Economic liberalization and the ascent of Hindu nationalism have characterized Indian politics and economy since the 1990s. A wave of anti-incumbency took down the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government in 2014. The verdict brought the BJP a majority in the Lok Sabha on the back of a campaign targeting the corruption of the ruling party. It is in this context that the Swatantra Party (1959-74), long forgotten, has returned to public memory. Calls for the party’s revival have been made by everyone from Amartya Sen to Ramachandra Guha. While the two have disagreed on the manner in which one may appropriate India’s past, both are committed to religious pluralism and have unambiguously condemned the BJP on grounds of majoritarian ideology and practice. In a public address, Sen expressed his wish that the Swatantra Party would be revived. Guha has asked whether India has any conservative intellectuals to speak of and has pointed to C. Rajagopalachari as a worthy model for a rejuvenated Indian conservatism. Though neither would join such a party or even vote for it, they believe that it could help protect democratic institutions.Aditya BalasubramanianToward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic IndiaPrinceton University Press/Penguin India, 2023Free economy and the Swatantra Party came to life after India won freedom from the British Raj, once the consensus forged among anticolonial nationalists of diverse persuasions broke down. By the end of the 1950s, new economic interests had emerged and the Nehruvian model of planned developmentalism encountered roadblocks. As India’s literate public expanded in size, ideological entrepreneurs representing various causes across India’s urban spaces came together to critique Indian political economy and economic policy during the second plan period. They drew upon Cold War–era discourses of neoliberalism and tried to reconcile them with India’s history and current conditions. Interacting in associations and writing in periodicals, they threshed out their own common-sense ideas to help make the economy the new domain for debate on the nation. Their free economy offered an ideological foundation for Indian conservative politics to develop in a distinctively mid-twentieth century form that blended an anticommunism, which invoked the fear of totalitarianism, with advocacy of unfettered commercial exchange and the defense of property.Situated in distinct contexts of region, language, caste, and political economy, the keyword “free economy” took on multiple meanings as it circulated, moving across metropole and mofussil alike. Most clearly, it meant opposition to the “socialistic pattern of society,” which Rajagopalachari dubbed permit-and-license raj. At the time, no other party explicitly disavowed the ruling party’s socioeconomic objectives. Free economy could also mean N. G. Ranga’s self-employed economy of peasants, Masani’s country of free enterprisers. It could be, to those Indians who took it upon themselves to write to the Swatantra leadership, a rhetoric for the expression of economic resentment. Of course, free for some meant unfree for others; the unspoken dimensions of the free economy discourses point to a patriarchal household division of labor, patterns of lower-caste exploitation, and not much freedom for the woman.Free economy’s ambiguity allowed it to serve as a point of consensus agreed upon by diverse figures, whose social commitments ranged from cosmopolitan individualism to a parochial family orientation. The lowest common denominator of the varying visions of free economy were a decentralized economy with strong private property rights, which prioritized small industry and embraced agriculture. An antistatism, rather than an anarchism, pervaded these visions; the state would avoid its own commercial activity in such an economy and create a supportive environment for private economic activity when necessary. It would not occupy the commanding heights of the economy.The partisans of free economy interacted with libertarians and neoliberals in the Western world, finding occasional overlap in their concerns. In fact, the content of their formulations shared more with those of American individualist anarchists than neoliberals. Indian protagonists engaged more with the polemical content of neoliberal utterances rather than theories of institutional design. They appropriated elements of these discourses for their political aims, as a layering over of their own economic ideas to respond to official Indian discourses on economy. This helped them wage a battle of ideas against the threat of communism.Aditya Balasubramanian.Free economy became relevant for India’s democracy as a platform for a project that this book has described as opposition politics, embodied by the Swatantra Party. This was at one level an idea of an economically conservative party to balance out India’s “one-footed” democracy, imagined most coherently by Rajagopalachari but tracing antecedents in the Indian Libertarian. Rajagopalachari’s stature and appeals to dharma and ordered progress played a crucial role in attracting interest for this project across a range of political actors. Next, opposition politics rejected the anti-politics of development. It involved disseminating free economy in Indian-language publics and attaching it to a concrete political project. As they entered the world of party politics and elections, Swatantra’s leadership rewrote free economy for a middle-class rights-bearing citizen. To win popular support, the party tapped into a vein of discontent around issues such as inflation and taxation to establish itself as an alternative political player at the all-India level. It provided an economic education for voters from the lettered public and managed to mount what was at the time the largest organized political challenge to the Congress. As it did so, it drew on antecedent practices, most of them associated with the nationalist movement. These ranged from propaganda to mass protest. These efforts courted responses that showed how, in certain quarters, people understood opposition to the Congress as a forum for claim-making and expression. Finally, opposition politics meant using India’s institutional political machinery to forge coalitions and fight for free economy from elected office. Swatantra mobilized sections of the populace and used India’s political institutions to provide checks and balances to the party in power before the elections of 1971 swept it away.Democracy is too often invoked to signify not merely a procedure of rule but also a set of values—freedom, rights, and progress among them. This conflation can mislead us and compromise our understanding of how distinct projects of democracy have emerged and unfolded.In India, the introduction of democracy before industrialization or the advent of mass literacy could mean that elections merely turned feudal relationships converted into legislative seats. No better example exists than the Maharani Gayatri Devi’s thumping victories under the Swatantra Party banner. At the same time, democracy could carry the promise of emancipation for the masses and mean unprecedented empowerment for historically disadvantaged groups like Dalits.Across the world, the recent rise of ethnomajoritarian regimes has taken place in both democratic and undemocratic fashion. India is a peculiar case of the postcolonial society in which this process has taken place electorally. Consistently peaceful transfers of power have taken place between regimes for seven decades. But the Indian example also points to the risks that endure even after procedural democracy becomes ingrained in the postcolony. Projects like Swatantra’s can help us imagine alternative possibilities and solidarities to check the worst excesses of the present, even if they stand far apart from our utopias.Excerpted with permission from Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India by Aditya Balasubramanian.Aditya Balasubramanian is a Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian National University.