Dear Reader
Dear Reader,
In 1956, journalist Khasa Subba Rau, with the patronage of C. Rajagopalachari—Rajaji, India’s last Governor-General, freedom fighter and a statesman hailed by Mahatma Gandhi as his “conscience keeper”, launched a weekly magazine called Swarajya.
Swarajya was intended to convey the founders’ quest to translate the joy of freedom not only from foreign rule, but full freedom as defined and promised by the preamble of our Constitution. It represented the first coherent and consistent intellectual response to Nehruvian socialism and the ever-expanding Big State in newly independent India.
Long before it became fashionable, Swarajya championed individual liberty, private enterprise, the minimal State and cultural rootedness. This is what Rajaji wrote:
“There is before the country the great problem of how to secure welfare without surrendering the individual to be swallowed up by the State, how to get the best return for the taxes the people pay and how to preserve spiritual values while working for better material standards of life. This journal will serve all these purposes.”
So what is this Swarajya 2.0 about?
Rajaji’s words remain as true as ever even, and especially now, in 2015. The new Swarajya wishes to be an authoritative voice of reason representing the liberal centre-right point of view. It remains committed to the ideals of individual liberty unmediated by the State or any other institution, freedom of expression and enterprise, national interest, and India’s vast and ancient cultural heritage.
Swarajya has two avatars to begin with—a digital daily, www.swarajya.staging.wpengine.com; and this monthly magazine.
We aim to be a big tent for liberal right-of-centre discourse that reaches out, engages with and caters to the New India in a manner that’s not arcane, abstruse, arrogant or self-referencing, through commentary, analysis, research, satire and opinion. Our focus will be on what we refer to as SPEC: the Social, Political, Economic and Cultural life of India.
These are our articles of faith (in alphabetical order):
– Democracy
– Gender equality
– Free markets
– Individual enterprise
– Individual freedom
– Integrity of our country
– Opportunity for every Indian to achieve his/ her potential
– Promoting our cultural heritage
– Reduced role of the State but a more effective one in its focus areas
– Secularism which does not pander, and a separation of religion from politics
– The dangers of dogma
We have an Editorial Board of Advisors comprising outstanding thought leaders (again, in alphabetical order):
Bibek Debroy, bold economist and distinguished Indologist; Jaithirth Rao, right-of-centre philosopher, former CEO of IT giant MphasiS, and head of Citibank’s Global Technology Development Division; Manish Sabharwal, chairman of Teamlease Services, India’s largest staffing and training firm, and one of the country’s leading thinkers on employment and employability; fearless economist and perhaps the world’s best cricket analyst Surjit S. Bhalla; and Swapan Dasgupta, historian, veteran journalist and authoritative voice of the Indian right.
OK, our ambitions are pretty high, and we are promising you a lot. But with your help—and the frank criticism essential to the principles of free discourse and exchange of ideas that we have carved in granite—maybe we can…maybe we can grow to be resonant—deep, full, and reverberating.
Welcome, and do plan for a long stay.