Jerry Rao : The Liberty Manifesto

Swa-Rajya implies that each human being is a sovereign person, not a servile subject of a despot, be the despot a benevolent one or a malevolent one

Amartya Sen has made the case that a “great argument” never dies. Even though, on the surface, Arjuna lost the argument of the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna’s dissenting views never completely disappeared. They remained as a subterranean intellectual current and frequently reappeared in different temporal contexts. The arguments made in the columns of the venerable Swarajya magazine, in favour of individual liberties, free initiatives of free citizens, preservation of citizens’ rights, including the right to property, freedom to be an entrepreneur beyond the clutches of an oppressive tyrant state, freedom from the notorious “permit-license raj”, a dispensation that was at times, worse than the foreign raj that preceded it——-all these arguments did not disappear when Swarajya went into hibernation or when the Swatantra Party dissolved itself. The Indian polity fell in love with gigantic statism, dirigiste policies, the pursuit of a socialistic pattern of society, whatever that might mean, and the capture of the commanding heights of the economy by an inefficient, corrupt and intrusive government. During this long, dark, Kremlinesque night, the calm, reasoned, sensitive arguments of C. Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and B.R. Shenoy stayed alive, even if only in odd corners and crannies.

Even as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took back Anglo-Saxon societies from the clientilist paths they had fallen into, and attempted a return to their Scottish Enlightenment roots, the Soviet experiment collapsed. The fall of the Berlin wall literally represented this collapse. We have been witness in our lifetimes, to the return of the Swarajya ideals with renewed emphasis. In India, the unlikely candidate who understood this, possibly mainly for pragmatic reasons, was the veteran Congress politician P.V. Narasimha Rao. History will count him as a remarkable statesman precisely because he was willing to cast off the ghosts of Avadi and embrace the doctrines expounded in Swarajya.

Manmohan Singh too, in his early avatar, grasped the need to free the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurs. However, the problem with these pragmatic approaches which seek to find the solution “that works”, is that since they are not grounded in deep philosophical perspectives, they fall apart at the first sign of resistance or of some convenient compromise. Reagan and Thatcher believed in individual freedoms with a profound quasi-mystical conviction. Rao and Singh found partially free enterprise a convenient response in the face of their political impasse. That is the reason that the restoration of freedom to the citizens of India, still in the clutches of a tyrant state, has been partial, wavering and chimerical.

It is high time that we take back the intellectual high ground in our country, from the state-funded, state-supported Kremlin fellow-travellers, who have infiltrated so many parts of our academic, bureaucratic and journalistic worlds. It is high time that we make the case for political and economic liberty, not only in terms of pragmatism, although that is a powerful argument, but also as a fundamental trait that defines what a free people are all about. It is only this philosophical endeavour which will enable us as a country to stay the course and not retreat into infantile statism and avoid the pitfalls of cosy crony capitalism and rent-seeking on the part of the powerful and the well-connected. We do not merely want a government that works. We want a minimalist government, a government that is not a nanny state telling us what to do, a government that treats us as free citizens, not as subjects of the Politburo.

The Mahatma’s insistence on the freedom for each Indian to make salt and not be at the mercy of a state monopoly, has to become the beacon that guides us in the years to come as we attempt to shape the intellectual discourse of our times. The task is not going to be easy. Several decades of poisonous state patronage, sinecures in oddball universities and mis-spelt Akademies have created a large number of intellectual sophists and charlatans who exercise disproportionate influence. We cannot let ourselves be intimidated by them. They will attempt to portray us as unpatriotic agents of neo-liberal imperialism, whatever that expression means or is intended to mean. We must be clear that we derive our intellectual lineage not only from Smith, Hume and Hayek, but from Rajaji, Masani and Shenoy, none of whom were Mitrokhin’s agents!

To add to our ammunition, we count the Mahatma among our philosophical forebears. With the same calmness, fortitude and strength of conviction that were possessed by Rajaji and Masani, we too should engage with our readers, with all citizens of India, and indeed with persons all over the world. We must never forget that Swa-Rajya implies that each human being is a sovereign person, not a servile subject of a despot, be the despot a benevolent one or a malevolent one.