Parv Tyagi, Shristy Chhaparia, and Vishwas Jha

In this episode of Arbitrary, Parv Tyagi (former Managing Editor, LSPR), Shristy Chhaparia (Editor, LSPR), and Vishwas Jha (Observer, LSPR) sit down with Aditya Balasubramanian to discuss his latest book ‘Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India’. 

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Parv:

Greetings to all our listeners! I am Parv and you are listening to Arbitrary, the flagship podcast of Law School Policy Review. I am joined by Shristy, Editor and Vishwas, Observer at Law School Policy Review.

We are delighted to have on our show today, Dr. Aditya Blasubramanian.

Aditya is a Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian National University. His research interests include the history of modern South and Southeast Asia, the intersection between environment and economy, and the history of economic thought. Aditya completed his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge as a British Marshall Scholar and a Cambridge Trust Scholar.  His first book, Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India, tells the story of Swatantra Party, India’s first and only pro-market and secular conservative party.

My first question is – why the book and what gap in the literature does it seek to fill?

Aditya:

Thank you for that question. The book seeks to fill a couple of lacunae. The first, broadly speaking, is that the history of India after 1947 is neglected, especially when we compare it to the rather well-established history of colonial India. And we also have a paucity of interest in the kinds of questions that are outside of what are known as three P’s: planning, policy, and partition. If we look at the histories of independent India, traditionally we have works on these three topics. Mine is a book that is about the critics of the state, it tries to recast the Nehruvian era as a period of contestation rather than consensus. And it is about both the regions as well as the nation, particularly southern and western India. So, from the perspective of South Asian Studies, that’s what it’s trying to add – helping us better understand this black box that is the Nehruvian period, that exerts a profound influence—notwithstanding certain attempts to erase that influence—on the way in which the independent Indian nation works even today.

The second motivation is to think about the history of neoliberalism in a new way. So this is not straightforwardly a book about neoliberalism, as I try to show. But what it does is to try to ask us this question of how do we understand the longer history of a market turn in a society like India, which, for all our conversation about mixed economy, planning, socialism, etc. even in the heyday of the Nehruvian era, government spending  was 15% of GDP. Government spending  in America is on average 25% throughout the 20th century. So most Indians have actually always engaged in informal private activity. So that’s one thing, to think about this, from the perspective that you had a longer-term history of dominance of private activity in economic affairs, and also a set of ideas relating to alternatives to statist economic policy. And what that means then for the history of neoliberalism is that the narrative that 1991 is when everything changes, is one that of course, has a kernel of truth to it, but is one that is seriously misleading if we think about a major rupture. And it also contests our characterization of the history of neoliberalism as something that diffuses from the minds of Western economists captured institutions like the IMF and World Bank, who then exert pressure on countries like India to change their policy, and then capture ideologically, the policy wisdom. Rather, what I’m trying to show is that actually, if we look at it from the perspective of these nations themselves, we have certain points of intersection with mainstream neoliberal theory much earlier. But really, these are actors who are selectively picking up and appropriating things as per their own interests and their own knowledge. And what you have is a story of regional political economy that intersects at some ways but also diverges quite meaningfully. And then the wider implication is, well, you could probably think that a similar thing is happening in various other parts of the world. So for example, it’s not just the policymakers in Chile, who are important, but it is your shopkeepers, your artisans, your social constituencies, who are basically politically mobilizing, but also maintaining some kind of consensus around these sorts of policies. So that’s broadly what the book is seeking to do.

Shristy:

Thank you for that answer. The second question is more about the methodology of the Book. So my question is, how did you begin the project? How did you go about researching, and given the paucity of literature on the subject, what was archival research like for you?

Aditya:

Yeah, thank you. So there are a number of things that happened that were quite fortuitous, in the process of researching this book. This originally was an undergraduate project. So there is hope for all of you bright NLS students, that the work that you do now may carry on through to when you’re old like me, and you will continue to be with it, or you’ll become boring depending on how you look at it. But it started as an undergraduate project that was interested in Indian economic policy in the 1950s. And specifically through the figure of John Kenneth Galbraith, who had worked as a consultant for the Planning Commission. But despite being a well-known Keynesian economist, he wrote to Milton Friedman, that if there’s a single country in which your ideas would benefit from greater take up, it would be India. Now, I find that quote surprising. And I also learnt that he later became the ambassador to India. And as an ABCD, myself, this was something that was quite interesting to me, which is America’s connections to independent India. Particularly, in this period of the 50s and 60s, which I had learnt a little bit about, from personal anecdotes, from my father’s generation of people about how life was quite different then. So I was curious about that. But once I got to the Galbraith papers in Boston, what I realized was that there was actually a vibrant critique of Indian economic planning and policy that was coming from India itself, which is not that well known about. And so that’s kind of what led me to this project, away from the domain of formal economists, away from the America-India connection, although there is a dimension of the Cold War between India and the US to explore.

Now, in terms of methodologies. So yeah, I would say that the way I pursued this is – to kind of be guided by the question, which of course, then evolves as time goes on. So I was interested  in learning more about the Swatantra Party, the sets of ideas of a free economy that are driving this party’s ideological agenda, its social bases, and its ideas about democracy and efforts toward promoting democracy, although not for progressive ends. Now, where can I find information – that’s kind of what set me on my path. And the first port of call was probably the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi, which has the private papers of C Rajagopalachari, which after Gandhi and Nehru are the biggest private collection. Apart from that there were other figures in the party, Minoo Masani, NG Ranga, etc., whose papers were also available, but much smaller collections. There was a major donation of the Swatantra Party papers in 2018, which after I finished the PhD, I spent a good time looking at. And then there was also a large archive of print culture. So it’s not just the Swatantra Party’s own newsletter, which appeared in various libraries mainly in the United States, because of these PL 480 Counterparty funds that were spent to purchase things from Indian libraries in those days, a set of newspapers and magazines that were quite vibrant then, but have since been forgotten, which were pro America, anti Congress, anti communist, etc. So I looked at those pretty extensively, particularly those of a magazine called The Indian Libertarian, and its predecessor, the Free Economic Review. And through those journals, I also found certain kinds of books that people who were attached to these organizations had written. And so I’d say that the source base is a mixture of these kinds of things and attached to that are, of course, archival fragments of people in the United States, the UK, etc. who were in conversation with my protagonists. And finally, we have all kinds of ephemera, right. There’s a gramophone recording from a museum of the Swatantra Party from 1962. There’s a video from Reuters archive, you know, there are autobiographies that are written by party leaders. So bringing those things together.

And so I would say that it’s been, not so much a methodology, insofar as it is just trying to get whatever you can. But in terms of the frame through which I analyze it, and I think here is a methodological point, is to think about these protagonists, as informal actors, and looking at each of these texts in a deeply contextualized fashion, as something that is trying to do a particular kind of political work as much as it is trying to articulate a kind of idea and paying attention to the political lives of these people in order to do that, in addition to the social and economic context from which they emerge. To better understand what they mean when they say something like peasant or whatever that is.

Parv:

We will now dive into the content of the book. Swatantra is understood in popular discourse as an unabashed champion of free market economics in India. However, you point out a greater nuance in the party’s thinking on the subject. You state “Swatantra was intended as a corrective for the excesses of the state pushing the economy away from its agrarian roots rather than an appeal to open all economic activity to market competition.” Rajaji, you point out, did not endorse abolishing import licenses altogether or letting market forces determine the exchange rate. He also recommended spending on a nationwide road making and housing plan to achieve fuller employment – a rather Keynesian advice. He also appears to be saying many things by not saying anything – he seems to have said nothing about free trade versus protectionism : a subject that did not escape commentary by any serious libertarian of that day. My question is – was this moderation academically thought through or did it arise out of the political necessity of forging coalitions of multiple interests or is it part of the global Keynesian consensus which even liberals were never able to break free from until the late 1980s?

Aditya:

Right, that’s a very good question. So that particular example that I gave in the book about Rajagopalachari’s advice about a nation wide road building program comes from a point of trying to articulate that in his political speech, Rajagopalachari is a slightly different Rajagopalachari than in his private correspondence. And that letter is actually to Lal Bahadur Shastri, when he is the prime minister. So in other words, the point is that, when the cameras are on me, and I am your opponent, I say a certain set of things. But in the backroom discussion, when we are out for a drink afterwards—a non-alcoholic one for Rajagopalachari—we could have a different sort of conversation. Now, I think what this articulates, particularly the nationwide road building program, is not that this is necessarily inimical to free markets, because we can actually think about this as providing the infrastructure for markets to operate in a certain way. I mean, if you have better roads and infrastructure, yes, on the one hand, it is Keynesian in that it is promoting public sector employment, and it’s going to increase, let’s say, possibly a deficit. But at the same time, it makes labor flow happen more quickly, allows movement of goods and services to take place in a more efficient manner. So we need not see that as completely inimical.

Having said that, what I think is that the silences on questions like free trade and free v. floating exchange rates, etc. is, because there are differences between party members like an NG Ranga who is not an unabashed free trader in the same way that a Minoo masani is. And so when you have diversity within the party, certain things that are not a common denominator, you kind of keep silent on them, or make a common minimum commitment, and then you know, as Morarji Desai says, disparagingly, about Swatantra, that the members are Swatantra to do whatever they wanted. But at the same time, it has to be stressed that these are informal thinkers. So, the systematic kind of point about every aspect of macroeconomic policy that a sophisticated economic theorist would take up is not really something that somebody like Masani or Bhaikaka Patel, who I discuss in the book, would say. If I am interested in regional political economy, and I am interested in making sure that the environment for small business is more favorable, I don’t necessarily need to be particularly concerned about some of the other dimensions of economic policy that Delhi is dealing with.

Parv:

Swatantra was also a deeply divided house. The party marked the coming together of, among others, disgruntled ex princes, ex zamindars, ex diwans, and retired Indian Civil Service officers, many of whom shared a kind of political nostalgia. They didn’t have much interest in the new Nehruvian style political order of the day. Some of them in fact had an anti-politics approach to public administration, questioning the very wisdom of universal franchise. However, there were, in addition to these ex royal administrators, those who were more open to embracing social and political change – Kammas, Reddys, Patidars, and urban dwelling mercantile communities like Parsis, for example. How were these competing conceptions and ideas debated and negotiated within the party? No doubt, the Congress too was an amalgam of multiple competing interests but it eventually galvanized around a towering leader: first Nehru and later Indira. No similar towering leader took charge of Swatantra and political power always remained dispersed in the party.

Aditya:

I think one has to think about a couple of things. The first is that the vote bank story of the Swatantra party and the story that I am interested in, which is the ideas and where they’re coming from, in terms of the social and economic bases, are two different points. So in a sense, a free market group can never come to power on its own. And I think this ties into something else, some of the other things that we can talk about today, with respect to the popular appeal of the party. So whether in the United States, when you know, Reagan strikes in lines with religious conservatives, or in Britain with social conservatives and Thatcher, or, you know, I suppose with Bolsonaro and again, not the set of religious or social conservatives – this is to get legs, so to speak, you need to move beyond that small group of of pro market constituents. So in one sense, Swatantra, does that, they are allied with these feudal zamindars, maharajahs, etc. and those are the ones who deliver the vote banks. And it’s kind of interesting that the vote banks are delivered in places like Bihar and in Rajasthan, etc., not the places where the ideas are coming from.

That leads us to a second point, which is that ideologically, actually, the people who are shaping the party agenda, and the people who are producing the literature for consumption by the masses – not always very successful, in a sense because the categories of the literature that were produced are still for the literate type of people and popular mobilization doesn’t really target the masses in the ways that it could have – are very different from the people who are actually winning seats at election time. So in a sense, there isn’t a contradiction. Those people are just looking for a house to be a part of electorally, they’re not necessarily that invested in any kind of ideological movement. So that’s a point that I think is worth stressing. But I think the other point that’s worth thinking through is that yes, on the one hand, Swatantra doesn’t throw up a charismatic leader. But where the Swatantra leadership is aligned, or at least the important people, is that they all have a certain kind of unitary nationalism, from the freedom movement from which they come and they have certain kind of allegiance to Gandhi. Now, of course, there are many different types of Gandhians, right? These are very different types of Gandhians than let’s say, your JC Kumarappa, or the sort of Gandhian economists. But I think this is a kind of weak glue that holds them together. But you’re right, it’s really not the same as a Nehru or an Indira and Rajagopalachari is never a mass politician, whereas those two clearly are, so that also accounts for the the fact that there’s a glue that temporarily holds them together and then splits them apart as well.

Parv:

You describe Swatantra as India’s first secular conservative party. Do you think that its secularism was one of the reasons of its demise? Its critique only of Nehruvian economic policy, without combining it with a parallel cultural and social critique of the Nehruvian political order arguably limited its appeal to educated Indians. It evoked reason, not emotion, and the former is seldom the organizing principle of successful political parties. What are your thoughts?

Separately, what prevented a possible alliance or kinship between the Hindu revivalists and libertarians in your view? At least my view is that Hindu revivalists are essentially non-conservatives. Their politics is radical and resurrectionary and therefore, incompatible with the Burkean gradualism that characterizes much of  western conservatism. For that reason, while libertarians could ally with conservatives in the west, they could not ally with Hindu revivalists – the differences between them and the Hindu revivalists were just very fundamental.

Aditya:

I would say we have to think carefully about the usage of the term secular, in that at the end of the day Swatantra ends up being a majority Hindu party. It comprises in the majority of people of upper caste backgrounds. To the extent, there’s minorities, I’d say probably the most prominent are Parsees who in many ways are secularized, so to speak, being the business community and this kind of thing. So there is that, but what I would say is that Swatantra is non sectarian, in that it doesn’t have an explicitly religious, ideological stance. And what I said earlier, which is the sort of Gandhian inheritance of a number of the party top brass, is something that pushes them to embrace the sort of unity in diversity ideals of Gandhi. And that I think is distinct from the right that we have today. I’d also like to go into two points of divergence from the Hindu right when this free economy discourse is originally being threshed out. The first is that the Hindu right, as Jana Sangh was just getting started in the 1950s, is interested in Hindi as the national language for India. And secondly, there is, of course, the question of the ideology of Hindutva.

Now, the two differences are that, actually, the libertarians believed that English is the lingua franca, and that then you should speak your regional language. So, that’s a point of divergence. The second major point is that rather than the ideology of Hindutva, the ideology here is one of free economy and a feeling among both the Gandhian element of the party that the vilification of minorities is counterproductive. And then those who are maybe not Gandhian, but still find that this is a rather irrational kind of constructed past that you’re trying to bring us to and also one that doesn’t acknowledge the profound casteism of Hinduism. So these are two kinds of points of divergence. And now I think that that creates a couple of problems in that, yes, it prevents the coming together with the Jana Sangh in certain states.

But I think we should also be careful in parsing the distinction between Hindu nationalists and Hindu revivalists. So, when we think of Hindu nationalists, I think RSS, Jana Sangh BJP, and other more militant outfits of the Sangh parivar, the VHP etc. are appropriate examples. But when we think of Hindu revivalists, we are looking at the Hindu Mahasabha, Arya Samajis – they are Hindu upper caste and even majoritarian. I mean, a lot of what they try to do is to reconvert Muslims to Hinduism and working on beef bans and this kind of thing. But there is a distinction between the two, because for the latter, the ideology is not of Hindutva. And Hindutva, I think I completely agree with you, is not conservative, and actually the political theorist Sudipta Kaviraj has an essay on this ‘Must We Say What We do not Mean?’ Because what it is trying to do is to radically reconfigure society along the lines of a constructed Hindu past, which was never really a Hindu past. That’s the point. I would say there are Hindu revivalists who do become part of Swatantra in some ways, particularly in Rajasthan, and in the Hindi belt. And also, I would say a figure like KM Munshi, who is around I guess, for the first meeting of the VHP, is a Hindu majoritarian but he’s not an RSS person. Right? So we do have that but those impulses, in a sense, are brought in check, in the sense that you don’t actually see the majoritarianism of a figure like Munshi really manifesting itself in profound or important ways in the Swatantra Party. But I think you’re absolutely right, which is that the fact that the Hindu nationalists, are trying to remake society in a radical way and that is something that is distinct from what a Swatantra Party is doing which is to say that the Congress is pushing things in one direction, but we just have to bring it back a little bit. And that helps also explain that while the RSS is a cadre-based organization. Swatantra is full of these elite politicians who have trouble getting a mass base. So Jana Sangh and all continue to do very, very well in the Hindi belt long after the demise of the Swatantra Party.

Parv:

Yes, that’s very useful. Now you note that as Swatantra aimed to attain a wider transnational appeal, Swarajya, the mouthpiece of Swatantra began to shed some of its agrarian nostalgia. How did this transition take place? Was this symptomatic of the party’s urban bias which arguably led to the party losing touch with the pulse of the popular electorate? Or were the reasons for its demise more organizational than conceptual – the lack of novel methods to counter the Congress, weak electoral coalitions, and according greater importance to educational objectives rather than electoral success?

Aditya:

Yeah, so it’s in the third chapter of the book that I discuss how C Rajagopalachari comes to his critique of the license-raj, and how, by the late 1950s, he starts to engage in more mainstream neoliberal discourse coming out from West Germany, United States, UK, etc. And in that sense, some of the agrarian content of the rhetoric that is being produced, is jettisoned. Now, there are a couple of reasons for that. I think primarily, it is trying to educate oneself in a language of economics, and then to speak in that language to speak back to the Planning Commission, and the official discourses that are coming out of Nehruvian India. So in a sense, I use your language to talk back to you. I don’t think actually, that the party lets go of its agrarian grounding. And the reason is as follows.

Something that’s in the manifesto, the 14-point Statement of Principles, where they do discuss about rural India and farmers and this sort of thing. And the second point is that when you think about what they are doing in rural areas, they’re contesting land reform projects. That is a very important kind of initiative and inspires a certain kind of popular mobilization against the 17th Amendment. So I will say that they continue to have through NG Ranga, the party president a certain kind of  agrarian pulse – agrarian elite though. Having said that, this is something that starts to disappear from the electoral propaganda. So for example, in the fifth and sixth chapter, I described some of the things that you see in terms of visual literature, and that’s often targeted at the urban, office-going kind of persons. And that’s related to, I think, the blinders and blinkers of the Bombay Swatantra Party, which is where the General Secretary Minoo Masani, etc. sit. So there is a disconnect in that respect. I also think that if we think about the vote banks of the Swatantra party, they continue to perform very well in the rural areas. And if we look at one of the states where they become the chief opposition party, which is Gujarat, the other two being Andhra and Rajasthan – the agrarian focus is very strong, it is actually trying to contest the state’s over allocation of resources to the urban areas.

Parv:

Since they were organizationally weak – did the leaders of Swatantra ever think of penetrating the Congress system and trying to shift that party rightwards from within? That was the strategy adopted by the libertarians in the western world, in the UK and the USA, with the Conservative and Republican Parties respectively, for example.

Aditya:

That’s a really interesting point. And if we think about the United States, let’s take the candidacy of Vivek Ramaswamy for the Republican nomination. He is somebody who from the age of 17, has been a paid up libertarian, right from his time at Harvard and all of that. And so, you may think, well, this person could have run on a Libertarian ticket, right? But rather he chooses to run on a Republican ticket and aligns himself with Trump, it’s very possible that he may be given a cabinet position if Trump comes to power. Now he enables mainstreaming of certain ideas rooted in libertarian echo chambers that would not have been given prominence. So it’s an interesting take that you entered the mainstream, rather than continuing on the fringe.

In the case of the Swatantra party, and of course, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Tamil Brahmin, so you can say that the descendants of the Swatantra party left for the United States because Swatantra is, since many of its top brass is, and in terms of the support it garners, a Tamil Brahmin type of party.

In the case of the Swatantra party in India, now, I think the traditional way in which parties that not the Congress seek to influence the Congress in this time, right, as theorized by Rajni Kothari, the one party dominant system is that there’s a party of consensus which an umbrella party – the Congress, and then outside there are parties of pressure that try to do exactly what Parv just said, which is to shift the center of gravity by aligning with some interest group within the Congress, or putting pressure from the outside to shift that center of gravity. Now, I think that is taking place not necessarily by libertarians, but within the Congress by the Congress Right.

What is interesting about the Swatantra Party is it says that, look, that’s not what we want to do. And the reason why we don’t want to do that is because one, we feel that these actors are essentially not getting a fair hearing. And secondly, because this is a one-party system, which we believe will lead down the road to authoritarianism, because of the immense popularity and prestige of Nehru, etc. And so we have to move out. And this in a sense allows us a clear expression of our ideas, and in a manner of speaking, Swatantra is much more successful than any Libertarian Party has ever been in the United States. Right? You mean you get 44 seats in the Lok Sabha and from the key opposition in three states. I mean, that’s more than any Libertarian Party. So in a manner of speaking, they choose a different strategy. But it ended up more more successful.

In terms of the descendants of Swatantra party and the right wingers, what I see is that the descendants if we think about people who respect and embrace the legacy of Santantra and identify with it, which is these people who are attached to organizations like the Center for Civil Society, actually, what they have sought to do is to try and place pressure through the policy arena. They have tried to speak to different kinds of audiences across parties, and not necessarily put pressure but to try to create a space for debate and take up certain kinds of ideas.

Parv:

Indian libertarians were also removed from the Indian academy unlike American libertarians who had strong ties to universities. Why was that? You mention that this may have been due to Indian libertarianism’s distinctively agrarian focus. But this agrarian focus had started weakening and the party acquired a more urban flavor.

Aditya:

Yeah, so I am not entirely sure if I would agree with that characterization, saying that it loses its agrarian flavor. But I think you are right to say that in the polemical utterances of the party, the agrarian nostalgia drops out. It’s also something that I mentioned in chapter three. Now, in terms of the academy, and if we think about the Indian Academy in the 1950s and 1960s, it is overwhelmingly dominated by people of the left or of the left liberal persuasion. And there are various reasons for that, you know, with respect to the legacy of Marxist thought in the Global South, there are various reasons, since this is a very poor country. And so you don’t really have a lot of takers for something like free market ideology, which typically is associated with societies that have experienced industrialisation. And so, in that sense, they don’t penetrate the academy, because there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of sympathy for that set of ideas. And there’s also I suppose, the political economy consideration for this, which is that the major academic institutions at this time are state run. Whereas in the United States, you have had a long tradition of private capital supporting institutions. For example, when he’s not able to get a job, the Libertarians essentially finance a long term visiting professorship for Ludwig von Mises. So you don’t really have that culture in India at this time. And so in essence, there’s a political economy reason for the absence of bankrolling these kinds of ideas in the academy. But then there’s also the broader point about what is the structure of the Indian Academy at this time and the constellation of ideas in a post colonial society in which, you know, Marxist thought has had such a profound influence.

And I think that, you know, in that sense, it’s not too surprising, where you do actually have some kind of a critique of this set of ideas is of course in Gujarat University and in Bombay – in Bombay dating back to the interwar period, where Indian economics is basically around questions of currency associated with CN Vakil – and Gujarat University, BR Shenoy and people like RK Amin, again very heavy mercantile ethos, long term traditions of educational philanthropy, etc.

Parv:

You note that Rajaji’s and Ranga’s writings stylistically resemble oratory rather than written prose. These contain triumphant declarations and exaggerated assessments of the present government’s policy. Similarly, Masani’s Our India encouraged readers to take up the challenge of nation building – understanding citizenship through not a rights based but a duty based prism. Swatantra discourse/rhetoric is not particularly dialogical or conversational, then? It also seems to be pedagogical and declaratory like that of the Congress? This also appears to contradict Swatantra’s claim to anti-paternalism. What do you think?

Aditya:

Yeah, that’s a really good question, Parv. One of the points that I make is that the manner in which Swatantra communicates is distinctly pedagogical and polemic. It’s not dialogic, right? And there’s a useful essay by DipeshChakrabarty where he talks about this pedagogical politics in post colonial societies, and the understanding among postcolonial political leaders that  you have to teach people, who are being given franchise for the first time, how to vote, how to understand things, etc. And in a sense, yes, Swatantra are mirroring the Congress, which is also adopting the pedagogical style. And if you watch Films Division of India videos on YouTube, which I encourage people to see, it shows fascinating ways in which the state conveys its aims. It is a uniquely pedagogical style. But I don’t think that this contradicts Swatantra claims to anti paternalism because the kind of paternalism for which they are going out to the Congress is in the domain of economic policy and welfarism and a certain kind of dogma associated to that, rather than in terms of the way in which Congress is communicating with people.

Vishwas:

Hi, so I wanted to shift the discussion slightly to more recent times. So we have the general elections coming up in a few months. And I just wanted to understand your perspective on what are the lessons that Opposition parties today can learn from Swatantra Party’s demise?

Aditya:

Yeah, it’s always difficult to project forward stuff that happened in the 1960s for the very changed landscape of 2024. Having said that, I think when we talk about the trials and tribulations that the INDIA coalition is having, I think they basically have a deficit of ideology, which Swatantra was very clear about. It’s not clear other than, oh you’re voting against the Hindu Rashtra or whatever and Modi, what the INDIA coalition is offering to people that could seize the popular imagination? I mean, on the one hand, you have Rahul Gandhi doing his Bharat Jodo Yatra 2.0. Okay, fine, but you know, you can unite Bharat, okay, but to what end? Like, what exactly is the vision that is tied to that, and that’s not particularly compelling, particularly when on the other side, you have an overwhelming personality and figure like Modi? You know, Nehru was not the same as Modi but he was a very popular leader, and he did have a very coherent ideology. And so to Swatantra’s great credit, they actually had something that they were standing by. And so much so that I could write a whole book about it.

That’s one thing. The second thing is that there are certain kinds of uncomfortable or difficult alliances that one has to make and make work. For example, think about Swatantra and DMK in 1967. Now, originally, you might think, DMK was the force of Dravidianism which unseated Rajagopalachari from office in 1954, which made his first term as the premier of Madras in 1937-39 very difficult. With such a chequered existence, how could they come together? It’s not just a marriage of convenience, it is sold with a certain amount of panache, in that it’s okay, we consider it to be a more educated people, as opposed to the Congress, which is led by Kamaraj who went only to high school. There is also this point about the region versus the center and that we want to decentralize administration of economic power. So, you know, these are ways in which people actually are able to come together on a critique, there’s a way of actually forging certain kinds of coalitions around common ground. Now, that seems to be in deficit today.

The other point is that Swatantra was a fairly well-planned operation, whereas this, INDIA coalition is something that kind of got together over the last year, and has essentially been flailing from the start. So they never had a coherent position about whether or not they’re going to attend the Ram temple proceedings. There was nothing about seat sharing, in particular UP, for example, the Congress proposed somebody to run for seat sharing who wasn’t even alive. So, you know, there was a certain amount of bringing your A game, that Swatantra Party was able to do that these guys aren’t. And there was a certain kind of ideological commitment then. So I think that offers something for us to think about today.

Parv:

Aditya, my last question, and a related question on contemporary politics, we have recently seen a lot of efflux from opposition parties with many leaders deserting these parties, and among other reasons, often cited, is the threat of ED and IT raids looming large over these parties. And this perhaps has some parallel with what happened in the 1970s – the abolishment of privy purses and the hounding of the royals by Indira Gandhi’s administration. So to what extent do you think were legislative or executive policies in the 1970s the reason for the royals’ disengagement from Indian politics?

Aditya:

So that’s a really good question, Parv.  Actually, when I think about that, it is something that I may have drawn more attention to in the book, which is about the exodus of vote banks from Swatantra and their disappearance. So, there is a kind of strangulation that is affected by Indira Gandhi. And I actually think that this is something that you see, today, when we think about the disempowerment of somebody like Mayawati in UP in that there are some people who have the sort of stomach for whatever, I’m going to spend the next 20 years in jail, and then there are some people for whom the calculus is less or lower or shorter, and they would rather not put up with all of these sorts of things. So I think that is absolutely well taken. But I think that the difference now is that it’s not just in the formal political sphere. We also see ED being used to go after news media organizations, you see the sort of use of the FCRA rules to go after think tanks and this sort of thing. So in a sense, the sort of enemies of the state category has widened.

But I think it is a sharp insight to say that, essentially, it is the aggressive chasing out of the princes, through policy and institutions of the state that made them political non-entities. The one thing that I will say is that there are and there aren’t forces who are influential so if you think about the Scindias – they continue to be an influential princely family. But you’re right, many of the more minor ones have been reduced to political irrelevance.

Parv:

Right. So this brings us to the end of our conversation. Thanks for being so generous with your time. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Aditya:

Thank you so much for such thoughtful questions. I mean, I know this is a law school podcast, so if I might make a sort of shameless plug, I mean, it relates to Parv’s last question, which is that the longer term history of organizations like the CBI and discourses of anti corruption is something that I’ve explored in a piece that has just appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies (link). It relates to, of course, Swatantra’s critique of the Congress. But I think it’s also related to today where the use of ED and of the CBI have gone up from 60% in the previous regime against political opponents to 95%. And so the idea of what are the mechanisms that the state uses to disempower its opponents, and the rhetoric around that, and what kind of imaginaries it’s tied to, are really important to study, and to think about how we are in the situation we are in today. So thank you.

Parv:

Right, thanks for pointing out the article. The article will be linked to the show notes as well. Thank you, again, for being so generous with your time. It was an absolute pleasure!