At this crucial crossroads, perhaps it is worth reflecting upon the history of one Opposition party during the original era of one-party dominance. In 1967, when the Congress suffered its first major setback and lost power in seven out of 16 states, it was the Swatantra Party that emerged as the second largest party by seats in the Lok Sabha. The party also formed the official Opposition in three states and led a brief coalition government in Orissa. Although Swatantra was a conservative Right-wing formation, five of its commitments deserve our attention in India today.

The core of the Swatantra ideology was what its leaders called a free economy, which went against the conventional wisdom of State-led development championed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress. Although India was free from the British Raj, the Swatantra leaders concluded, it was living in a licence-permit raj. Today, this term is used as an epithet to describe the red tape associated with the pre-liberalisation Indian economy. But at the time, it was coined to suggest the risk of India’s descent into an oligarchy of bureaucrats in charge of distributing licences and permits, big businesses who financed the ruling party, and politicians from the ruling party. In contemporary India, the hold of big business on politics has increased with the elimination of caps on corporate donations, the widening of the ambit of foreign firms that can donate to political parties, the relaxation of donor reporting requirements, and the introduction of anonymous electoral bonds.

Swatantra embraced regional diversity. The party platform was devised by leaders from numerically small but influential communities in Southern and Western India, regions with long histories of overseas trade and a distinct pattern of land tenure during the colonial era. In Tamil Nadu, Swatantra helped forge a coalition in 1967 that brought down the Congress government in favour of a regional party. The Congress has since not returned to power in that state, one of India’s most well-developed. Swatantra also resisted the imposition of Hindi as a national language, suggesting practically that English should continue to be used in matters of government and to ease inter-state interaction.

Swatantra’s founders believed in and sought to uphold their conservative reading of the Constitution, but were strong supporters of its demand for secularism and helped author the section on fundamental rights. Four of its leaders served on the Constituent Assembly and considered that the Congress’s attempts at land reform compromised Article 31, the right to property. After the nationalisation of major public sector banks in 1969, a senior party leader successfully moved the Supreme Court to pay compensation to bank shareholders. By contrast, according to some prominent voices in the Indian Right-wing today, the Constitution appears to be something that has to be overhauled and rewritten rather than followed.

Swatantra further took pains to communicate and politicise discontent with economic policy. This came from a belief that the Indian electorate deserved robust economic growth and ought to take the government to task when it failed to deliver this. The party ran anti-inflation and anti-excess taxation days and communicated economic principles through extensive pamphlet literature. Leaders wrote frequently in the print public sphere about these issues.

In contrast to the Right-wing today, Swatantra broadly steered clear of religious sectarianism. Key leaders such as C Rajagopalachari, NG Ranga, and Minoo Masani marched alongside Mahatma Gandhi in the freedom struggle and embraced his vision of inter-religious unity. While there were majoritarian elements in the party such as KM Munshi, their agendas were kept in check. Rajagopalachari, in fact, wrote to Jana Sangh co-founder and Organiser editor KR Malkani to ask him to stop running articles about warlike Muslim kings and tyrants: “Not only do such stories serve no current purpose, but they do great harm,” he cautioned. Instead, he suggested that the magazine “adopt a more reasonable attitude when dealing with events and sections of people who are permanent elements of society and who are ready to cooperate in all our national efforts though they are not willing to give up their religion.”

Personally, I do not admire conservative politics. Nor am I interested in glorifying Swatantra. Undoubtedly, it was a party of the privileged that delivered a message that was both gendered and wilfully insensitive to distinctions of caste. It did not capture the popular imagination despite attempts to translate ideas into vernacular idioms. And so Swatantra’s disintegration by the 1970s was not all that surprising. But any realistic assessment of Indian politics as it is, rather than what some well-meaning people would wish it to be, needs to acknowledge the predominance of conservative interests. In that context, Swatantra offers a useful example from India’s past – of a gentler Right-wing committed to principles that even those on the other end of the political spectrum could appreciate.

INDIA’s members will have to strike many compromises. But it is worth holding on to some ideals, such as the ones to which Swatantra broadly adhered.

Aditya Balasubramanian is Senior Lecturer in History at Australian National University and the author of Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India. The views expressed are personal