The Swatantra Party was a rainbow-like phenomenon in Indian politics: bright and beautiful; yet short lived. It represented different socio-economic classes, and interests across both business and agriculture. It had an elitist complexion, yet had large numbers of peasantry in its ranks.
The party played a conspicuous role in Indian politics from 1959 to 1974. It posed an ideological alternative to the dominant Congress party’s statism under the guise of a ‘socialistic pattern of society’. The Swatantra Party floated the idea of Gandhian liberalism, against the Congress’s Nehruvian socialism. Its leaders stood for occupational politics vis-a-vis identity politics in India. Here lies the everlasting relevance of the Swatantra Party in post-colonial India’s political experiments.
Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari, the patriarch of the Swatantra Party, unambiguously stated its classical liberal worldview: “The Swatantra Party stands for the protection of the individual citizen against the increasing trespasses of the State. It is an answer to the challenge of the so-called Socialism of the Indian Congress party. It is founded on the conviction that social justice and welfare can be attained through the fostering of individual interest and individual enterprise in all fields better than through State ownership and Government control…The Swatantra Party is founded on the claim that individual citizens should be free to hold their property and carry on their professions freely and through binding mutual agreements among themselves and that the State should assist and encourage in every possible way the individual in this freedom, but not seek to replace him.”
However, Rajaji and the Swatantra Party never succumbed to materialism. He said, “The loosing of the religious impulse is the worst of the disservice rendered by the Congress to the nation. We must organise a new force and movement to replace the greed and the class hatred of Congress materialism with renovated spiritual outlook emphasising the restrictions of good conduct as greater importance than triumph of organised covetousness” (quoted by Howard Erdman in The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism, 1967).
Also read: Where the Linear Progression of Hindutva Will Take India
The Swatantra Party emerged as the major voice of the opposition in the Lok Sabha after the fourth general elections of 1967, when it won 44 seats. It successfully formed a coalition government in Orissa and made its presence felt in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. But, after the split in the Congress in 1969, the Congress (O) consolidated the rightist votes under its fold. This development fatally affected the social base of the Swatantra Party. Subsequently, the party merged with the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the BLD eventually merged to form the Janata Party. Dr V.P. Rasam opines that the policies and programmes of the Janata Party were considerably influenced by the ideology of the Swatantra Party (Swatantra Party: A Political Biography, 1997). The fall of communism and the Soviet Union, and liberalisation of the Indian economy, aptly vindicated the Swatantra Party’s ideology.
The spark that led to the formation of the Swatantra Party in 1959 was galloping statism under Nehru’s regime. In the Avadi session of the All India Congress Committee, the Congress set the establishment of the socialistic pattern of society as its ultimate objective. Rajaji accused Nehru of leading the country towards statism and consequent totalitarianism. At the Nagpur session (1959), the Congress resolved to implement the policy of joint cooperative farming. The Nagpur Resolution resulted in snowballing the movement for the establishment of a liberal party, committed to individual freedom and free enterprises. The middle class was sandwiched between high taxation and inflation. The business class was fed up with the licence-permit raj.
Two organisations – the Forum for Free Enterprise and the All India Agriculturalists Federation – played pivotal roles in the formation of the Swatantra Party. Professor N.G. Ranga was chosen as the party’s first president because he was primarily a peasants’ leader. Rajaji declared in the preparatory convention held in Bombay on June 4, 1959 that the party is inaugurated against the misconceived progress of the Congress toward the suppression of individual liberty and development of the state into a true ‘Leviathan’.
The Swatantra ideology was based on the principle of ‘maximum freedom and minimum government’. The party stood for competitive free enterprise, according to which an individual would be free to produce whatever he wants, to sink his capital in it and take his chance of making profit or loss. Minoo Masani, the main economic ideologue of the party, called this ‘economic democracy’. The party was strongly anti-statist. It opposed Soviet type-centralised planning, and Ranga stood for Gandhian planning. The party held the doctrine of trusteeship as its moral principle. Secularism was another anchoring ideal of the party. Rasam states that it was the only party which provided ample representation to the minorities in the legislatures.
Also read: Farmers’ Protest: Agriculture Expert Devinder Sharma Answers Frequently Asked Questions
The ongoing farmers’ strike against the new farm laws inspires déjà vu of the Nagpur Resolution of 1959. Then, Nehru’s leadership was taking the country towards a form of totalitarian socialism of the Soviet type, rather than towards a Western European model of democratic socialism. Today’s India, under the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah regime, is taking a totalitarian statist turn and adhering to ruthless crony capitalism. The Swatantra Party was a viable model of occupational politics vis-à-vis identity politics based on religion, region and caste. Had the Swatantra Party survived the tides of time, it could have closed the room for the rise of communal politics in the last decades of 20th–century Indian politics.
Statism is transgressing into individual’s rights of personal liberty and privacy, and freedom of choice. Anti-beef and anti-‘love jihad’ legislations amply demonstrate the totalitarian turn of the Indian state. The farm Acts have exposed the ruling regime’s shameless tendency to favour crony capitalists at the cost of farmers. “Anyone who thinks he can persuade the peasants of India to give up their land and become serfs again for a super-zamindari …is living in a fool’s paradise,” said Minoo Masani on joint cooperative farming.
This statement is true about the farm Acts too. The agrarian class and small industries need a liberal party transcending religious, regional and caste identities in present-day India. The Swatantra ideology is searching for a concrete political organisation, and the farmers’ strike underscores this truth.
Faisal C.K. is an independent researcher.
