Masani’s mettle

The electoral blitz conducted by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the recent national elections earned much praise and reaped rich rewards. But even back in 1959 when the Swatantra Party (SP) was born, one of its founders Minoo Masani attributed the success of the neophyte party to "modern techniques” and "political competence.” In an interview in May 1979 at The Hague with Frederik Bolkestein, then a member of the Netherlands parliament, reprinted in the July 2014 issue of Freedom First, Masani noted:
"We made the best of our limited resources. The other politicians of India lived in a different world. Brought up in the Labour Party in Britain I introduced modern techniques of publicity, propaganda, films and posters. After the first election we started nursing constituencies which was absolutely unknown in India. In India all parties adopt their candidates a few days before nomination. There is trouble between different castes and groups as to who should get what seat. It is done on a purely opportunistic basis. Now I said: ‘Nonsense. That is not how you should run a parliamentary democracy. You nominate your candidate the day after the last election and you give him five years to nurse his constituency and get him known. You give him resources and an office to work in and an agent. All these British concepts which I introduced were absolutely revolutionary. My party disagreed.’ They said: ‘We must watch the other candidate and then appoint a man of the right caste.’ That was considered smart: you oppose a Brahmin by a non-Brahmin and so on…
"So we nominated candidates from the word ‘go’ and by the middle of the term half of our candidates were in position. This paid dividends because many people got elected simply because they had worked in the constituency for three or four years which nobody else had.”

C. Rajagopalachari (left) with Minoo Masani

The word Swatantra was coined by C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) one of the co-founders of the Party along with Masani. "We came into existence in 1959 as a reaction to the fact that all parties in India were either communist or socialist and that there was no non-socialist party worth mentioning, except the Jana Sangh which was a denominational party,” noted Masani. "So Rajaji and I decided that it was time to have a liberal-conservative party. Rajaji was conservative and I was liberal. Professor N. G. Ranga, who was the president for many years, was an agrarian who belonged to the Green International (party)... These three elements came together to form this Party. Rajaji wanted to call it a conservative party but Ranga and I both objected on the ground that we were not prepared to join a conservative party. Jayaprakash (Narayan) wanted it. He said that India needed a conservative party, it was a conservative country, but we thought it was a non-starter. In the end Rajaji invented the world ‘Swatantra’ meaning self-determined, ‘Swa’ self and ‘tantra’ is a mechanism, so this means individual self-determination, freedom from within.”
Masani stepped down from the Party leadership following the Indira Gandhi "wave” of 1971 that came in the wake of the war with Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. In 1974, the SP merged with Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal. But, in its 15 years of existence the Party placed "free enterprise on the map of India,” concluded Masani.