A French seating chart, a 40°C summer, and a tuxedo nobody asked for.
It all started with chairs
Rewind to the summer of 1789. France is in full revolution mode, and the National Assembly meets to write a constitution. The big fight is over how much power the king should keep. Those who wanted the king to keep his veto sat to the right of the Assembly's president. Those who wanted to clip his wings sat to the left.
That's it. A seating arrangement. Nobody planned a global ideology; somebody just needed to count votes faster.
One baron even complained that he tried sitting in different spots to keep an open mind, but sitting on the "wrong" side meant voting alone and getting jeered from the galleries. Peer pressure, 18th-century edition. Within a few decades, left and right had become shorthand for progressive versus traditional, and the rest of the world happily copied it.
French toast, Indian style
Think of French toast. In France, they call it pain perdu, "lost bread", a way to rescue yesterday's stale loaf. What you get at a Mumbai café, with masala and green chutney on the side, is something else entirely. The name travelled; the dish became ours.
Left and right came to India the same way. We imported a European concept and tried to make our parties wear it. A left-right tuxedo, tailored in Paris, worn in an Indian summer at 40°C. It fits in some places, pinches in others, and everyone is sweating.
Now, it is considered risky to name a specific party in such discussions. So let me start with the BJP.
The Right: proudly right about being right
The BJP is perhaps the only party in India that takes being right as the right thing to do. Its true devotees don't wear the "right wing" label reluctantly; they wear it like a medal. And if you believe in jevi praja tevo raja (as the people, so the king), then close to 40% of Indians, legitimately, by vote, have endorsed the right. And I am not even counting the good old Shiv Sena and the rest of the saffron extended family.
Look a little deeper and the recipe has a few clear ingredients. Nationalism, served first. Unapologetic support for Hindu identity, never hidden under the table. And then, borrowed from the American right, a strong economic theme: development, infrastructure, growth. Sabka saath, sabka vikas is the slogan; critics will tell you the fine print reads apna vikas. Big industry likes it. Dalal Street likes it. The Sensex has its own opinion and rarely hides it.
But here's the most interesting bit. When you catch a BJP supporter saying or doing something that's extreme even by right-wing standards, don't expect a U-turn. He (or she) will own it. They'll defend it, with complete sincerity, and explain exactly why it is right to be on the right. You may disagree with every word, but you can't call it confusion. There's a strange kind of honesty in that.
The Left: whatever is left
The left in India is more complicated than most people think. On most days, the definition is simple: whatever is left after the right is the left. Don't support the BJP? Congratulations, you've been seated on the left. Nobody asked you, nobody gave you a membership card, but the chair already has your name on it. Strange.
Then there's the classical left, CPI(M) and CPI, who actually know their address and will happily confirm it. Red flag, hammer and sickle, trade unions, the works. Their seat in that 1789 hall would be clearly marked.
After them come the newer crowd: AAP, and now Vijay trying his luck in Tamil Nadu. They run on welfare, freebies and the common man, but refuse to wear any badge. Welfare-heavy, label-free. Then there's Trinamool, a curious case: a party that rose in Bengal by fighting the communists, yet runs on schemes and subsidies that would make many leftists proud. It gets seated on the left simply because it won't share a bench with the right. Add to this the regional and caste-based parties, whose real compass points to their state or their community, and who sit on the left side mostly because the right side is already full.
Congress: the centre of its own confusion
You've been waiting for your favourite. Here it is.
Congress sits in the centre, leaning left, and looks permanently unsure about which way it's leaning today. It walks very carefully, trying to appeal to everyone at once: religious and non-religious, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, veg, non-veg, youth, elders, every caste, every state, every language. It's the buffet that tries to serve every cuisine, and somehow ends up with nothing anyone specifically craves.
Pleasing everyone has a side effect. Every so often, something said or done turns out deeply unappealing, sometimes borderline offensive, to some section of society. Then comes the routine: read the room, course-correct, issue an explanation, launch a yatra. Bharat Jodo. And then back to the usual beat of attacking whoever is in power.
Congress also carries a heavier backpack than most. It has, by its own choice, pinned on a "morally superior" badge. The trouble with that badge is that every small slip doesn't look like a mistake; it looks like hypocrisy. The right can say "yes, I meant it." Congress has to say "that's not what we meant," and that's a much harder sentence to sell.
Then the results arrive, and Congress is surprised. Again. Because on the ground, its people meet 60 to 80% of folks who complain about the BJP. And yet those same folks don't vote for Congress. Somebody needs to tell them, gently: me hating my ex doesn't mean I'll automatically fall in love with you. Bhai, mehnat karo. Work hard.
Wait, where do the liberals sit?
Just when you think you've figured out the seating chart, someone on prime time calls someone a "libtard", and the other side fires back with "andh bhakt". So where do liberals fit in this hall?
Strictly speaking, they're on a different scale. Left versus right is mostly about money: how much the state should tax, spend and redistribute. Liberal versus conservative is about society. A liberal values individual rights, free speech and the freedom to question tradition. A conservative values faith, family, tradition and order, and prefers change slowly, in measured doses.
The two scales overlap, but they are not the same. And the word "liberal" changes with its passport. In America, liberal means left. In Europe and Australia, a liberal is often pro-market, closer to the right. In India, it has become a catch-all for anyone secular, English-speaking and unhappy with the BJP, and online it's used more as an insult than a description.
The fun part is that plenty of Indians are both at once. Pro-business and pro-temple. Pro-welfare and very particular about whom the daughter marries. Liberal in the office, conservative at the dinner table. Which is exactly why one left-right line, borrowed from a French hall, keeps snapping under the weight.
So, who's right?
Here's something to chew on after all that masala. The 1789 seating chart was almost accidental; historians say it could easily have gone the other way round. Two centuries later, we still use it to decide who is good, who is bad, who is moral, and who is anti-national. And research on political bias keeps finding the same uncomfortable thing: people on both sides are about equally biased in favour of their own team. Each side is just very good at spotting it in the other.
Maybe the problem isn't left or right. Maybe it's the tuxedo. Indian politics runs on caste, region, language, religion, welfare and aspiration, all at once. That's a lot of axes for a hall with two sides. Perhaps it's time we stopped asking which side a party sits on, and started asking what it actually does once it gets the chair.
