Our Mission

Well in time before the next occasion arrives for a trial of strength against the ruling power, it is necessary that those who are interested in the Swatantra Party should do some earnest thinking. Unless we realize wherein our strength lies and also in what respects we are, and must continue to be, weak or vulnerable, and on the basis of that analysis shape and build our work, we are likely to meet with depressing results and disappointments. Talking as to simple folks, a dog knows what it can do and what it cannot do and a crow, likewise, instinctively relies on what it can rely on. The crow does not give battle or defend itself where the dog is bound to prove the better of the two. The comparison should not be taken to be a complete simile. I have used it only to explain the point that those interested in the Swatantra Party should examine the principles on which the party is founded and the inherent nature of those principles, and adapt their work to that unalterable basis. The party’s work should conform to its anatomy and histology.

Examining the principles of the party, we shall see that our economic approach is based on reason and not on pleasing people’s emotions. Our goal is the same as that of every other decent political party, viz., the happiness, prosperity and progress of our nation; but the means by which this result is to be attained varies from party to party. We lay stress on spiritual values because happiness cannot be procured otherwise, whatever be the material conditions. We lay stress, again, on the traditional basis of the lives of our people, the family and the farm, and the artisan’s workshop. We put the individual’s liberty of action in the forefront and seek to restrict the State’s authority over him. Our party seeks to rest social service largely on voluntary action, because therein only is happiness associated with sacrifice of self-interest.

Now it is obvious that these essential principles are such as can appeal only to reason and intelligence. We cannot expect to rouse the emotions of the illiterate masses by such appeal. Our principles cannot make much of an appeal to those who would be lazy rather than active, who would like the State to do as much as possible for them, and relieve them of responsibility for their own lives. We cannot therefore touch the mass mind as easily as other parties can, who offer free gifts from the Exchequer or from other people’s properties robbed by ‘legal’ process. We cannot excite them with promises of egalitarian distribution of wealth, to be obtained somehow by some body. We have to work hard and educate the educatable over the economics of freedom which we have adopted as our party’s basis as distinguished from Statism and State capitalism for which the Congress and the communists stand. We have to make people see the spiritual losses and material defects inherent in the latter.

It is only reason that can appreciate the need for a voluntary element in social service. The mass mind will not easily perceive the evils of State coercion. We must, however, face our own more difficult task because that is our mission, and not the acquisition of power for the party, somehow or other. Our party workers must, therefore, apply themselves to the intelligentsia and not seek to jump over them to the proletariat or the ‘masses’ as we call them in India, which the communists, and now the Congress, can do with their programmes and policies specially made attractive for them and based on class conflict, although to the detriment of true national interest. We should not think of improving our party position by competing with the Statists on their lines.

The question arises, then, how can we hope to get votes to defeat other parties at the polls? Convinced that our principles are right, and that it is necessary in the national interest that we must put up an opposition on the basis of those principles, we must persevere in our mission, not concerning ourselves with calculations of success or defeat. As the Gita teaches us, we should work patiently through the discerning elements of the population and look to the steady dissemination of ideas through that medium. We must believe more thoroughly in the motto of the State than does the ruling party: satyam eva jayate. Truth must ultimately win. The masses will not ultimately reject justice and truth and good administration, although now they may be open to seduction.

For the same reason and consistently with the fundamental principles of our party, we must lay stress on character and good example in all the ramifications of our work. If we adopt means of adharma, whatever be our motives, we shall build in haste and error and the structure must collapse.

The movement towards democracy from other forms of government is a movement towards the wider distribution of the power of the State. It is not a reinterpretation of truth or reason in terms of democracy. There is no illusion or fallacy more harmful to the people than that truth or reason should yield to or be modified by the installation of democracy. Democracy is not an adulteration of reason, but only a wider distribution of power that is involved in the system of governance to which that name is given. We must adhere to truth even in democracy.

Just as in our non-violent struggle for national Freedom based on Ahimsa and Truth we did not, at all stages and everywhere, live up to the expressed principles, and yet the international situation and the hour came to help us win our goal, so also our struggle for freedom against the Statism of the Congress and the communists may with Heaven’s grace—in spite of our failings—succeed more speedily than we may expect. Extraneous circumstances such as the corrupt practices that have so rapidly developed out of Statism and which stare the people in the face may help us. But we must ever stick to our main path, that of appealing to reason.

I have founded the party. I feel I have not done wrong. It was a good and necessary thing that I did. The nation stands in need of such a party of stiff opposition to the trends of the ruling party that is exploiting the glory of the Indian National Congress and going contrary to the principles advocated by Gandhiji. Our processes must necessarily be slow. They cannot run as fast as time runs against me. It is therefore for the younger people to remember what I have said herein and to carry on the work with a sense of mission and with faith in Truth and God.