Minoo Masani Was the Quintessential Dissenter

This article is part of a series by The Wire titled ‘The Early Parliamentarians’, exploring the lives and work of post-independence MPs who have largely been forgotten. The series looks at the institutions they helped create, the enduring ideas they left behind and the contributions they made to nation building.

Popularly known as Minoo Masani, Minocher Rustom Masani, was a great freedom fighter, lawyer, journalist, writer, diplomat and a distinguished parliamentarian.

Son of Sir Rustom P. Masani, Minoo was born at Bombay, on November 20, 1905. By 1930, he had been educated at the Cathedral High School, the Bharda New High School, the Elphinstone College, the London School of Economics, and Lincoln's Inn. He was a Bachelor of Arts, an LLB and a bar-at-law. 

A barrister trained in London, Masani came back to India and started legal practice at the Bombay courts. After a few days he gave up practice and joined the Indian freedom movement as a member of the Indian National Congress in 1932. He was a member of the All India Congress Committee and Bombay Provincial Congress Committee for several years and participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement. He was jailed multiple times during 1932 to 39, and again for similar activities in 1943, by the British government. 

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Minoo Masani was instrumental in founding the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) within the Congress party. He was also joint secretary of the All India Congress Socialist Party between 1934 and 1939 and was member of its national executive. 

At a young age, Masani was an ardent follower of communist leaders of the Soviet Union but the brutality of Stalin compelled him to change his views. He started opposing communism and refused to accept communist members in the Congress Socialist Party. Masani did not succeed in persuading party members in this matter and walked out of the Congress Socialist Party along with Rammanohar Lohia, Achyut Patwardhan and Asoka Mehta. Later, communist members were indeed excluded from the party.

During this time, Masani wrote the famous article ‘Socialism Reconsidered’ opposing the Marxist doctrine. After that he plunged into the ‘Quit India' Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and left his job at the Tata Company. He was imprisoned in Nasik jail where he came into close contact with other great Congress leaders.

As parliamentarian

Masani was councillor in the Bombay Municipal Corporation form 1935 to 1945, and the mayor of Bombay from 1943 to 1944. He was a member of the Central Legislative Assembly from 1945 to 1947, the Constituent Assembly from 1946 to 1948, and the provisional parliament from 1950 to 1952. Masani contributed a lot towards the drafting of the constitution of India. He was also a member of the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee and Union-Powers Committee.

In 1957, Masani was elected as the member of the Lok Sabha from Ranchi in Bihar, on the symbol of the then Jharkhand Party. As a member of Lok Sabha, he gave full effort to bring forth a mixed economy and tried hard to resist socialist policies.

In 1959, he accompanied C. Rajagopalachari to found the right wing Swatantra Party. He was general secretary of the party, and member of its executive committee. As general secretary, Masani used his organising capabilities to the hilt. In the 1967 election, the party got 44 seats in the Lok Sabha as the single largest opposition party. Swatantra Party also became the main opposition party in the Rajasthan and Gujarat state assemblies.

Masani was member of the second Lok Sabha from 1957 to 1962, the third Lok Sabha from 1963 to 1967 and fourth Lok Sabha from 1967 to 1971. He was also chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of the parliament. 

Masani was a noted parliamentarian with an extraordinary run from 1957 to 1971. As the leader of the opposition party and member of different committees appointed by the Lower House, he raised his voice when needed and delivered valuable speeches. Many of his crucial speeches in parliament were published under the title Congress Misrule and Swatantra Alternative.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

As leader of the single largest party in the opposition, he invariably opened the debate on the Finance Bill that follows the introduction of the Union Budget.

Masani kept a close watch on the attendance of members of his group and their behaviour. He firmly believed that occupying the opposition benches did not mean opposing for the sake of opposition. On many occasions he supported the ruling party but did not hesitate in going against all other groups in the house if an issue warranted such action.

In 1970, when Indira Gandhi’s popularity sidelined all parties, Swatantra Party also came to the verge of extinction. At that time, Masani resigned from the party and bid adieu to active politics.

In his later years, Masani started thinking about socialism in a different way. He propagated the idea of a mixed economy which was appropriate for Indian democracy and wrote articles reflecting his view.

Minoo was nominated by the government of India as representative of the United Nation's Sub-Commission for Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. Masani invited prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s wrath when he refused to turn a blind eye to the persecution of the minorities in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe. He was recalled and sent off in 1948 as India’s Ambassador to Brazil, a post he held till 1949. 

Those were the Cold War years when the Soviet Union sponsored front organisations to promote its interests worldwide. Several organisations were set up internationally to counter the Soviet challenge. One of these was the ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ based in Paris. 

In India, Masani, along with Jayaprakash Narayan, Asoka Mehta and A.D. Gorwala took the initiative in establishing the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) in 1950 and affiliated it to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. The ICCF was a non-party organisation and the members of this Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom were open-minded scholars, writers, artists and scientists who sought to defend intellectual liberty to cultivate a spirit of free enquiry and an appreciation of the arts.

Two years earlier (in 1948) he had founded, with the blessings and encouragement of the then deputy prime minister and home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Democratic Research Service to eradicate separatist ideology in India. The Service sought to educate public opinion on the dangers to India’s national independence posed by communists who were acting under instructions from the Comintern in Moscow and, in the early fifties, conducting a violent insurrectionary movement in Andhra Pradesh.

As editor of Freedom First which he had founded in 1952, Masani fought the censorship imposed during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and sought the court’s intervention against her censors in what came to be known as the Freedom First case. Though the court vindicated his stand he suspended publication as he found that there were too many impediments to his exercising editorial freedom.  Later, Freedom First began to be published as a quarterly and came to be regarded as an authentic voice for liberalism in India.

In 1978, when the Janata Party was elected to power, Masani was appointed chairman of the first Minorities Commission of India but he resigned soon afterwards over differences on principles and approach. 

Masani was honoured as a patron of the Liberal International. He was a secularist, though he disliked the word and preferred to call himself the more cumbersome ‘non-denominationalist’, and an uncompromising champion of individual liberty. 

Starting out as a friend and supporter of Nehru, he began to see in his later years the practical wisdom in Sardar Patel’s policies. Though he had retired from politics he continued to be active in public life and was a great supporter of individual liberty. 

In March 1968, he founded the Leslie Sawhny Programme of Training for Democracy to train young people in citizenship to be conscious of their rights and their duties as good citizens.

He founded the Society for the Right to Die with Dignity and was in the centre of a minor storm when he campaigned for passive euthanasia for the terminally ill. In 1985, he set up the Project for Economic Education in association with the Leslie Sawhny Programme and Professor B.R. Shenoy’s Economic Research Centre to educate public opinion on issues relating to the economy in general and the economic reform programme that began in the eighties, in particular.

Masani enjoyed a reputation as a man with a very high level of integrity in public life. This quality by itself was enough to disqualify him from being a ‘successful’ politician where success is measured in terms of ministerial positions or other similar patronage-wielding offices.

In 1981, Masani wrote his two-volume autobiography Against the Tide. He concluded his autobiography with this observation:

“Since our politicians are by and large beyond repair, if India is to be saved, it will have to be saved by the small man, particularly the middle class of the cities and the landed farmers of the countryside who are the backbone of the nation. These classes have suffered cruelly under the so-called ‘socialist pattern’ that Nehru imposed on the country and which is still rampant, but their back is still not broken. It is to these that I would look to save this country.” 

He was happiest when surrounded by young people. Not surprisingly his first and last books were meant for the young. The first was Our India, a bestseller and a prescribed textbook in schools even in pre-Independence India. The book was withdrawn from schools when he parted company with Nehru and the then establishment. His last book was its sequel We Indians. If optimism exuded every page of Our India, We Indians was a confession of failure and a plea to the young to avoid the mistakes of his generation.

In the concluding chapter of We Indians, he wrote:

“We of my generation have made such a mess of our country’s affairs that, in my opinion, we have no right to preach to young folks…”.

The quintessential dissenter, Masani passed away on May 27, 1998 at Bombay.

He was married to Shrimati Shakuntala Srivastava in 1946 and had one son, Zareer Masani.

Qurban Ali is a trilingual journalist who has covered some of modern India’s major political, social and economic developments. He has a keen interest in India’s freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the socialist movement in the country.

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