Swarajya, May 16, 1964
Between ourselves, honest voter, these private monopolies created by the pernicious system of permits, licences, quotas and controls (to be extended now even to foreign capital which voluntarily comes into the private sector) make the Congress Party's rich friends richer, and the poor poorer. It is a close conspiracy; we have a battle between money and liberty, between dharma and atheism, between freedom and communism clothed in Congress robes.
As political parties and movements go, the Swatantra Party is less of a political party and more of a movement. It is a new party, only five years old now, but the movement for strengthening the freedom of the citizen and to oppose the State’s drive to get full control over the citizen’s economy is not new. It began even with the framing of our Constitution in 1948. Sri K.M. Munshi and others kept a vigilant eye over the scheme of things and saw to it that Part Ill of the Constitution fully protected the citizen against the growing expansion of the power of the State. Some of us had great faith in the State and its virtues, and thought the guarantees were superfluous. But for some reason or other (which now seems fully justified), Sri K.M. Munshi and others had less faith and entertained serious fears about it, and fought and succeeded in getting all the fundamental rights duly inscribed in the Constitution.
Since then however many changes have taken place. Particularly after 1954, the march to Statism acquired accelerated speed. This led to the founding of the Swatantra Party in order to prevent a drift to totalitarianism and to act as a brake on the Statism of the Congress Party. The ruling party in its desire to increase the pace of industrialization and to achieve for India a high place among the ‘progressive’ nations of the world, adopted socialism which in actual fact and effect was pure State-capitalism. Soon the rights and freedoms guaranteed for the individual were cut down, one after another, and the regime has become a permit-licence-quota raj. The Congress Party has acquired a vested interest in this scheme of things. The mission of the Swatantra Party is to oppose this Statism.
A feature to be noted and remembered in understanding the aim of the Swatantra Party is that, consistent with its philosophgy, this party gives to its members freedom of opinion and expression in all matters other than its primary object of fighting Statism. This kind of freedom being new to politics is not yet duly appreciated or perhaps even understood. Members of the party are free to hold and give expression to their opinions on most issues according to their individual convictions and are not compelled or called upon by party-discipline to sacrifice their convictions for the sake of organizational strength. This is considered to be a weakness by people brought up in the conventional ideas of party-discipline. The drilled votes of the Congress Party are a negation of democracy. Besides leading to undemocratic rule by groups which are really minority groups, it is an evil influence on the other political parties also. The Swatantra Party is determined to withstand this system of extinguishing individual opinion for the sake of gaining party strength. The votes of its members are not to be given under compulsion but should follow conviction on all points outside the opposition to Statism.
Even if the Swatantra Party comes to power, it will not yield to the temptation of seizing the opportunity to strengthen itself by maintaining the permit-licence-raj. It will stand resolutely by its pledge in favour of minimum government and maximum freedom for the citizen. It is resolved on reducing the burearatic machine to proper size. The present gigantic official structure is a corollary of the Statist policies of the Congress Party. The Swatantra Party will endeavour to reduce public expenditure and State capitalist adventures and to leave as much of the national resources as possible in the hands of the people themselves, so that they may fructify under the initiative and management of the individual or groups of individuals, which is the only policy which will ensure national prosperity and full employment of the people’s skill and physical capacity.
It is not necessary to set out the case against Statism. Its error is too obvious to require argued refutation. The citizen’s freedom of economy is essential for the functioning of the State. If the State takes over the work which belongs to the citizen, the State loses its very sustenance. Before long, as the fruits of previous individual freedom get exhausted, the symptoms of this failure of aliment will make themselves felt. Statist rulers congratulate themselves on their success with the early spoils they get by their system, but very soon they will see that it was one of the most obvious of errors to imagine that the State could function without the citizens fully and freely functioning for themselves. The State will miserably fail if it seeks to command day-labour, freedom denied.
An organization cannot wholly replace human personalities. The boundary line, the limit of freedom on one side and the bounds of power on the other, must be wisely laid down. They have been so laid down in our Constitution. National effort for progress and expansion should be conceived and developed within the framework of the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. To seek to expand and prosper at the cost of those liberties is not an honest programme of democracy. It is like trying to trade and show results with false weights and measures. Success is success, only if the weights and measures have been true. Authoritarianism may present a similitude of success for a time. That success is not of true quality; nor can it last beyond a little while.
Reverting to the main topic of this article, I claim that the Swatantra Party truly reflects overwhelming public opinion in the country against the permit-licence-quota system introduced by the Congress Party into our economy; against the corruptions issuing there from on account of the party in power seeking to control the fortunes of all individual effort, and against Statism in general. But the party cannot in like manner claim or seek to reflect public opinion on the issue of the official language, or the issue of Kashmir, or on the other questions connected with lndo-Pakistan relationship. On these questions, there is no unanimity of opinion either in the country or in the Swatantra Party. The party has on occasions given advice and guidance on some of these issues, but it would be an unhealthy imitation of the Congress Parade to drill party opinion on these issues or to suppress free thought within the party. It is a crime and positive national disservice to use party discipline to suppress the expression of independent opinion or votes based on personal conviction on great national issues. People may deride and laugh at the discordant voices of the Swatantra Party on such issues (as a recent editorial in a certain daily seems to do), but time will teach us soon that drilled unanimity on all issues including questions like the 17th Amendment or lndo-Pakistan relationship is a bane and not a virtue and that the Swatantra given by the Swatantra Party to its members is not a matter for semantic humour, but a solid contribution to political wisdom as something to help preserve democracy based on universal suffrage against the destructive forces and perversions emanating from the organizational side of political partisanship and from the lure of power that directs compulsive unanimity. If there is any justification for democracy it is contradicted by the drilled vote system of political parties, which results in power not for the people but for political bosses who specialize in organization rather than in the pursuit of truth.
