme Court. He, along with Justice PN Bhagwati, is credited with the evolution of PIL in India. But even before becoming a judge of the Kerala High Court in 1968, he began his political career as an independent Member of the Legislative Assembly of Madras from 1952 to 1956. He again contested as an independent candidate in 1956, but this time he was supported by the Communist Party of India, which also ultimately won the Kerala state legislative elections. As a result, he was appointed as Minister of Home, Law, Irrigation, and Power from 1957 to 1959 until the state government was suspended by the Central Government led by Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1948, he served in jail for one month for allegedly helping communists in their violent activities and also providing them hideouts to escape arrests from police authorities. When he was sworn in as a judge at the Kerala High Court, he publicly laid down his endeavour to become a judicial activist, a pledge that is well reflected in his subsequent judgments. In almost every judgment concerning workers vs industries, Iyer favoured workers because he inherently believed in an oppressor vs oppressed framework. Further, if the evolution of the PIL is evaluated in isolation, it would be categorised as a step meant to democratise access to justice for marginalised and disadvantaged groups. But for the Left, social institutions and civil society are not meant to operate in isolation to win the war of position. They are meant to work under institutional interoperability so that collective efforts could lead to their one unifying goal.

In the 1970s, when the PIL evolved under Justice VR Krishna Iyer and Justice PN Bhagwati, the objective was to relax locus standi and allow individuals or civil society organisations to approach constitutional courts on behalf of groups whose rights are allegedly infringed. This opened a floodgate for individuals, rights-based advocacy groups, and civil society organisations to file PILs to exploit the fault lines in Indian society. By saying this, the intention is not to imply that there have not been bona fide cases to invoke PILs in India, but the fact is that it has become a powerful tool or instrument to exploit and deepen the fault lines in Indian society.

Civil society organisations’ interference in matters concerning caste, gender, religion, vanvaasis, and environment through PILs has been a recurring case. For example, conversion, by force or by way of proselytisation, has been a concerning issue in India, and when state governments take decisive action to curb this by enacting anti-conversion laws, the constitutional courts are flooded with PILs to seek say over the laws. Similarly, the centuries-old practice of restricting the entry of women between the ages of 10 and 50 at the Sabarimala Temple to maintain the celibate nature of the deity Lord Ayyappa is transformed by civil society organisations into a legal struggle. An organisation named Indian Young Lawyers’ Association filed a PIL in 2006 to declare the practice archaic, discriminatory, and unconstitutional and simultaneously the narrative was amplified by the Left networks across institutions. When the Supreme Court declared the practice as unconstitutional in 2018, it was portrayed as a win against Hinduism and its so-called archaic culture and traditions. Similarly, there are a plethora of examples in which either an individual or a civil society organisation filed a petition or PIL to amplify the narratives and deepen the fault lines.

If judges, advocates and civil society organisations represent the visible face of the Left ecosystem, universities and legal curricula therein determine what future judges and advocates will think before they enter a courtroom and what narratives civil society organisations will amplify based on the jurisprudential framework. Out of the three pillars, legal academia is the most underrated yet the most impactful pillar on which the Left’s strategy rests. In Gramsci’s framework, universities, as social institutions, occupy a central place in the war of position because they create an intellectual class that subsequently populates the other institutions and organisations. Constitutional jurisprudence in legal academia is viewed through the lens of transformative constitutionalism, constitutional morality, the Constitution as a living document, social justice, critical legal studies, and rights-based frameworks.

The foregoing discussion is not intended to suggest that every judgment expanding rights, every PIL, every intervention by a civil society organisation, or every research in legal academia is necessarily ideologically motivated. The larger point, however, is institutional rather than case-specific. Over several decades, sections of legal academia, rights-based advocacy groups, advocates, and judges succeeded in constructing an interconnected ecosystem with interoperability which is capable of producing scholars, mentoring lawyers, initiating strategic litigation, and gradually shaping constitutional discourse. It is precisely this long-term investment in ideas, people, and organisations that mirrors the phenomenon Teles describes in the American context. The more important question, therefore, is not merely how such an ecosystem emerged, but why no comparable legal-intellectual movement has taken shape on Indic nationalism despite its sustained electoral success and growing political influence. It is to this institutional asymmetry that the discussion now turns.

Where the Indic Nationalist Legal Movement Stands

A candid survey of the Indian landscape reveals how far the Indic nationalist legal movement is from possessing anything comparable in the domain of law. The gap is not primarily one of money or political will but of intellectual infrastructure, organisational coherence, and strategic clarity about what a distinct legal project of Indic nationalism would actually entail. The sections below trace this failure across multiple dimensions, including the absence of a jurisprudential school, weak presence in legal academia, the organisational limits of the movement’s primary legal body, the lack of a student pipeline, the consequent talent drain, the isolation of scholars who might otherwise anchor an intellectual programme, and the absence of long-term institutional philanthropy. Yet these are not independent failures. They stem from the same underlying problem, namely the Indic nationalist’s persistent preference for political mobilisation over the construction of intellectual infrastructure. While they have invested heavily in electoral competition and mass agitation, they have largely neglected the slower, less visible work of building the legal research centres, journals, scholarship and fellowship networks, and talent pipelines through which legal movements acquire coherence, doctrinal depth, and durable influence.

At the most elementary level, Indic nationalism’s deficit is jurisprudential, as it possesses no school of jurisprudence. The American conservative legal movement, whatever its internal disagreements, was animated by a set of interconnected jurisprudential commitments (originalism, textualism, scepticism of judicial policymaking) that gave its litigation coherence and its scholarship direction. The Indic nationalists possess no equivalent. There is no theory of constitutional interpretation, no sustained body of scholarship articulating how courts ought to reason, or what relationship ought to obtain between the state, religious institutions, and civil society under the Indian Constitution, or what ought to be the limits of freedom and rights. This is not because the intellectual raw materials are absent. On the contrary, the Indian constitutional tradition is rich with unresolved tensions (between fundamental rights and directive principles, between the reformist ambitions of Part III and the group-differentiated accommodations of Articles 25–30, between parliamentary sovereignty and judicial supremacy) that a sophisticated Indic jurisprudence could productively engage.

It is not the case that no organisational infrastructure exists. The Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad (ABAP), founded in 1992 under the intellectual patronage of Dattopant Thengadi, has grown into what is by some measures the largest lawyers’ organisation in the country, with a presence in every state and union territory, study circles operating at court complexes across the country, and national conferences drawing thousands of advocates. Its founding vision was ambitious, with Thengadi speaking of a complete reimagining of the legal system in accordance with Indian tradition and philosophy and envisioning the Parishad as ‘the nucleus of the Constituent Assembly of the resurgent Bharat’.

ABAP’s early patrons included legal luminaries such as Justice HR Khanna, Justice ES Venkataramiah, and Ram Jethmalani. The organisation publishes a quarterly journal, Nyayapravah, runs Nyaya Kendras (legal aid centres) for economically disadvantaged communities, and organises continuous education programmes for young advocates. Its members have risen to the bench (Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel had served as General Secretary of the Parishad before his appointment to the Supreme Court) and to politics; its alumni have been involved, in their individual capacities, in some of the most consequential litigation of the past three decades, from Ram Janmabhoomi to the Ram Setu case to litigation around Muslim reservations in various states.

The organisation has had a fulfilling run so far. However, there remains a challenge that the organisation may intend to take up. Its organisational model is that of a movement rather than an institution, remaining loosely knit, lacking formal membership registers, and refraining from filing cases in its own name. It functions, as its own members describe, as a nudge for free-thinking lawyers to take up a cause, a moral and ideological community rather than a litigation engine. This design has given it a remarkable geographical reach and a certain resilience, allowing it to operate in thousands of district and trial courts across the country, in spaces where the Indian legal Left has never had any presence at all. But it has also meant that its impact, while real, is diffuse rather than concentrated. It has not produced a body of scholarship, a coherent litigation strategy, or an intellectual programme comparable to what the Federalist Society achieved. Its activities (study circles, conferences, legal aid centres, the occasional PILs) are valuable as community-building and as professional socialisation, but they do not amount to the kind of sustained, academically credentialed intellectual production that reshapes how law is taught, practised, and adjudicated at the highest levels. The Parishad has built a network; what should come next is a school of thought. And a network without a school of thought, as the American first-generation firms painfully discovered, is akin to a vehicle missing its steering wheel.

The organisational gap extends to the law schools as well. Part of the explanation lies in the movement’s relationship to the legal academy. The Federalist Society’s signal innovation was to embed itself in elite law schools from the very beginning, treating the formation of conservative law students as its primary mission and treating the academy as the terrain on which the intellectual battle had to be won. Indic nationalism has no equivalent operation among law students. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has a campus presence through Think India, which conducts programmes that occasionally touch on legal questions. Their work is broad, entailing student welfare, campus politics, national service, and cultural programming. This breadth, while valuable in its own right, means that it cannot perform the function of concentrated legal-intellectual formation that the Federalist Society performed. A student chapter of Think India at a National Law University may organise cultural events and political discussions of a general nature, but it does not equip them with intellectual vigour, to argue constitutional cases, and also does not expose them to the best counterarguments against their own positions. There is, quite simply, no organisation in India that identifies ideologically sympathetic law students at the National Law Universities (NLUs), central universities, state universities or even private universities, develops their thinking through sustained adversarial debate with the best available counterarguments, connects them to senior advocates and judges willing to mentor them, and channels them into positions where they can shape legal doctrine. That organisation does not exist because it has not been conceived as a distinct project, separate from general student politics. The Federalist Society’s founders understood that they were building something categorically different from a student political organisation; the Indic nationalists have not yet grasped this distinction. In India, the movement cannot be limited to elite law schools in the form of NLUs because there are not many, and given the breadth of the country, it would require both quantity and quality of law students who can sustain the movement.

The absence of such a pipeline produces a predictable talent drain. India’s National Law Universities, the primary feeders for elite legal careers, are dominated by liberal and left-of-centre intellectual culture. The flagship student journals the National Law School of India Review and the NALSAR Student Law Review reflect and reinforce this orientation, with their pages dominated by their talking points. No equivalent Indic counterweight exists in print. The institutional infrastructure of the campuses confirms the same picture. The National Law School of India University (NLSIU) hosts a Centre for Environmental Law, Education, Research and Advocacy (CEERA) established in 1997, a Centre for Women and the Law established at the school’s founding in 1988, a Centre for Child and the Law, and a Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy. Student societies follow the same pattern with NLSIU’s Society for Non-Human Persons advocating for animal rights and engaging with the Animal Law Centre; NLU Odisha runs Friends Beyond Species, a society for animal and environmental welfare, alongside an Ambedkar Study Circle devoted to caste-based discrimination. Human rights law clinics, refugee law programmes and gender justice committees are standard across the NLU system and private law colleges as well. Nothing wrong with them, but the cumulative effect is an intellectual environment in which certain questions are institutionally nurtured, and others, cornered. A student who arrives at an NLU sympathetic to the discourse of Indic cause, religious institutional autonomy, or scepticism of judicial policymaking will find no society, no journal, no research centre, and no senior faculty member whose work affirms and develops those instincts. The field has been set, and it has been set in one direction. The ABVP and Think India have networks that can connect them with sympathetic judges or senior advocates, and this has to translate into a dedicated career network infrastructure. Further, there is a need of dedicated fellowship programmes that can offset the opportunity cost of choosing public-interest work over corporate practice. The result is the same talent drain that Horowitz identified in 1980s America. The brightest young lawyers sympathetic to Indic nationalism are absorbed into corporate practice, where their ideological commitments are largely economically irrelevant, while the small number who pursue public-spirited legal work often do so largely without institutional support, professional networks, or an intellectual community. Finally, the scholars who might otherwise anchor a more coherent intellectual programme are without the institutional support that would amplify their work. There are a handful of scholars in constitutional law, legal history, and the emerging field of law and religion whose work engages productively with questions that Indic nationalism cares about. But they operate largely in isolation, without the networked support structure that would amplify their influence, connect them to young lawyers, or translate their scholarship into litigation strategy. They are not embedded in an institutional ecosystem and are effectively individual entrepreneurs working without a market.

The result is predictable. The Indic nationalists are yet to produce their Horowitz Report, or more precisely, they are yet to cultivate the institutional maturity required to commission one, circulate it honestly, and act on its findings, and until they do, they will continue to win elections while losing the institutions that determine what those victories actually mean.

What is to be done?

Teles’ book is a study in the relationship between ideas and power. Its central argument is that institutional transformation in a complex democracy cannot be achieved by electoral victories, litigation strategies, or organisational innovations alone. It requires all of these, but in a specific sequence, with ideas in the lead, followed by the people who carry them and the institutions that sustain and reproduce both. The conservative legal movement in the US succeeded because its most effective leaders understood that the real contest was not in the courtroom or the Senate but in the seminar room and the law review, that the lawyers who would argue the cases and the judges who would decide them had to be formed before the cases could be won.

For the Indic nationalists, the implications are uncomfortable but clear. The movement’s legal predicament is not primarily a problem of hostile judges or biased institutions, though both exist. It is a problem of intellectual underinvestment, sustained over decades. If Teles’ narrative offers any lesson, it is that correcting this will require something more disciplined than enthusiasm and something more patient than a single electoral cycle.

The first, and perhaps the most fundamental, is developing a distinctly Indian jurisprudential framework of a modern sovereign nation-state. Before embarking on a new venture, the idea should be to find the gap first and not find ways to fill the gaps without knowing what the gaps are. ‘How’ framework must follow the ‘What’ framework and not vice versa. In the Indic nationalist’s legal project, the most foundational gap is conceptual before it is organisational: it has not articulated what a jurisprudence fit for a modern Indian nation-state would actually look like. The starting point must be the idea of the nation-state itself and clarity on non-negotiable baselines. Any framework on constitutional interpretation must proceed from the baselines that the Indic nationalists consider non-negotiable or uncompromising.

The right step should be to build that framework, theorise it with strong rigour to command engagement in the legal academia, and translate it into a doctrinal framework capable enough of guiding litigation and judicial decisions. This is the intellectual work that will serve as a foundation strong enough to help build and sustain the whole ecosystem.

The second fundamental aspect is long-term institutional philanthropy; finances deployed with strategic intent and subjected to rigorous evaluation. The Olin Foundation’s example is instructive not because of the quantum of its spending but because of the discipline with which it spent. It operated like a venture capitalist, not a charitable trust and actively sought out high-quality projects, held funded organisations accountable for results, defunded underperformers, and concentrated its resources on institutions where impact would be greatest. Indic nationalism needs patrons who are willing to commit to long-term institutional philanthropy in building legal-intellectual infrastructure over a generational timescale. Not sponsoring conferences or underwriting cultural events, but funding research programmes, fellowships for young scholars, and the slow, unglamorous work of building scholarly literature. This requires financiers who understand that the returns are measured in decades on such investments, and who are willing to stay the course through periods when nothing visible appears to be happening.

The third concerns institutional form. It would be a mistake to imagine that the Federalist Society can simply be transplanted into Indian soil. The contexts in which the two operate are too different. The legal profession is organised differently, judges are appointed through a different process, the relationship between the bar and the academy has evolved along different lines, and the wider political environment presents its own opportunities and constraints. Any Indian equivalent would therefore have to be adapted to local conditions rather than copied wholesale. What is perhaps more promising is something closer in spirit to a Think India-style effort, but focussed exclusively on law schools and on the formation of law students with intellectual vigour who can later assume a larger role in the ecosystem. Such an organisation would not need to replicate the Federalist Society’s entire architecture. What it would need to do is identify talented law students at the National Law Universities, which could eventually also be extended to central universities and premier state institutions and expose them to serious Indic legal thought through sustained adversarial debate, connect them to a mentorship network of senior advocates and judges, and create a professional community that outlasts any single cohort. The emphasis would have to be on intellectual excellence and rigorous jurisprudential thinking above all else, remaining far removed from campus politics and cultural programming, and anchored instead in the quality of legal argument. This is what distinguished the Federalist Society from every other conservative student organisation in America, and it is the distinction that matters most.

The fourth, and in some ways the most difficult, is the need for honest internal assessment from the very beginning. The Horowitz Report worked not because it was a brilliant document (though it was incisive) but because the movement’s patrons were willing to commission it, read it, and act on its findings even when those findings were devastating. Also, because they had a period of a decade or two to assess and find the gaps. The Indian parallel of the report should be the one that subjects the legal infrastructure aligned with the movement to a candid and unsentimental audit, asking hard questions about what has actually been achieved, what has failed, and the reasons for both.

This would require some combination of capable organisers, financiers, and members of the legal establishment currently associated with Indic nationalism to step forward and commission such an exercise, with the understanding that its findings would be circulated honestly among those who matter and implemented even where the conclusions are uncomfortable. Without this willingness to confront failure, no amount of money or organisational energy will produce results. The American experience is unambiguous on this point, with the movement’s most consequential turning point being not the founding of the Federalist Society but the moment when its patrons chose honesty over self-congratulation.

The conservative legal movement in America was initiated to change the status quo, which eventually took roughly 30 years to move from the Horowitz Report to a Supreme Court majority shaped by Federalist Society alumni. Starting and sustaining a legal movement is not a cakewalk; it is a herculean task. In the US, it was a long march through the institutions, one characterised by patience, strategic discipline, and intellectual seriousness, and eventually sustained across cycles of both political defeat and political success. The Left in India built its ecosystem gradually over decades and currently has a significant edge over the Indic nationalists’, at least in terms of an ecosystem spanning across legal and social institutions, which are interconnected and function with interoperability. The Indic cause is not starting from nothing. It has electoral power, financial resources, a large network of practising lawyers, and a growing cohort of young people sympathetic to its broad aims. But there is no legal movement, and we are far from initiating any. What it lacks is the clarity and the intellectual architecture that would give the assets direction and coherence in India’s legal institutions. If the Indic nationalists actually intend to change the status quo, they need to seriously take into consideration the diagnosis and act on it. Indeed, building the intellectual ecosystem is the work of a generation, but as Teles’ account makes clear, it is work that cannot be deferred at any cost, because the institutions that are not contested today will be the institutions that constrain tomorrow.