TY - JOUR
AU - Balasubramanian, Aditya
AB - Abstract Economic conservatism in India traces its roots in the fragmentation of political consensus following the success of the anti-colonial nationalist movement. Framed in the context of the Cold War, long before the 1991 liberalization reforms, this economic conservatism blended anti-communism, free-market advocacy, and the defence of property. This was expressed as the central agenda of the broadly secular Swatantra Party, an effort to consolidate two-party democracy that emerged by the late 1960s as the most serious challenger to the dominant Congress Party. Swatantra brought together diverse progenitors aligned with American development ideas for the Third World. This article reconstructs Indian economic conservatism’s transnational history through an interconnected study of three founding figures of the party and the network of urban associations and periodicals brewing alternative ideas beneath the layers of dominant opinion in which they were embedded. It recasts non-aligned India as a site of ideological contestation affected by the Cold War. Swatantra’s lasting critique of Indian political economy was indicative of a more widely held dissent on India’s development strategy, which has helped to drive the fragmentation of Indian politics. Demands for the party’s revival reveal a desire for a secular alternative to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. In January 1959, the businessman and politician Minoo Masani (1905–98) wrote to senior statesman C. Rajagopalachari (1878–1972) about naming a new Indian political party. Rather than a ‘right party’, proposed by Rajagopalachari, Masani preferred ‘a Centre Party, a Liberal Party or a Democratic Party’.1 Some months later, the party was christened the ‘Swatantra’ (Freedom) Party. Masani then circulated a memorandum to party members titled ‘Swatantra Party: Basic Economic Policy’ composed by the economist B. R. Shenoy (1905–78).2 The document was foundational. Identifying the paramount challenge facing India to be increasing the economic growth rate, it stressed the fundamental incompatibility between democracy and the centralized economic planning being pursued by the Indian National Congress-led Government of India.3 Instead, the memorandum proposed that ‘the best guarantee of speed in progress is a maximum of individual freedom and a minimum of governmental interference’ and cited the example of West Germany’s ‘free market economy’ as a model.4 Over the next twelve years, the Swatantra Party brought together a coalition of princes, ex-landlords, businessmen, administrators and rich peasants to establish itself as the largest opposition party to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s (1889–1964) Indian National Congress. Fundamentally, these disparate groups cohered around economic interests. The party’s sudden emergence attracted some attention, but the scope of inquiry was limited both by social scientific focus on interests rather than ideas, and by Swatantra’s decline by the early 1970s.5 Economic conservatism in India was a reaction against the notion of a planned economy for a democratically governed, decolonizing nation. Framed in the context of the Cold War, it brought together diverse progenitors. Expressed in a rhetoric of freedom, it blended an anti-communism invoking the fear of totalitarianism with free-market advocacy and the defence of property.6 This was novel, because until then the major critiques of Nehruvian political economy had come from the Left or the anti-modern Gandhians.7 Unlike these alternate critiques, the one provided by the economic conservatives of the Swatantra Party was lasting. The phrase coined by Rajagopalachari, ‘permit-and-licence raj ’, which became the centrepiece of Swatantra’s anti-Congress campaign, continues to evoke the thicket of regulations on business and exchange that characterized the pre-1991 era.8 Retracing Indian economic conservatism’s local political origins and borrowed global idioms as they were applied to a national conversation allows a study of the ideological embedding of economic liberalization in India.9 Through intellectual biographies of three connected contemporaries involved with the first Indian political party to explicitly disavow socialism as a stated objective, this article begins the project of delineating the contours of conservatism in India.10 Capturing the geographic and temporal context of how economic conservatism germinated is especially important for this exercise because conservative ideology is more diffuse than its counterparts.11 In doing so, it expands the history of how market economics and party politics became intertwined in Asia during the second half of the twentieth century by placing Masani, Shenoy and Rajagopalachari in conversation with free-market economists and activists in the Western world.12 Sensitive to the fact that these men were publicists and politicians occupying an intermediary stratum between ordinary people and intellectuals, this article studies the journals and associations in which they formulated and disseminated their ideas, their interlocutors, and their strategies of framing domestic concerns in a rhetoric of global Cold War.13 It pays specific attention to urban print culture in order to understand how economic ideas reach popular discourse.14 This article makes four principal contributions. First, it uncovers the longer economic roots of Congress’s electoral decline by exposing the vibrant contestation of dominant Nehruvian economic ideas during the 1950s and by offering a hidden history of the secular Right in India. During the 1967 elections, when Congress’s electoral hegemony began to wane, it was the broadly secular Swatantra Party that formed the largest opposition group in parliament, not the forerunner of today’s dominant cultural nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.15 While certain Swatantra leaders demanded a state culturally tilted towards the interests of the Hindu majority, they were not interested in a theocratic state or a Hindu India. Second, moving beyond Indian history, this article suggests that historians need to rethink the top-down model of the diffusion of ideas that underpin their image of market advocacy in the late twentieth century, which places professional economists at the centre of this story.16 In India, it was the middling thinkers — elites, but not quite intellectuals, who were politicians and publicists — who brought these ideas into public discourse. They did not generally come from universities, nor did they assume the rationality of economic science that characterized market advocacy in the late twentieth century and the Western world.17 Next, this article subverts the conventional wisdom of non-alignment as a protective shield insulating post-colonial states from the Cold War.18 Building on recent work that has exposed how superpower competition played out in the politics of economic aid to India and compromised development imperatives, it shows that the Cold War was also a battle for hearts and minds fought inside the non-aligned world by local actors.19 Finally, this study points to the developments that took place after the tenuous consensus that held together diverse actors in the freedom movement ruptured in the post-colony. In the Indian example, under conditions of mass enfranchisement and the pursuit of a developmentalist state model, a process of realignment took place in civil society and the public sphere through associations and periodicals that resulted in the pluralizing of political ideologies, and ultimately, the electoral landscape. The economy became the new domain in which the nation could be debated. I Anti-communist Print Culture and Masani, the Free Enterprise Publicist During his lifetime, Minoo Masani involved himself with organizations ranging from the mammoth Indian National Congress to the tiny Democratic Research Service operated from his Bombay office.20 The most visible of his involvements by the mid 1950s was the Forum of Free Enterprise, part of a dense network or web of English-speaking urban associations of 1950s India that were sympathetic to the West during the Cold War. The parties responsible for their existence and upkeep had been bureaucrats, former revolutionaries and journalists. A few had been uncomfortable with communism ever since Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929.21 They drifted increasingly to the Right after the news of Stalin’s Great Purge of 1936–8 came out, and more so after the Government of India banned the Communist Party of India in 1948.22 Most had been involved in some way or other in the freedom movement. All had experienced its effects. Participants in this network of associations and periodicals came together over Cold War era anxieties about the trajectory of Indian economic development and the expansion of the Nehruvian state. Across the decolonizing world, a new conventional wisdom about the necessity for state control of the economy to bring about development through central planning with the aim of self-sufficiency from foreign economic control had taken hold.23 Consistent with this consensus, India's plans were an experiment in heavy industry-led import-substituting industrialization under a mixed economy framework. Temporally coinciding with the introduction of statist economic policy was the emergent dominance of a ‘radical, left-wing construction’ of the language of democracy. Although Nehru’s own construction of the Indian objective of a ‘socialistic pattern of society’ was ambiguous, his contemporaries of varying political hues adopted more radical rhetoric. During these times, even the right-wing Hindu nationalist Jana Sangh party referred to its platform as a form of socialism.24 But this also reflected the affinities of the Non-Aligned Movement’s leaders. Despite being unwilling to engage in superpower confrontation, Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser and Tito were sympathetic towards the Soviet Union and claimed to be socialists of some variety.25 America was frustrated that Soviets got more ideological ‘bang’ for their ‘buck’, even though the former supplied the largest sums of economic aid to India.26 Interpreting these dynamics in an alarmist fashion, some, like the contributors to Madras’s Swarajya magazine, worried that India would be starved of the entrepreneurial spirit and take the road to serfdom (see below). Others, like the Calcutta-based Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia, sought to preserve Indian culture from destruction by communism, and peddled Hindu majoritarian sentiments. Still others argued for new philosophies of life from which political attempts should be worked out, like the Indian Rationalists or the Radical Humanists. Mainly headquartered in Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta, Madras or New Delhi, their publications’ reach extended far into India’s interiors and even abroad. ‘The Cold War has come to India. In Parliament it was only to be expected, but it is now seen increasingly in the corridors of buildings, in Club rooms and in every centre of discussion’, announced the Bombay business weekly Eastern Economist in 1952.27 Voluntary associations of this web operated at a step removed from official propaganda efforts by the superpowers.28 The periodicals that came out of it represented the views of Indians interpreting the Cold War from the perspective of a subcontinent that had become a site of competition for ideological influence. Their history forms part of the unwritten cultural history of the Cold War in India.29 The organizations comprising this web of connected associations and periodicals published short, affordable books, pamphlets and periodicals. They became noticeable as a collective force by about 1956, the year that the Second Five-Year Plan commenced (see below). They put out public lectures, inviting each other’s leaders to give talks under their auspices. Where possible, these organizations tried to get kindred spirits to open branches in other cities. The leadership of these institutions knew that they were not popular and several struggled for funds. Readers could purchase bundled subscriptions to various magazines, buying the books of one organization under the auspices of another. Leaders opened branches for each other in different cities. Here was a collective action of those at the ideological margins of economic and political discourse. Together, they amounted to more than the sum of their parts. The literature produced in the periodicals of this web met with an expanding audience, especially in larger cities. The second half of the 1950s saw the circulation of periodicals rise from eleven million to nineteen million. This increase was concentrated in the four largest cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras, which published approximately 38 per cent of the country’s periodicals.30 Although they contended against the dominant currents of opinion and sold fewer copies than comparable magazines associated with the Left, such as Seminar and Blitz, the circulation figures of the periodicals in this web indicate that they were far from obscure (see Table). Circulation Figures of Selected Magazines by 1960* Periodical . Frequency . City of origin . Free copies . Sold copies . Total circulation . Blitz† Weekly Bombay 4,518 82,668 87,186 Current Weekly Bombay 1,158 9,510 10,668 Indian Libertarian Biweekly‡ Bombay 513 150 663 MysIndia Weekly Bangalore 436 13,048 13,484 Organiser Weekly Delhi 915 6,733 7,648 Radical Humanist Weekly Calcutta 200 2,441 2,641 Seminar† Monthly Bombay 800 725 1,525 Swarajya Weekly Madras 737 15,719 16,456 Thought Weekly Delhi 497 9,397 9,894 Periodical . Frequency . City of origin . Free copies . Sold copies . Total circulation . Blitz† Weekly Bombay 4,518 82,668 87,186 Current Weekly Bombay 1,158 9,510 10,668 Indian Libertarian Biweekly‡ Bombay 513 150 663 MysIndia Weekly Bangalore 436 13,048 13,484 Organiser Weekly Delhi 915 6,733 7,648 Radical Humanist Weekly Calcutta 200 2,441 2,641 Seminar† Monthly Bombay 800 725 1,525 Swarajya Weekly Madras 737 15,719 16,456 Thought Weekly Delhi 497 9,397 9,894 * Source: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Annual Report of the Registrar of Newspapers for India, 1960: Part II (New Delhi, 1961). † Denotes inclusion for comparison. ‡ Every two weeks. Open in new tab Circulation Figures of Selected Magazines by 1960* Periodical . Frequency . City of origin . Free copies . Sold copies . Total circulation . Blitz† Weekly Bombay 4,518 82,668 87,186 Current Weekly Bombay 1,158 9,510 10,668 Indian Libertarian Biweekly‡ Bombay 513 150 663 MysIndia Weekly Bangalore 436 13,048 13,484 Organiser Weekly Delhi 915 6,733 7,648 Radical Humanist Weekly Calcutta 200 2,441 2,641 Seminar† Monthly Bombay 800 725 1,525 Swarajya Weekly Madras 737 15,719 16,456 Thought Weekly Delhi 497 9,397 9,894 Periodical . Frequency . City of origin . Free copies . Sold copies . Total circulation . Blitz† Weekly Bombay 4,518 82,668 87,186 Current Weekly Bombay 1,158 9,510 10,668 Indian Libertarian Biweekly‡ Bombay 513 150 663 MysIndia Weekly Bangalore 436 13,048 13,484 Organiser Weekly Delhi 915 6,733 7,648 Radical Humanist Weekly Calcutta 200 2,441 2,641 Seminar† Monthly Bombay 800 725 1,525 Swarajya Weekly Madras 737 15,719 16,456 Thought Weekly Delhi 497 9,397 9,894 * Source: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Annual Report of the Registrar of Newspapers for India, 1960: Part II (New Delhi, 1961). † Denotes inclusion for comparison. ‡ Every two weeks. Open in new tab Scholars have identified the voluntary association as the classical expression of a conservative form of organization.31 In Burke’s thought, such an association provided the necessary buffer between the individual and the state. Its emergence was a testament to the freedom of association and common interest of individual wills. This was a version of what he called the ‘little platoon’, of which the family was the traditional example.32 But going beyond the morphology of association, there was also a conservative intellectual disposition uniting these groups against state expansion and centralization. The case of Minoo Masani, who was involved in this network, underscores how a virulent anti-communism was constitutive of Indian economic conservatism, even though the highly westernized Masani did not self-identify in this manner. In the West, conservatism responded to socialism by incorporating the idea of limited power and rejecting the organic community in favour of the idea of an individual ‘exercising independence and force of character shored up by private property’.33 To do so, it appropriated tenets of classical liberalism and constructed an appeal as an anti-totalitarian cause.34 In many cases, those holding conservative attitudes defined themselves as liberal. A single definition of liberalism became even more difficult because it was being reinvented simultaneously in countries such as the United States and Britain, which had a communitarian ethos and a concern for public responsibility towards improving human material needs and capacities.35 In India, the profound role of imperial liberal ideology in constructing political and educational institutions and informing governance had also contributed to the emergence of nationalist discourse in liberal idioms.36 But in a post-colonial environment where most other political groups self-identified as socialist, Masani’s position was relationally conservative. Masani was born into a well-known Parsi family in Bombay. The Parsis were an especially anglicized mercantile community of western India who had turned in the nineteenth century to the legal profession and capitalist enterprise, assuming foundational roles in Indian textile and steel industries.37 Masani read law at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1920s and became active in Labour Party and anti-imperialist politics. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927, he became a great admirer of the Russian planning experiment, although never a communist. Some years later, he encountered the American-educated socialist Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–79) while both served out a jail sentence in Nasik for their participation in Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience Movement.38 The two men became close and Masani helped Narayan set up the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in 1933.39 Over the next six years, he played the role of dedicated deputy to Narayan. Masani abandoned his leftist persuasions in light of political developments at home and abroad. Because it was formally banned by the British, the Communist Party of India had to operate under cover. When politically progressive groups in India came together in the 1930s under a United Front, other front groups became vulnerable to losing supporters to the communists in a clandestine fashion. CSP leaders found supporters deserting them. By the time Masani quit national politics in 1939, the communists had successfully entered the Congress Socialist Party and threatened Narayan’s control over the organization.40 Roughly coinciding was news that had started to travel to India about Stalin’s purges. This combination of forces sent Masani, author of an appreciative book about the Soviet Union called Soviet Sidelights, on a path towards anti-communism.41 A key influence on Masani was American James Burnham’s (1905–87) concept of the ‘managerial state’.42 A lapsed communist and former friend of Trotsky, Burnham subsequently rejected the philosophical foundations of Marxist thought. He spent the Second World War working for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.43 Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, drew out similarities between the structures of the economies of America during the New Deal, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. He argued that in the process of achieving economic advancement, Russia and Germany had become states in which managers of industry and bureaucrats in public administration wielded control over the economy through increasingly scientific methods. Gradually, these states would compete as ‘managerial states’. Managerialism was the third stage in economic transformation after feudalism and capitalism; the permanence of capitalism could in no way be assumed. Instead, Burnham offered a dystopian modernist vision. He implicitly warned of the dehumanization of life, a direct corollary of statist economic policy in an industrial world. Burnham would go on to become a leading intellectual force behind the American conservative movement of the 1950s.44 His clearly written book and certain conclusions offered Masani a log to grab on to while he was working out his own political disillusionment. Over the next decade, Masani shed his leftism and became a public relations man for the nationalist Parsi firm Tata Sons, India’s largest conglomerate.45 He published three illustrated children’s books that reveal an increasing embrace of a pro-American liberal individualism: Our India (1940), Picture of a Plan (1945) and Our Growing Human Family (1950). These books were part of a new genre of nationalist texts published by Oxford University Press in anticipation of the advent of an independent India.46 Written in an epigrammatic style, they sought to communicate economic concepts to children in a way that made the Indian economy come alive, and to inspire audiences about the possibilities of the future. Masani thought of it as ‘a new style of writing and a new style of illustrating’.47 Our India, an economic geography that sold over half a million copies, gave an idea of India’s natural resource endowments, manpower potential and standard of living.48 It laid out Masani’s understanding of citizenship as duty rather than right. He put the responsibility for economic development on the shoulders of each individual. As he would ask in Our India: ‘Who is going to get it all done … “YOU”! Yes, you, Young Sir, and you, Little Lady … After all, this is your country — and if you don’t who d’you think will?’49 The emphasis here was not so much on the state’s obligations to its people, but rather on how individuals could work towards national objectives of economic development. In a related vein, Masani conceived of society as a collection of individuals rather than classes. The pictograms peppered across Our India displayed the individual as the unit of measure (see Plate 1). This foreshadowed Masani’s later involvement in running a citizenship programme to train people in their democratic duties, and his description of India’s predicament in the late 1960s as one of ‘too much politics’ and ‘too little citizenship’.50 The interest in duty in connection with the economy and later as informing social practices in a democracy — as opposed to rights — aligns well with the notion of basing public action on voluntary individual rather than state-mandated practices.51 Open in new tabDownload slide 1. Illustration by C. H. G. Moorhouse depicting occupational structure from Minoo Masani's Our India (London, 1940), 36. Open in new tabDownload slide 1. Illustration by C. H. G. Moorhouse depicting occupational structure from Minoo Masani's Our India (London, 1940), 36. Picture of a Plan, written in the Our India style, drew on Burnham to caution that ‘In Russia, things have been controlled much too much from the centre and this has meant an unnecessarily large army of bureaucrats’.52 The author Masani now adopted the view that Bolshevism had led to control of the economic system by a self-interested clique and he expressed fear that ‘man is not at present sufficiently well equipped to control the huge machines — industrial and political — which he has created’.53 He rejected the means taken by the Soviet state to achieve a classless society: ‘If individual liberty and political democracy are as essential a part of socialism as economic equality, it is necessary that the methods of achieving socialism should fit the end’.54 Picture of a Plan was a children’s version of the Bombay Plan, a document drawn up by Tata Sons in conjunction with other major industrialists in 1944 to outline a blueprint for Indian economic development. The Plan carved out a space for private enterprise to forestall more radical proposals.55 It proposed tripling India’s income and doubling the per capita income over three five-year plans.56 Adding in his own gloss, Masani suggested that the goal of planning was ‘embodied in the American Declaration of Independence — the inalienable rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’.57 Masani mentioned the perils of managerialism and envisioned a country in which government would support private enterprise and agriculture. But he neglected to discuss the possible risks of private sector-led monopoly, perhaps consistent with the public relations aims of his new employers. He would go on to call for ‘State plus Free Enterprise’ and an American-style ‘progressive capitalism’ with less government control to address the post-war economic slump dogging India in 1947.58 Masani embraced the notion of greater Indian embeddedness in the American-led post-war international order in his final children’s book, Our Growing Human Family (1950). The book told a Whiggish story of human progress, from the tribe to the ‘world federation’ of self-determined democratic nation states along lines envisioned by Woodrow Wilson.59 Unabashedly pro-American, it even featured illustrated portraits of Wilson and Abraham Lincoln.60 A key motor of Masani’s story of progress was the advent of industrial capitalism in Europe. According to him, capitalist interests had persuaded the political leadership to wage war to open export markets. Colonialism was the product of the search for export markets for European goods. Speaking to the present, Masani argued that a world federation of self-determined nations required free trade. A striking image in the book compared the free movement of goods between American states favourably to tariff barriers between European nations (Plate 2).61 This implied a strategy for Indian trade policy that aligned with American interests. After the Second World War, the United States had been keen to dismantle imperial preference and the sterling bloc to bring forth ‘a free-flowing trade with India’. America saw the country as both a market for consumer goods and a source of raw materials.62 However, this was antithetical to the idea of heavy industrialization via import substitution that was being threshed out at the time by India’s leaders. Part of a programme to cast off India’s colonial history as a raw materials exporter and finished goods importer powerless over the terms of trade was the introduction of substantial tariffs to spur the development of home industries.63 Zealous to find a better alternative model for India than Stalin’s Soviet Union, Masani turned to the United States. The formerly anti-imperial nationalist embraced, perhaps uncritically, the new imperialism of free trade. By the 1950s, Masani had become a Cold War free enterpriser operating as a dedicated polemicist in local and international groups. Through his Democratic Research Service (DRS) in Bombay, Masani published a cultural magazine called Freedom First, leaked documents of the Communist Party of India, and wrote a history of that Party.64 Through the DRS, Masani helped to organize a Bombay meeting of the international Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Among the attendees was James Burnham, now in charge of diverting CIA funds to the CCF.65 A group of artists and intellectuals championing freedom of expression, CCF members convened at conferences and published periodicals such as the famous Encounter magazine. The extent to which the CIA determined the attitudes and opinions put forth by the CCF’s journals remains hotly debated.66 Masani and Jayaprakash Narayan, the other major leader behind the organization, likely knew about CIA sponsorship. However, they used the CCF’s resources opportunistically for their own ends as part of political resistance to Nehru that often had little to do with American foreign policy. Despite his pro-Americanism, Masani’s ‘blind bitterness against Nehru’ and ‘instability’ did not endear himself to American diplomats.67 Open in new tabDownload slide 2. Representation of federations and free trade by C. H. G. Moorhouse from Minoo Masani's Our Growing Human Family (Bombay, 1950), 101. Open in new tabDownload slide 2. Representation of federations and free trade by C. H. G. Moorhouse from Minoo Masani's Our Growing Human Family (Bombay, 1950), 101. Sidelined by the Americans, Masani turned more single-mindedly towards issues of economy but connected them to Cold War concerns. He assumed a key role in the Forum of Free Enterprise. The organization had been founded by an ex-Tata director in 1956, the year the government’s Industrial Policy Resolution listed iron and steel among the seventeen industries reserved for the public sector and nationalized life insurance.68 The Resolution also required businesses to secure government permits to operate and listed industries to be reserved for the public sector. Although there was never a question of nationalizing industries that were already privately owned, the trend of industrial policy over the previous decade made private business uneasy that they would become junior partners in the mixed economy, outcompeted by public sector enterprises.69 The Forum focused on educating college-age students about the virtues of private enterprise. It produced and sent pamphlets and books to colleges and schools free of charge. Financing came in part from the Tatas but mostly from members and the founder’s own funds. The Forum also hosted what became very famous annual speeches on the Union Budget. These generally decried the high levels of corporate and income taxation in the country and the multiple indirect taxes that had been levied to finance economic planning.70 The organization’s manifesto redefined free enterprise as entrepreneurship, the engine of social dynamism: ‘The man who first discovered fire was a Free Enterpriser and also the man who invented the locomotive … The shopkeeper and the merchant, the farmer and the artisan, the worker and the manager … all these are Free Enterprisers’.71 Thus defined, ‘free enterprise’ appeared to hold broader appeal beyond Bombay. The Forum opened branches in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras.72 In 1957, Masani used Narayan’s support in the northern state of Bihar to win election to the lower house of the Indian parliament. Speaking during the heyday of the Second Plan, Masani warned parliament of the ‘tendency to over-idealize and glorify heavy industrialization’. The cost in terms of running deficits that created inflation and raising taxation, Masani warned, could lead to the middle classes becoming frustrated and turning away from the democratic way of life. ‘We cannot invest resources that we do not possess’, he cautioned. In addition, the Plan and ‘proliferation of the bureaucracy’ associated with the newly inaugurated state-led developmental projects were putting in place ‘a kind of bureaucratic State Capitalism as against Private Capitalism’.73 Here Masani reprised the critique of the managerial state in his critique of public-sector enterprise. His anti-communist activities were recast into a support of free enterprise and warning that conditions stifling such enterprise could spell the end of democracy. This language had much in common with the pamphlets that had started to appear from the Forum of Free Enterprise. Two years later, at a Forum event in Bangalore on the dangers of the imagined threat of Soviet-style collective farming and the imposition of land ceilings on agricultural property, Masani met Rajagopalachari. They commenced the discussions that would lead to the foundation of the Swatantra Party.74 Minoo Masani does not appear to have had a sophisticated understanding of the theory of the free market. He was a publicist. However, he did embrace individualism and the notion of a more restrained role for the state in economic activity. Both of these commitments came from an anti-communism that was the product of a conversion from the Left. His appeal to liberty — freedom, in his words — and the virtues of private entrepreneurship paralleled the trajectories of American conservatives who had started their lives sympathetic to leftist causes.75 His desire to pursue American-style economic policies in India, supporting the interests of big business through lower taxation and government regulation, was conservative in that it was ultimately a defence of the privileged. II Free Markets for Freedom and Culture: B. R. Shenoy’s Crusade against Inflation and Controls In 1957, B. R. Shenoy suggested that in ancient Hindu society governed by dharma — the cosmic laws underlying correct behaviour and social order — the state was a ‘minimum state’. Its essence was that ‘each individual should be left free to pursue his lawfully chosen vocation’. 76 Without certain exceptions, the state could not ‘enter into the sphere of economic activities, which is the sacred domain of the private sector’.77 A dual attachment to a Hindu revivalism and free-market economics informed B. R. Shenoy’s political commitments. Hindu revivalists sought to reform Indian society along modern lines by abolishing antiquated social practices and caste prejudice, and their ideas had a strong individualist current. In Congress, they were leading figures in the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century agitations for Indian self-government.78 Insofar as one can reconcile Shenoy's attachments to both markets and a constructed ideal of Hinduism and Hindu society, both implied the absence of an economically interventionist state and emphasized the role of the individual in pursuing material or spiritual aims. The collective spirit of communism, the role that it originally implied for the state, and its disavowal of religion — which to his mind compromised culture — were grounds for him to reject this ideology. However, Shenoy never developed the nexus between religion and economy in his writing, so the connection was a loose one. Shenoy came of age in an educational environment where both political economy and religion bore heavily upon nationalist political concerns. As a student at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), he encountered both Austrian economics and nationalism tinged by Hindu revivalism.79 Establishing a university in the holy city of Banaras was part of the broader Hindu revivalist project of BHU’s founding Vice Chancellor Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946).80 To strengthen Hindus for the overthrow of colonial rule, he supported higher education, the reading of holy texts to improve the individual’s relationship with God, the promotion of Hindi rather than Urdu as a language, and cow-protection movements against prospective Muslim beef-eaters. Malaviya believed this programme advanced dharma.81 Malaviya had been a well-known Congress nationalist leader in the era before Gandhian mass politics.82 However, from the 1920s, the moderate forms of protest such as petition and debate that he had championed gave way to the boycott, the strike and the fast.83 Votaries of a secular and socially radical brand of nationalism associated with the scion of Malaviya’s rival Nehru family, Jawaharlal Nehru, had ascended in the Congress.84 Malaviya drifted away from the party and became involved in promoting his political agenda through the Hindu Mahasabha (Hindu Grand Assembly), later associated with the rise of Hindutva (Hinduness), the sectarian ideology governing the dominant BJP’s politics in India today.85 Having been exposed to individualist currents of political economy and religious revivalism, Shenoy proceeded to the LSE. He spent the years 1931 to 1933 preparing an MSc thesis called ‘Some Aspects of a Central Bank for India’.86 During his first year, economist F. A. von Hayek (1912–2006) presented a series of lectures titled Prices and Production that synthesized previous contributions to Austrian economics in a new theory of the business cycle.87 In a nutshell, the theory argued that business cycles originate from excessive credit creation by the central bank. Hayek opposed the use of monetary policy to decrease interest rates at a time of downturn, suggesting that it interfered with the natural adjustment processes of the market. Deficit spending by governments would merely prolong this process by artificially increasing prices and stimulating unproductive investment.88 This was a greatly influential formulation at the time of the Great Depression, and Hayek established himself as a great challenger to the likes of John Maynard Keynes.89 Great Britain, which had returned to the gold standard in 1925 at the overvalued pre-war rate of exchange to gold and consequently experienced economic distress, had just abandoned the gold peg to stimulate the economy.90 Shenoy spent time in London when monetary policy and the real economy were seen to be deeply connected, and price had just become a more important economic indicator. Shenoy returned to India after completing his studies and made a career as a reputed monetary economist. He was the first Indian to publish in the venerable Quarterly Journal of Economics and enjoyed a number of university and government appointments as a monetary economist.91 Much of his academic output concerned inflation.92 In 1954, he became Director of the School of Social Sciences at the University of Gujarat, a point of inflection in his career. Reinventing himself as a public affairs commentator, Shenoy wrote prolifically in the press.93 Between 1954 and his death, he contributed 67 articles and 35 letters to the editor of the Times of India alone.94 Nevertheless, this reinvention did not mean he shed the markers of the monetary economist completely. He continued to believe that prices were the key indicator of value, and that price deviations from the norm were destabilizing. Across his writing, inflation was the single most commonly covered issue. Shenoy dedicated his rhetoric to discrediting communist regimes and asserting the virtues of free markets. His pet example of the merits of market economics was East versus West Berlin. Here was a case study of ‘free’ versus ‘controlled’ economic policy.95 Shenoy contrasted the prosperity of West Berlin, which had partaken of the West German wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), with the relative deprivation of East Berlin. He considered the dismantling of economic controls to let the market mechanism operate freely as the most central part of the West’s programme.96 By contrast, visiting East Berlin, part of Communist East Germany, ‘gives the impression of visiting a prison camp’, he suggested: ‘The people do not seem to feel free’. To support his contention, Shenoy pointed out the net migration from East to West Berlin and the difference between market (4.25 to 1) and official exchange rates (1 to 1) between the East and West mark. Shenoy spoke of ‘enormous development potentialities’ of the West German model for India while addressing an Oxford audience that included Hayek, now the famous author of The Road to Serfdom, in 1959. But he suggested that the path being taken by Indian planners was towards ‘totalitarian prosperity’, or ‘a case of seemingly full, physical well-being without culture. And life of physical well-being without culture is not life worth living’. This cultural critique was a species of conservative rhetoric relating to Shenoy’s identification of dharma as a kind of order that ought not to be destabilized. He called Indian economic policy ‘communist’ and suggested that the country needed to import the philosophy of the organization to which he was speaking, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS).97 This post-war international thought collective sought to make the case for free markets and contest the dominance of Keynesian economic thought.98 Shenoy’s speech impressed Hayek and his colleague, Chicago economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006).99 They granted him membership of the society and carried on a lively correspondence with Shenoy over the next ten years.100 Shenoy articulated a more specific critique of Indian economic policy in a Note of Dissent (1955) submitted to the Indian Planning Commission on the Second Five-Year Plan Frame. He argued that statistics looked at from Soviet bloc economies had given planners false impressions of how quickly the Indian economy could grow. Because democracy occupied a central position in Nehru’s conception of the planning enterprise, the optimistic projections for savings to be invested in the plan overstated their true values. ‘Totalitarian devices’ could not be used. Funding a plan of the envisioned size required running large deficits. ‘No plan can be bigger or bolder than the available real resources’, Shenoy wrote. This one strove for the impossible and threatened ‘uncontrolled inflation’.101 Retrospective accounts identify Indian planning with the measures undertaken during the Second Plan (1956–61), when Planning Commission experts assumed increasing responsibility for Indian economic and social policy. These ambitious years constituted a key inflection point in India’s development strategy.102 Crucially, the authors of the Second Plan accepted a large deficit between available resources and planned investment.103 An increasing amount of foreign aid and new forms of taxation were to help meet the financial requirements of this plan, but a sizeable 8 per cent went unaccounted. This strategy was accompanied by a plan for restructuring rural land ownership in favour of tenants and shifting the tax base from agriculture to commerce. As mentioned, commercial interests were subjected to industrial licensing and foreign exchange control. The state also assumed welfare functions during this period, reaching into the domains of health, education, transportation and food in unprecedented ways.104 It became increasingly indispensable, but also unreliable and prone to bureaucratic corruption.105 During this period, India consolidated a heavy industrial base for her economy.106 The Second Plan’s ambition and relative neglect of agricultural investment sowed the seeds of the decline of planning. Shortfalls of foreign exchange and food constrained the programme and required increasing foreign aid.107 Policy makers accepted foreign exchange from donors but did not outline a strategy for generating greater amounts of it in the future. And although the absolute level of inflation never justified Shenoy’s doomsday propositions, during the period between 1956 and 1961, prices rose by about five percentage points annually. One year, it even touched 15 per cent.108 Consistent with American views of proto-modernization, Shenoy advanced a different model of economic development that prioritized consumer goods rather than capital goods-led development. The key was to specialize in raw materials production, which would provide the financing for the development of consumer goods industries. That implied opening the economy more to market forces and exporting to developed countries.109 This was consistent with the American objective to make India an outpost for its own exports and the aim exemplified by the Harvard economist Alvin Hansen’s suggestion that developing countries target ‘a moderate degree of industrialization consistent with their resources, especially the manufacture of light consumer goods’.110 To Shenoy, reorienting production towards consumer goods and balancing budgets would arrest price increases and obviate economic controls that raised ‘stupendous administrative problems’. Eliminating agricultural controls and subsidies, he reasoned, would save money for the state. Devaluing the currency would boost exports. Shenoy also suggested ramping up voluntary efforts by the rural unemployed through shramdan (‘work gift’), to provide labour for infrastructure projects connecting rural to urban areas.111 Shramdan was Hindu in spirit and part of Shenoy’s understanding of dharma. ‘Drowned out by a chorus of social democrats and leftists’ in academic circles, as one historian has described it, Shenoy complained to Milton Friedman of ‘how lonely I am in India advocating the viewpoint I have been doing’.112 ‘Hardly any of the senior Indian economists … have found reason to agree with me’, he lamented.113 But through the MPS, Shenoy found kindred spirits like Friedman. At the time, currencies were fixed to the US dollar and backed by gold; Friedman advocated letting exchange rates float and be determined by market forces.114 Through the MPS, Shenoy also made contact with a network of journalists and popular writers in the West.115 He served as an intermediary, communicating information about India to them and in turn disseminating their ideas in Indian newspapers and pamphlets.116 By 1970, he had earned his MPS colleagues’ respect and became one of its global directors.117 Austrian economics and the brand of Hindu revivalism in which Shenoy was reared had in common a sense of individualism that led to the attitude that the free market was the way to prosperity and socialism the road to communist serfdom. Shenoy’s methods of engagement with public discourse through the newspaper and debate resembled the earlier brand of Congress politics practised by the likes of Malaviya in the age before the mass politics of the boycott, march and hunger strike initiated by Gandhi. Isolated at home, Shenoy was nonetheless invigorated by association with like-minded thinkers abroad. His 1970 address to the MPS praised the ideal of the ancient Hindu concept of caste. Although he did acknowledge the ills of caste-based oppression that had developed over time, he believed that the concept was a ‘flexible set up [that] had advantages of comparative cost and maximum production from a given social complex of human aptitudes and talent’.118 Shenoy found his ideal Hindu society compatible with free-market society and outlined an alternative vision for Indian economic policy. His key register for contesting the Nehruvian economy was polemicizing inflation, which would be immensely helpful for C. Rajagopalachari. III C. Rajagopalachari, The Fragility of Political Order and Licence Raj C. Rajagopalachari was a moralist, and religion was central to his life. 119 He conceived of Hindu mythology as a form of moral instruction and wrote bestselling children’s versions of the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana.120 A senior figure in the Indian nationalist movement as Gandhi’s lieutenant in southern India, he served as premier of Madras Presidency (1937–9), in various roles in the Cabinet, and as Governor-General of India (1948–50). Between 1952 and 1954, he was the chief minister of Madras state (later Tamil Nadu). Rajagopalachari’s nationalism stressed unity across caste, creed and class. He considered communism and religious communalism to be unproductively divisive. Both Rajagopalachari’s terms in regional office were marred by his inability to navigate the winds of progressive change blowing in his native Tamil-speaking Madras. The rigidities of caste, the commercialization of agriculture, and the embrace of modern industry in this region had given rise to two major political movements. The first was communist political organization.121 Taking office as chief minister in 1952, Rajagopalachari warned the communists in the legislative assembly that he was their ‘Enemy Number One’. The second movement, which traced its roots to the nineteenth century, was the anti-Brahmin Dravidian movement. The Dravidians united in opposition to the ‘Aryan’ north from where the hegemonic Brahmin community allegedly hailed. Dravidian leaders singled out Rajagopalachari, a Brahmin often inadequately sympathetic to the problems of caste in society, as a symbol of prejudice and organized protests against his attempts as premier to teach the northern language of Hindi in schools in 1939. Fifteen years later, they helped bring Rajagopalachari’s term as chief minister to an end by protesting his hereditary education scheme. The scheme aimed to conserve resources by shortening the school day. The proposal to have students learn their caste occupation from their parents in the remaining time was seen as deeply regressive.122 Retired by the mid 1950s, Rajagopalachari consumed Cold War literature, wrote in the Swarajya magazine on topics ranging from Tolstoy to nuclear disarmament, and translated the Hindu epics.123 Swatantra was his last major cause. He synthesized Masani’s concern about free enterprise, Shenoy’s concern about inflation, and his own long-standing problem with administrative corruption in his description of India under Nehru as a ‘permit-and-licence raj ’. Rajagopalachari once described himself as a man from the nineteenth century, ‘a good time’.124 His early life in an agrarian district of Madras Presidency was formative. The areas in which he grew up were predominantly governed by the ryotwari system of land tenure, where the peasant-proprietor paid taxes directly to the district collector. This system was seen to be more equitable to the zamindari system primarily governing north India, where land was generally divided into larger plots and an exploitative absentee landlordism was more pervasive. In Madras Presidency, the state had a limited role apart from revenue collection and policing. The district collector was the most powerful figure, and his level of administrative prowess was important in shaping the fate of the locality. The advent of agricultural commercialization, industrial capitalism and freedom from British rule in the twentieth century transformed this world, but it remained in the back of Rajagopalachari’s head.125 His near-obsession with corruption and attachment to the concept of civic duty are key parts of Rajagopalachari’s politics. They trace back to his prison diaries of 1921–2, completed while serving out a jail term for participation in Gandhi’s non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement.126 The diary suggested that Swaraj (self-rule) would bring deliverance from ‘dishonour and subordination’ but not necessarily government or greater happiness: Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of wealth and inefficiency of administration will make a hell of life soon as freedom is given to us. Men will look regretfully back to the old regime of comparative justice, and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest administration.127 This placed a major onus on ‘universal education by which right conduct, fear of God and love’ were to be ‘developed among the citizens from childhood’. He saw civic and religious duty as intertwined, both part of his dharma.128 For much of the rest of his life, Rajagopalachari would see himself as a teacher helping to advance his countrymen towards that universal education. Composed while Rajagopalachari was premier of Madras, the Tamil citizenship manual-cum-popular education reader called Oorukku Nallathu (Good for the Polity) (1939) outlined the dimensions of his political thought.129 At its heart lay the importance of honest administration and the risk of abusing administrative power. Rajagopalachari presented the udhyogastargal (civil service) separately from the executive, legislature and judiciary, which underscores the importance to which he assigned them. This was the branch of government that most represented the state in rural everyday life. The kaaval (police) was one of the udhyogastargal’s constituent elements. In colonial Tamil land, the uniformed policeman enjoyed prestige and wielded discretionary violence in maintaining law and order.130 The other figure who most represented the state and enjoyed both powers of revenue collection and the dispensation of justice was the collector. That gave the civil service or administration leeway to abuse authority. This continued after the introduction of constitutional reforms in the 1935 Government of India Act; an immense amount of administrative discretion continued to be vested in the civil servant because Indians were alien subjects and not citizens.131 Therefore, it was of paramount importance that they did not take bribes and work in a disinterested fashion.132 Rajagopalachari’s time at the helm of Madras Presidency from 1937 to 1939 and of Madras State between 1952 and 1954 were periods of efficiency and legislation consistent with a more circumscribed role for the state in economic affairs.133 Whereas he signed legislation to protect the tenancy rights of legislators and offered debt relief, he would not disrupt ownership. He ended controls on food prices in 1952 to bring down administrative corruption and hoarding by traders. But rather than defending the measure as one that curbed black market profiteering and benefitted the people, he defended the measure as one that would decrease immoral activity. There is little evidence that Rajagopalachari embraced the welfarism of the time, only a desire to conduct administration honestly. Once retired, Rajagopalachari helped launch the Swarajya magazine. At this time, he feared that the Cold War world was confronted with the dual dangers of nuclear holocaust and greed.134 If one threatened physical destruction, the other risked the degradation of mankind’s soul. He campaigned actively for world peace and nuclear disarmament and urged the embrace of religion to combat these dangers.135 However, unlike the Hindu revivalists, Rajagopalachari was tolerant of whatever religion someone might want to assume and stressed that the state should offer ‘impartial encouragement of religions’.136 This would help citizens cultivate the moral standards required to safeguard democracy. Rajagopalachari described administrative corruption as the major threat to democracy and proposed measures to limit the influence of money and vested interests on politics. In India and decolonizing Asia at large, he wrote, recent emancipation from monarchy and colonialism had not yet brought good government. Instead, government mainly served vested interests. Especially in societies without good traditions of popular government, he worried that an army leader could easily fill the leadership vacuum. Like the world at large, political order in a democracy was intrinsically fragile and required constant vigilance.137 One reform he proposed to strengthen Indian democracy was isolating administrative appointments and promotions from the influence of elections. Like in the case of the Indian judiciary, this meant these appointments and promotions would be the sole responsibility of the administrative branch.138 Second, he suggested attacking the role of money in politics by conducting elections like the Census. Government would send non-party-affiliated mobile units to collect ballot papers at each house. Through such a reform, ‘the task of bringing voters to the booth — which in one way or another is the cause of all the expenditure now incurred by parties and individual candidates — would become a natural function’.139 Supplementing this idea was Rajagopalachari’s proposal for ceilings on corporate contributions and party spending in elections.140 The proposal Rajagopalachari would invest himself in was not legal. It was to introduce conservative ideological opposition to the Congress. He was concerned that to justify its leadership, Congress had swung to the Left and risked embracing totalitarianism.141 He asserted that ‘A real two-party system would alone furnish the healthy opportunity for beneficient [sic] osmosis. There would be no osmosis but meaningless dilution if we cut out this dividing membrane’.142 An alternative to the Congress would provide the necessary pressure on the system for good government. Otherwise, he warned of ‘some form of fascism’ as ‘the lessons of history in the other backward and colonial areas of the world’ had shown.143 In an extraordinary Swarajya article that included a warning from Soviet writer Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago of the emptiness of idealist rhetoric, he asserted that ‘to conserve is to look after what is good and not to let the thoughtless ruin what is essential and good, in a hunt after will-o’-the-wisps’.144 He dedicated himself to this opposition party for the rest of his life. Masani helped make this a reality, bringing the Forum of Free Enterprise’s support behind Swatantra and managing daily affairs as the general secretary.145 But it was Shenoy who helped base the Swatantra platform in a critique of contemporary political economy and the language of markets. Thanks to the economist, Rajagopalachari constructed new justifications of positions tracing older intellectual genealogies. Consider how Rajagopalachari reworked his arguments against land redistribution. From a defence of contract based on customary principles such as the ryotwari settlement of owner-proprietorship followed in the Madras Presidency during the colonial period, he moved to equating individual freedom with private property rights. He argued that compensation for landowners needed to be at ‘market rates’, the way that shareholders were compensated for selling shares on the stock market, which was far more than the government proposed.146 Rajagopalachari drew on literature produced by MPS members sent to him by Shenoy to both legitimate his positions and identify Swatantra as part of a global movement.147 Rajagopalachari wrote back asking questions and seeking clarifications about jargon. Once explained, Rajagopalachari would write in Swarajya, citing Shenoy appreciatively.148 To Shenoy, the fact that consumption of food-grains and cloth — both price controlled — had not increased measurably meant that planning had failed. He argued that planning’s benefits had accrued mainly to the privileged, ‘Congress Party men by the thousands, corrupt officials responsible for the issue of licences and permits, contractors engaged in the public-sector projects, the beneficiaries of community-development projects, traders, businessmen and industrialists’.149 Impressed, Rajagopalachari asked for confirmation that he understood the argument correctly; the beneficiaries of increased per capita income and economic growth were ‘those who have been benefitted by the licencing policies of the Government’ and ‘those people who are absorbed in the expanded bureaucracy and the wage earning classes in the industrial sector’.150 Inflation provided the key link to explaining why that consumption had not increased for most people. Rajagopalachari began to label ‘licences and permits’ as an oppressive technology of the state: ‘The men who obtain licences and permits may differ if the rulers be Congressmen or Communists, but the principle of total ownership by the State is common to both. The distribution of patronage may differ but they both agree on the suppression of the individual’.151 ‘Permit-and-licence raj ’, the reworded version of this idea synthesized moral, institutional and economic critiques of Congress-led government. It indicted bureaucratic corruption, vested interests and the state of living after freedom from British rule.152 The oligarchic coalition of Congress politicians, big business and bureaucrats he identified was the obverse of Rajagopalachari’s constructive suggestions for electoral and administrative reform. The terminology of raj was an expression of what the social scientist Albert Hirschman called the ‘jeopardy hypothesis’ in his influential discussion of reactionary rhetoric.153 It was a new form of raj that jeopardized the most cherished thing that had been secured in recent memory — freedom from the raj. Ending licence raj under the Congress was the objective of the Swatantra Party. Rajagopalachari was silent or vague on multiple issues. International trade is one such black box. But he was clear that redistributive activities fell outside the ambit of the state. In this regard, he urged voluntary public-spirited efforts of charity as actions in accordance with dharma. He cited the ancient Tamil notion of oppuravu (philanthropy), and Gandhi’s idea of the wealthy behaving as trustees for the poor, as ideas that had long-standing origins and ought to be followed.154 Rajagopalachari pointed appreciatively to the prevalence of philanthropic initiatives and ethos in the United States as something that helped to bring ‘better and more equitable social conditions’.155 Just as Masani embraced building the economy as part of the duties of citizenship and Shenoy invoked shramdan to help contribute to infrastructure projects linking urban to rural areas, Rajagopalachari offered his own suggestions. Rajagopalachari’s economic conservatism drew from the experience of small-town and agrarian society. From an interest in public administration and a broader suspicion of centralized state power, he improvised a defence of organic change in the economy. Honest administration, fiscal rectitude, and decontrol were the hallmarks of his economically conservative policy prescriptions. By removing money’s influence from elections and helping to create a two-party system, he hoped to save India from the road to serfdom. IV Conclusion Anti-communism helped produce a contingent convergence of ideas from diverse actors in the aftermath of the Indian nationalist movement engaged in a battle for ideas unfolding in an unlikely place — the non-aligned world. It made strange bedfellows of a man hankering after an American-style capitalism, a Hindu revivalist for whom the ideal Indian economic policy was that pursued by West Germany, and an austere man nostalgic for an agrarian past. These publicists, embedded in transnational Cold War networks, came together as partisans of a ‘free economy’ to be delivered at the national level by the Swatantra Party. Indian economic conservatism selectively borrowed the rhetoric of Western free-market advocacy but had locally distinctive features.156 It was not grounded in a sophisticated theory of markets. With the exception of trying to safeguard the right to property, the idea of encasing market forces from politics through the law does not appear to have been of any importance.157 The individualism of this free-market advocacy did not hollow out a sense of social obligation. A critical component of this economic conservatism, related to ideals of social unity from the nationalist movement, was the idea of individuals making active efforts for the economic betterment of their compatriots and the nation. Attention to what the late C. A. Bayly called the ‘upward hermeneutic’ of how ‘local circumstances and quotidian reflection on them which informed ideological change’ has shown how ideas take circuitous paths rather than diffusing outwards from the minds of experts.158 Swatantra was not the only political organization to have adherents to economic conservatism. It was merely the party with its most pronounced expression. As one scholar notes, ‘By far the most disturbing aspect of the challenge to the national Congress leadership was the similarity between Swatantra’s aggressive antagonism to government controls over the economy, and deep-seated resentment among strategic elites of the Congress Party over the same policies’.159 After it collapsed in the early 1970s, Swatantra members joined other parties with other primary agendas and the language of economic conservatism was submerged. But it did not go away. The chorus of voices described here who expressed little confidence in the idea of the welfare state and judged the state mainly on issues such as inflation and corruption became more mainstream in subsequent decades.160 Reform-minded Congress Party politicians and administrators, and regional parties would echo the Swatantra leaders and use windows of opportunity provided by crises or demanded by international institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank to make reforms in accordance with their beliefs.161 One of these people was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (1932–) a key architect of the 1991 liberalization of the Indian economy.162 His inspiration to become an economist was Masani’s Our India.163 Following the liberalization of the Indian economy, the language of economic conservatism has assumed prominence once again in public discourse. That language helped the Hindu nationalist BJP to win a majority of seats in the parliamentary elections of 2014 and 2019 by smearing the Congress with corruption and promising good governance.164 The BJP has brought a strangely ambiguous version of economic conservatism that combines tax cuts with welfare programmes, the disinvestment of large public enterprises and the punishment of the cash economy through demonetization.165 But it has been combined with an ethnic nationalism unambiguously devoid of a secular content. Almost six decades after Swatantra first appeared on the electoral map, diverse actors have come together again to suggest its revival as an alternative to the BJP. As in the past, Swatantra and its forgotten figures are being revived to contest a new one-party dominant system.166 But it is being done in different ways. A think-tank called the Centre for Civil Society has spearheaded the initiative to digitize Freedom First, Indian Libertarian, and the pamphlets of the Forum of Free Enterprise through a portal called Indian Liberals.167 The Centre has also produced edited volumes on B. R. Shenoy, Milton Friedman, dissent on socialism, and Aarthik Swatantra (Economic Freedom).168 The editors of the new Swarajya magazine list commitment to democracy, free markets, individual freedom, individual enterprise, gender equality and equality of opportunity as well as ‘separation of religion from politics’ and ‘secularism that does not pander’. They consider themselves to be true to the ideas of C. Rajagopalachari.169 Finally, Indian public intellectuals of varying political persuasions seek a revival of Swatantra to thwart religious majoritarianism. Amartya Sen has expressed his wish that the Swatantra Party would be revived to prevent the ascent of the Hindu Right.170 The historian Ramachandra Guha has suggested that India has no conservative intellectuals and offered Rajagopalachari as a worthy model for a rejuvenated Indian conservatism.171 A leading business daily has gone further, calling Rajagopalachari the ‘icon’ India needs today.172 Whereas Indian society in the 1960s was perhaps ill-suited to embrace Swatantra’s ideas, the emergence of new middle classes in India in the aftermath of economic liberalization possibly furnishes a new electoral constituency for this group. And while some big businesses have profited immensely from BJP rule, others who feel that the government is not doing enough and point to economic slowdown might be more sympathetic to an unambiguous market-sympathetic electoral party.173 There are also other dynamics at play. The electoral decimation of the Congress, and the largest protests in almost fifity years against the BJP’s anti-minority Citizenship Amendment Act suggest that conditions for the rebirth of a secular conservative party are advantageous.174 Footnotes * Thanks to Sunil Amrith, Rohit De, Ramachandra Guha, Tim Harper, Duncan Kelly and Ian Kumekawa for their suggestions. I am especially grateful to Srinath Raghavan and Emma Rothschild for their incisive comments on multiple drafts and steadfast support on the long road to publication. 1 M. R. Masani to C. Rajagopalachari, 14 Jan. 1959: Instalment IV, C. Rajagopalachari Papers (hereafter CRP), Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (hereafter NMML). 2 B. R. Shenoy, ‘Basic Economic Policy’ (1959): Subject File 41, Instalment VI-XI, CRP, NMML, 736–47. This was enclosed with correspondence from Masani dated 22 July 1959, ibid., 736. 3 The Indian National Congress (1885–) was India’s chief political organization and stood at the forefront of the nationalist movement. During the transfer of power in 1946–7, it took over the Government of India and formed the government after the first elections in 1951–2. The Congress also won every state election conducted at that time. Although it began to lose individual states from 1957, the party remained in power at the Centre until 1977. Stanley A. Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: The Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton, 1968). 4 Shenoy, ‘Basic Economic Policy’, 737. 5 Howard L. Erdman, The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism (New York, 1967). 6 On the importance of the idea of totalitarianism to anti-communism in the West, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York, 1995). 7 Ramchandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York, 2007), 201–25; Venu Madhav Govindu and Deepak Malghan, The Web of Freedom: J. C. Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle for Economic Justice (New Delhi, 2016). 8 See, for example, Asit Ranjan Mishra, ‘New Industrial Policy Not Before Elections’, Livemint, 4 Mar. 2019; Amy Kazmin, ‘Modi Tackles “Licence-Raj” with a Thousand Cuts’, Financial Times, 21 Sept. 2014. 9 Rob Jenkins, ‘International Development Institutions and National Economic Contexts: Neoliberalism Encounters India’s Indigenous Political Traditions’, Economy and Society, xxxii (2003), 593. 10 See the suggestions in C. A. Bayly, ‘The Ends of Liberalism and the Political Thought of Nehru’s India’, Modern Intellectual History, xii (2015), 607. 11 The value of this contextual approach is underscored by Duncan Bell in ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory, xlii, no. 6 (2014). On the risks of failing to do so in the Indian context, see Neilesh Bose, ‘The Cannibalized Career of Liberalism in Colonial India’, Modern Intellectual History, xii, no. 2 (2015). On the diffuseness of conservatism, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996), 209, and Jennifer Burns, ‘In Search of a Usable Past: Conservative Thought in America’, Modern Intellectual History, vii, no. 2 (2010). 12 Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, Mass., 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, 2012). 13 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005). 14 Craufurd D. Goodwin, Walter Lippmann: Public Economist (Cambridge, Mass., 2014); David Todd, Free Trade and Its Enemies in France, 1814–1851 (Cambridge, 2015). 15 Rajni Kothari, Politics in India (New Delhi, 1970). 16 Two exemplars of this burgeoning genre are Burgin, The Great Persuasion, and Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). 17 In that sense, it also calls into question the terminology of ‘neoliberalism’ itself. On these debates, see Angus Burgin’s comprehensive review essay, ‘The Neoliberal Turn’ (unpubd MS). I am grateful to Burgin for sharing his unpublished work. 18 See, for example, Shashi Bhushan, Non-Alignment: Legacy of Nehru (New Delhi, 1976); K. P. Misra (ed.), Non-Alignment: Frontiers and Dynamics (New Delhi, 1982); Jaipal Rikhi, Non-Alignment: Origins, Growth, and Potential for World Peace (New Delhi, 1983). 19 David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, Mass., 2018). 20 Others included the Congress Socialist Party, the Leslie Sawhney Programme of Training for Democracy, Liberal International and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. S. V. Raju, Minoo Masani (New Delhi, 2007). 21 This expulsion was fomented by a rivalry with Stalin but had longer-term origins in Trotsky’s disagreement with aspects of the Leninist programme such as the New Economic Policy, which he believed failed to give adequate support to agriculture and state-owned enterprise. Other differences included Trotsky’s internationalism and critique of Stalinist bureaucracy. Joshua Rubenstein, Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life (New Haven, 2011), 155–202. 22 Estimates range from approximately seven hundred thousand to the millions. See Michael Ellman, ‘Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments’, Europe–Asia Studies, liv, no. 7 (2002). Charles Wesley Ervin, Tomorrow is Ours: The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon, 1935–48 (Colombo, 2006). 23 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London, 1995), 350. 24 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Democracy and Development in India’, in The Enchantment of Democracy and India: Politics and Ideas (Ranikhet, 2010), 130–1. 25 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 358. 26 Paul McGarr, ‘ “Quiet Americans in India”: The CIA and the Politics of Intelligence in Cold War South Asia’, Diplomatic History, xxxviii, no. 5 (2014); Engerman, Price of Aid, 127–8. 27 ‘The Cold War in India’, Eastern Economist, 8 Aug. 1952, 1. 28 S. R. Joey Long, Safe for Decolonization: The Eisenhower Administration, Britain, and Singapore (Kent, OH, 2011), 57–80. 29 Paul McGarr has hinted at this history but focuses mainly on the CIA in his discussion of the propaganda wars between the United States and the Soviets in the 1960s. McGarr, ‘ “Quiet Americans in India” ’. 30 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Annual Report of the Registrar of Newspapers for India, 1960, 2 vols. (New Delhi, 1960–1). 31 Robert A. Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis, 1986), 38; Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, trans. David Kettler and Volker Meja ([1925]; London, 1986), 99. 32 Nisbet, Conservatism, 38. 33 Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 355. 34 The standard definition of classical liberalism draws from John Stuart Mill’s formulation as an individualist philosophy that assigns paramount importance to liberty and rationality and is underpinned by the understanding that these two concepts are interlocked with a notion of progress. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 147–67. On the appropriation of its tenets by conservatives in the twentieth century, see Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (New York, 2018), 103–26. 35 Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 196. See also Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, 2019). 36 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010). See also C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge, 2012). 37 Fleeing religious persecution in Iran in the late seventh century, the Parsis were Zoroastrians who settled in western India. Ashok V. Desai, ‘The Origins of Parsi Enterprise’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, v, no. 4 (1968); Amartya Sen, ‘The Commodity Pattern of British Enterprise in Early Indian Industrialization, 1854–1914’, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Economic History, Aix-en-Provence, 1962 (Paris, 1965), ii, 781–808; Mitra Sharafi, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (Cambridge, 2014). 38 Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–79), who hailed from Bihar and was educated at Berkeley, played an instrumental role in forming the Congress Socialist Party. A hero of the anti-imperial Quit India Movement (1942–4), he abandoned electoral politics to focus on social work during the 1950s. However, by the late 1960s, he returned to Bihar politics and subsequently organized opposition against the Congress. For this, he was jailed during the Emergency of 1975–7. After his release, he helped organize a ruling coalition led by the Janata Party, which defeated the Congress in the 1977 elections. Ajit Bhattacharjea, Jayaprakash Narayan: A Political Biography (New Delhi, 1975). 39 These details are recounted in the first volume of his memoirs. M. R. Masani, Bliss Was It in That Dawn: A Political Memoir Up to Independence (New Delhi, 1977), 163. 40 So far, this paragraph follows Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Delhi, 1983), 258, 318, 333, 370. 41 Minoo Masani, Soviet Sidelights (Bombay, 1936). 42 Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington, Del., 2002). 43 James Burnham, ‘Letter of Resignation from the Workers Party’, Fourth International, i (1940), 106–7; Francis P. Sempa, Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century (London, 2002), 73. 44 Burnham helped found the biweekly National Review, the quintessential journalistic outlet of the post-war American conservative movement, and served as its first editor. His column called ‘The Third World War’ urged conservatives not to get complacent about the Soviet threat. David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton, 2010), 66–7. See also Binoy Kampmark, ‘The First Neo-Conservative: James Burnham and the Origins of a Movement’, Review of International Studies, xxxvii, no. 4 (2011). 45 Big business was by now financing a range of political groups to support the objective of ending British rule. Tata enjoyed special prestige because they had, despite hostile British policy, successfully established themselves as a textile, iron and steel firm. Working for Tata was still consistent with Masani’s anti-colonial nationalism. On big business and the Congress, see Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics: The Indigenous Capitalist Class and the Rise of the Congress Party (Cambridge, 1985); Tirthankar Roy, India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012), 210–23. On the Tatas and industrialization, see Sen, ‘The Commodity Pattern of British Enterprise in Early Indian Industrialization’. 46 Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India under the Raj (Oxford, 2006); Rimi B. Chatterjee and Padmini Ray Murray, ‘India’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), History of Oxford University Press, Volume III: 1866 to 1970 (Oxford, 2013), 649–72. 47 Masani, Bliss Was It in That Dawn, 157. 48 Minoo Masani, Our India (London, 1940); Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), 171–2. 49 Masani, Our India, 151, quoted in Jayal, 172. 50 Raju, Minoo Masani, xvi; M. R. Masani, Too Much Politics, Too Little Citizenship (Bombay, 1969). 51 On the importance of duty, see Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, 340; Scruton, Conservatism, 55–79. 52 Minoo Masani, Picture of a Plan (New Delhi, 1945), 38. On the intended resemblance to Our India, see J. R. D. Tata to Purushotamdas Thakurdas, 3 Feb. 1944: File 291, Part One, Thakurdas Papers, NMML. 53 Minoo Masani, Socialism Reconsidered (Bombay, 1944), 42. 54 Ibid., 59. 55 ‘The Fifteen-Year Plan’: File K-135, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Papers, Private Archives Section, National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI). Five of the eight authors were on the Tata payroll. 56 Sir Purushotamdas Thakurdas et al., A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1945). 57 Masani, Picture of a Plan, 63. 58 Minoo Masani, A Plea for a Mixed Economy (Bombay, 1947), 37. 59 Ibid., 93. For an intellectual history of Wilsonian ideas and their relevance for anti-colonial thought, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007). Masani’s views were informed by close engagement and even emulation of the historical writings of H. G. Wells, whose campaign for a world state was shaped heavily by interpretation of the United States’ relationship to the world. Duncan Bell, ‘Founding the World State: H. G. Wells on Empire and the English-Speaking Peoples’, International Studies Quarterly, lxii (2018). 60 Masani, Bliss Was It in That Dawn, 159. 61 Minoo Masani, Our Growing Human Family (Bombay, 1950), 70–4, 84, 101–2. 62 Srinath Raghavan, Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia (New York, 2018), 165–71. 63 G. Balachandran (ed.), India and the World Economy, 1850–1950 (New Delhi, 2003), 1–45 (editor’s intro). 64 A selection of publications by the Democratic Research Service includes: Communist Conspiracy at Madurai: An Analysis of the Private Proceedings of the Third Congress of the CPI with Full Text of Secret Documents (Bombay, 1954); Communist Double Talk at Palghat: A Probe into the Private Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Indian Communist Party at Palghat held in April 1956, with Texts of Some Secret Documents (Bombay, 1956); Indian Communist Party Documents, 1930–56 (Bombay, 1957); Kerala under Communism (Bombay, 1959). 65 Margery Sabin, Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1765–2000 (New York, 2002), 142; Eric D. Pullin, ‘ “Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions That We Hold”: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58’, Intelligence and National Security, xxvi, no. 2–3 (2011), 394. 66 Eric Pullin, ‘The Culture of Funding Culture: The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, in Christopher R. Moran and Christopher J. Murphy (eds.), Intelligence Studies in Britain and the US: Historiography since 1945 (Edinburgh, 2013), 47–64. 67 Chester Bowles to Kennedy, 18 Nov. 1952: Folder 267, Box 95, Papers of Chester Bowles, Manuscripts Collection, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., USA. 68 Government of India, Industrial Policy Resolution, 1956 (New Delhi, 1956). 69 Uma Kapila, ‘Industrial Development and Policies since Independence’, in Uma Kapila (ed.), Indian Economy since Independence, 23rd edn (New Delhi, 2012), 389–91. 70 Stanley A. Kochanek, Business and Politics in India (Berkeley, 1973), 206. 71 Forum of Free Enterprise, Manifesto (Bombay, 1956); these encapsulate ideas articulated in A. D. Shroff, Forum of Free Enterprise, Free Enterprise and Democracy (Bombay, 1956). 72 Kochanek, Business and Politics in India, 207. 73 Speech on the Finance Bill in the Lok Sabha on 26 Aug. 1957, and Speech in the Lok Sabha on 28 May 1957 in the course of the General Discussion on the Budget, reprinted in Minoo Masani, A Plea for Realism: Some Speeches Delivered in Parliament between May and August 1957 (Bombay, 1957), 35–43, 1–10, respectively. 74 Speeches from the 29 May 1959 Bangalore meeting were reproduced as For Freedom, Farm and Family (Bombay, 1959). 75 These included not just Burnham, but also Max Eastman, John Dos Passos and Will Herberg. John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975). 76 Dharma is one of the most central and ambiguous terms in Hinduism, and carries a range of meanings from cosmic law, to order, to religion itself. The definition adopted here is based on the context of use. Ingo Strauch, ‘Dharma’, in Knut A. Jacobsen et al. (eds.), Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online (2018), available at <https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-encyclopedia-of-hinduism/dharma-COM_2050090?s.num=0> (accessed 10 Apr. 2019); B. R. Shenoy, ‘My Idea of a Welfare State’, reprinted in Indian Libertarian, v, no. 18 (1957), 17–19. 77 ‘Semantic Trojan Horse of Nehru Planning’, Indian Libertarian, v, no. 15 (1957), 14. 78 Sarkar, Modern India, 72–4, 150–1. M. Bhatt and M. Trivedi, ‘Bellicoth Raghunath Janardan Shenoy: A Biographical Sketch’, in Mahesh P. Bhatt and Mukund S. Trivedi (eds.), Liberalism and Less Developed Countries: Essays in Memory of Professor Bellicoth Raghunath Shenoy (Ahmedabad, 1982), xiii. 79 ‘B. R. Shenoy, London School of Economics and Political Science Academic Record, MSc Economics 1930–1’, London School of Economics Library, London, UK (hereafter ‘Shenoy, Academic Record’). 80 Located in northern India on the banks of the river Ganges, Banaras (now Varanasi) is the greatest of pilgrimage sites in Hinduism. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New York, 1982); Jagannath Prasad Misra, Madan Mohan Malaviya and the Indian Freedom Movement (Oxford, 2016). 81 C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1975), 215–9. On cow protection and communal tensions, see Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Rallying around the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c.1888–1917’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II (New Delhi, 1983), 60–129. 82 He had been president of Congress sessions in 1909, 1918, 1932 and 1933. 83 Sarkar, Modern India, 125–6. 84 Both families hailed from the same city of Allahabad. On the Nehrus, see Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics, 213–4. 85 Malaviya’s successor as Mahasabha President, V. D. Savarkar (1883–1966), would go on to theorize Hindutva (Hinduness). Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London, 1996), 25–33. 86 ‘Shenoy, Academic Record’. 87 Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) was one of the leading economists of the twentieth century. His early work concerned the theory of money and economic fluctuations, but this gave way to studies on the connections between knowledge, information, the economy, institutions and society. Hayek supported a decentralized market system with free competition. His most famous work was The Road to Serfdom (1944), a polemical tract written against state-based economic planning. He received the Nobel Prize in 1974. Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago, 2004). 88 Ibid., 156–63. 89 Ibid., 176–81; Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–37 (London, 1992), 454. 90 Donald Moggridge, British Monetary Policy, 1924–31: The Norman Conquest of $4.86 (Cambridge, 1972). 91 Positions included Commissioner of Currency for the government of Ceylon (1940–2), Director of Rural Economics and Monetary Research at the Reserve Bank of India (1945–6), and Alternate Executive Director of the IMF and World Bank (1951–3). Bhatt and Trivedi (eds.), Liberalism and Less Developed Countries; B. R. Shenoy, ‘An Equation for the Price-Level of New Investment Goods’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, xlvii (1932); B. R. Shenoy ‘The Interdependence of the Price-Levels P, P′ and π’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, xlviii (1934). 92 His academic papers were collected and published as Theoretical Vision: B. R. Shenoy, ed. Parth J. Shah and R. K. Amin (New Delhi, 2004). 93 A number of these essays were collected and published as Economic Prophecies: B. R. Shenoy, ed. Parth J. Shah and R. K. Amin (New Delhi, 2004). 94 Times of India, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Database Online, available at <https://www.proquest.com/libraries/academic/news-newspapers/>. 95 B. R. Shenoy, ‘East and West Berlin: A Study in Free vs Controlled Economy’, Swarajya, 6 Aug. 1960. 96 The reality was more complex. West Germany also had an active state welfare programme. Christian L. Glossner, The Making of the German Post-War Economy: Political Communication and Public Reception of the Social Market Economy after World War Two (London, 2009), 47–60. 97 ‘Sound recordings of the Mont Pelerin Society meeting at Oxford in 1959’: Tape 20, Side 1, Box 61, Papers of the Mont Pelerin Society, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif. (hereafter HIA); B. R. Shenoy, ‘Free Market Economy for India’: mimeo, Box 79, Folder 13, Friedrich Hayek Papers, HIA. 98 Burgin, Great Persuasion. On the spread of the ideas of its progenitors, see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, Mass., 2009). 99 Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was the most prominent advocate of free markets in the twentieth century and spent much of his career at the University of Chicago. By the 1960s, he had taken over the MPS. He was most famous for his work on monetary policy and exchange rates, and he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976. Lanny Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (Basingstoke, 2007); Shenoy to Hayek, 13 Oct. 1959, ibid.; Friedman to Shenoy, 16 Dec. 1959: Box 33, Folder 10, Milton Friedman Papers, HIA. 100 Hayek to Shenoy, 20 Oct. 1959: Friedrich Hayek Papers, HIA. 101 The ‘Plan Frame’ was a tentative framework for the Plan. This paragraph follows Shenoy, ‘A Note of Dissent on the Memorandum of the Panel of Economists’, 22 Apr. 1955, reprinted in Planning Commission, Papers Relating to the Formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan (New Delhi, 1955), 19–32. 102 Medha Kudaisya, ‘ “A Mighty Adventure”: Institutionalising the Idea of Planning in Post-Colonial India, 1947–60’, Modern Asian Studies, xliii, no. 4 (2008). 103 A. Vasudevan, Deficit Financing, Controls, and Movement of Prices in India since 1947 (Bombay, 1967), 123–68. 104 See the discussion in Gyanesh Kudaisya, A Republic in the Making: India in the 1950s (New Delhi, 2017). 105 Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘A State of Contradictions: The Post-Colonial State in India’, in Sudipta Kaviraj, The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas (New York, 2010), 222–4. 106 A. H. Hanson, The Process of Planning: A Study of India’s Five-Year Plans, 1950–64 (London, 1966), 154–8, 165–70. 107 Engerman, Price of Aid, 159–89. 108 This refers to the standard metric of wholesale price inflation. H. L. Chandhok, Wholesale Price Statistics, India, 1947–78 (New Delhi, 1978), 147. 109 This paragraph follows Shenoy, Problems of Indian Economic Development (Madras, 1958), 71–2, 89–93, 192–239. 110 Hansen, quoted in Raghavan, Fierce Enigmas, 166. 111 Shramdan had been introduced in rural areas by the Planning Commission, but it was part of the village development scheme that received limited resources and attention. See Jagdeesh Kodesia, ‘Nehru’s Contribution’, in N. B. Das Gupta et al. (eds.), Nehru and Planning in India (New Delhi, 1993), 238. 112 Guha, India after Gandhi, 223. 113 Shenoy to Friedman, 20 Jan. 1959: Friedrich Hayek Papers, HIA. 114 Milton Friedman, ‘The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates’, in Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago, 1953), 157–203. On the Bretton Woods system, see Michael D. Bordo, ‘The Bretton Woods International Monetary System: A Historical Overview’, in Michael D. Bordo and Barry Eichengreen (eds.), A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System: Lessons for International Monetary Reform (Chicago, 1993), 3–98. 115 For example, Shenoy appealed to Newsweek editor and MPS member Henry Hazlitt to write a column on India for the American press and have it syndicated in India. Shenoy to Hazlitt, 13 Oct. 1961: ‘B. R. Shenoy, 1961–78’ file, Henry Hazlitt Digital Archives-Beta, available at <http://hazlitt.ufm.edu>. Shenoy also requested Hayek’s permission on behalf of a student to translate The Road to Serfdom and Constitution of Liberty into Gujarati. Shenoy to Hayek, 22 Dec. 1965: Friedrich Hayek Papers, HIA. 116 See, for example, B. R. Shenoy, Indian Planning and the Common Man (Bombay, 1961); Nicole Sackley, ‘The Road from Serfdom: Economic Storytelling and Narratives of India in the Rise of Neoliberalism’, History and Technology, xxxi, no. 4 (2015). 117 Arthur Shenfield to Henry Hazlitt, 26 July 1974: ‘Sh-Z’ file, Henry Hazlitt Digital Archives-Beta, available at <http://hazlitt.ufm.edu>. 118 Shenoy, ‘Image of the Entrepreneur’, text of a paper from the 18th Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, 1970: Annual General Meeting Files, Papers of the Mont Pelerin Society, Liberaal Archief, Ghent, Belgium. 119 Vasanthi Srinivasan, Gandhi’s Conscience Keeper: C. Rajagopalachari and Indian Politics (Ranikhet, 2010); Antony R. H. Copley, The Political Career of C. Rajagopalachari: A Moralist in Politics (New Delhi, 1978). 120 Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Images of Dharma: The Epic World of C. Rajagopalachari (Delhi, 1985). 121 David Washbrook, ‘Country Politics: Madras 1880 to 1930’, Modern Asian Studies, vii, no. 3 (1973). On the reaction to Rajagopalachari’s policies and leadership, see Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (Berkeley, 1997), 101–2, 169–72. 122 M. S. S. Pandian, Brahmin, Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present (Ranikhet, 2007), 188–92, 200–10. 123 Rajmohan Gandhi, Rajaji: A Life (New Delhi, 1997), 429–31. 124 Monica Felton, I Meet Rajaji (London, 1962), 37, 66. 125 Christopher John Baker, An Indian Rural Economy, 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (New Delhi, 1984). 126 Gandhi’s non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement (1920–2) was initiated in the aftermath of the extension of wartime emergency measures of preventative detention and imprisonment without trial and the massacre of non-violent protestors in Amritsar. The movement included forms of protest such as the boycott of British goods, refusal to work in British firms, and the spinning of Indian textiles. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition and After: A History of Modern India (New Delhi, 2016), 297–310. 127 C. Rajagopalachari, A Jail Diary (Madras, 1922), 63–4. 128 C. Rajagopalachari, The Bhagavad-Gita: Abridged and Explained, Setting Forth the Hindu Creed, Discipline and Ideals (Madras, 1935). 129 C. Rajagopalachari and K. Santhanam, Oorukku Nallathu (Madras, 1939), reprinted in Rajaji Katturaigal (Madras, 1944), 151–74, 168–9. 130 David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule: Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986). 131 Sandipto Dasgupta, ‘ “A Language Which Is Foreign to Us”: Continuities and Anxieties in the Making of the Indian Constitution’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, xxxiv, no. 2 (2014). 132 Rajagopalachari and Santhanam, Oorukku Nallathu, 170–3. 133 This paragraph largely follows Copley, Political Career of C. Rajagopalachari. 134 Rajagopalachari, ‘Almost Personal’, Swarajya, 28 Feb. 1959. 135 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Positive Co-Existence’, New Reasoner, iv (1958), 25–6. At the age of 83, he left India for the first time to urge President Kennedy to stop nuclear testing as part of the Gandhi Peace Foundation. ‘Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Noted Indian Statesman, Dies’, New York Times, 26 Dec. 1972, available at <https://www.nytimes.com/1972/12/26/archives/new-jersey-pages-chakravarti-rajagopalachari-noted-indian-statesman.html> (accessed 15 Apr. 2019). 136 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Future of Democracy in Asia’, Hyphen, Sept. 1961, reprinted in Satyameva Jayate: A Collection of Articles Contributed to Swarajya and Other Journals (Chennai, 2005), 219–22. 137 Ibid. 138 The discussion is around an article written by C. Rajagopalachari, called ‘Recipe for Good Government’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 15 Aug. 1957, as cited in Felton, I Meet Rajaji, 68. 139 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Expensiveness of Elections’, Swarajya, 26 Jan. 1957. 140 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Donations to Congress Party Chest’, Swarajya, 13 Aug. 1960; C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Company Donations to Party Funds’, Swarajya, 27 Aug. 1960. 141 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Our Democracy’, Swarajya, 17 Aug. 1957. 142 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Wanted: Real Two-Party System’, Swarajya, 31 Dec. 1960. 143 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘New Political Values’, Swarajya, 29 June 1957. 144 Doctor Zhivago, a classic that takes place between the Russian Revolution and the outbreak of the Second World War, captured the individual costs of progress for society and was read in the West as a major anti-communist work. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York, 1958). C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Lost Its Anchor’, Swarajya, 11 Apr. 1959. 145 Erdman, Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism, 65–71. 146 Anglo-Hindu law gave legal status to a number of pre-colonial customs in land settlement as well as various other aspects of social life. David A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State, and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, xv, no. 3 (1981). C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Compulsion in Agriculture’, Swarajya, 22 Nov. 1958; C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Where Are We Drifting?’, Swarajya, 14 Feb. 1959; C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Philosophy of the Swatantra Party’, Swarajya, 20 Feb. 1960. 147 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘The Grinding of the Individual to Nothingness’, Swarajya, 25 Mar. 1961; C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Prof Friedman Deals with an Enigma’, Swarajya, 2 Apr. 1966. 148 Shenoy to Rajagopalachari, 27 Aug. 1960: Microfilm Roll Accession No. 10937, Instalment II, CRP, NMML. 149 Ibid. 150 Rajagopalachari to Shenoy, 30 Aug. 1960: Microfilm Roll Accession No. 10937, Instalment II, CRP, NMML. 151 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Congressmen and Communists’, Swarajya, 22 Oct. 1960. 152 The first usage of the term was by Rajagopalachari at Swatantra meetings held in Bombay and Delhi during March 1961. ‘Borrowings by Government: C. R. Criticises Policy’, Hindu, 4 Mar. 1961. 153 Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 81–132. 154 Bidyut Chakrabarty, ‘Universal Benefit: Gandhi’s Doctrine of Trusteeship’, Modern Asian Studies, xlix, no. 2 (2015); C. Rajagopalachari, ‘Doctrine of Trusteeship’, Quest, April–June 1959, reproduced in Satyameva Jayate, vol. ii, 26–8; C. Rajagopalachari, ‘The Kural on Trusteeship’, Swarajya, 27 June 1959. 155 C. Rajagopalachari, ‘The Touchstone of Policy’, Swarajya, 21 Mar. 1959. 156 This points to the limitations of a global approach to intellectual history. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013). 157 On this, see Slobodian, Globalists. 158 C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties. 159 Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–2004, 2nd edn (New Delhi, 2005), 179. 160 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (New Delhi, 2003), 158. 161 P. N. Dhar, The Evolution of Economic Policy in India: Selected Essays (New Delhi, 2003); Rahul Mukherji, ‘India’s Aborted Liberalization — 1966’, Pacific Affairs, lxxiii (2000); Medha M. Kudaisya, ‘ “Reforms by Stealth”: Indian Economic Policy, Big Business and the Promise of the Shastri Years, 1964–1966’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, xxv (2002). For the 1970s picture, see John P. Lewis, India’s Political Economy: Governance and Reform (New Delhi, 1995). Atul Kohli’s influential hypothesis on the 1980s as the beginning of reforms to the domestic economy is outlined in ‘Politics of Economic Liberalization in India’, World Development, xvii, no. 3 (1989). 162 Singh spent much of his career working in key roles in the economic bureaucracy. He was prime minister of India from 2004–14. ‘Manmohan Singh’, Curriculum Vitae of Honorary Doctor, Visva Bharati University, India, available at <http://www.visvabharati.ac.in/files/6340200114_Manmohan.pdf> (accessed 13 Mar. 2019). 163 Manmohan Singh interview by Charlie Rose, 21 Sept. 2004, text reproduced in ‘Interview of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh on Charlie Rose Show’, Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, available at <http://www.mea.gov.in/interviews.htm?dtl/4565/Interview+of+Prime+Minister+Dr+Manmohan+Singh+on+Charlie+Rose+Show> (accessed 10 Feb. 2019). 164 Paul Wallace (ed.), India’s 2014 Elections: A Modi-led BJP Sweep (New Delhi, 2015); Rajdeep Sardesai, 2019: How Modi Won India (New Delhi, 2019). 165 Hindol Sengupta, ‘The Economic Mind of Narendra Modi’, ORF Issue Brief No. 318, Oct. 2019, Observer Research Foundation, available at <https://www.orfonline.org/research/economic-mind-narendra-modi-56004/> (accessed 15 Feb. 2020). The confusion is captured in the media. See, for example, Puja Mehra, ‘A Pro-Markets Worldview Seems Absent in BJP Government’s Policy Prescriptions’, Economic Times, 21 Nov. 2019. 166 Suhas Palshikar, ‘India’s Second Dominant Party System’, Economic and Political Weekly, lii (2017); Suhas Palshikar, ‘Towards Hegemony: BJP Beyond Electoral Dominance’, Economic and Political Weekly, liii (2018). 167 ‘Indian Liberals: An online archive of Indian liberal writings’, Indianliberals.in, available at <http://indianliberalis.in> (accessed 1 Mar. 2018). 168 Parth J. Shah (ed.), Friedman on India (New Delhi, 2000); Parth J. Shah (ed.), Profiles in Courage: Dissent on Indian Socialism (New Delhi, 2001); Theoretical Vision, ed. Shah and Amin; Economic Prophecies, ed. Shah and Amin; Parth J. Shah, Aarthik Swatantra ka Sangharsh (New Delhi, 2005). 169 ‘Our Editorial Philosophy’, #Swarajya, available at <https://swarajyamag.com/editorial-philosophy> (accessed 1 Feb. 2018). 170 Amartya Sen, A Wish a Day for a Week (London, 2014). 171 Ramachandra Guha, ‘In Absentia: Where are India’s Conservative Intellectuals?’, Caravan, 1 Mar. 2015, at <http://www.caravanmagazine.in/reportage/absentia-ramachandra-guha-indian-conservatives> (accessed 1 Mar. 2018). 172 ‘C. Rajagopalachari: The Icon India Needs Today’, Mint, 9 Dec. 2016, available at <https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/b7BmRSyqrO8LaTmz1yIv5L/C-Rajagopalachari-The-icon-India-needs-today.html> (accessed 8 Mar. 2020). 173 M. Rajshekhar, ‘Adani Power Project Was on the Brink of Bankruptcy — But the BJP Government in Gujarat Saved It’, Scroll.in, 6 Mar. 2019, available at <https://scroll.in/article/915109/adani-power-project-was-on-the-brink-of-bankruptcy-but-the-bjp-government-in-gujarat-saved-it> (accessed 10 Feb. 2020); Shivam Vij, ‘Why Haven’t Others in India Inc Questioned the Modi Government, Like Rahul Bajaj Did?’, Quartz, 2 Dec. 2019, available at <https://qz.com/india/1759300/why-rahul-bajaj-kiran-mazumdar-are-anomalies-in-india-inc/> (accessed 13 Feb. 2020). 174 Sanya Mansoor and Billy Perrigo, ‘ “This Is Not Just a Muslim Fight”: Inside the Anti-Citizenship Act Protests Rocking India’, Time, 18 Dec. 2019, available at <https://time.com/5752186/india-protests-citizenship-act/> (accessed 14 Feb. 2020). © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2020 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Contesting ‘Permit-And-Licence Raj’: Economic Conservatism And The Idea Of Democracy in 1950s India
JF - Past & Present
DO - 10.1093/pastj/gtaa013
DA - 2020-11-03
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/contesting-permit-and-licence-raj-economic-conservatism-and-the-idea-xi7In8mYA0
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -