Minoo Masani was a man of many parts. He began as a lawyer who gave up his practice to participate in the freedom struggle; an author whose ‘Our India’ written for the young in the forties brought him popularity and fame; a parliamentarian of repute with great respect for the institutions of parliamentary democracy; a crusader for individual liberty who evolved into a Liberal in the best traditions of Dadabhai Naoroji and Gopal Krishna Gokhale; a theoretician who traversed the political spectrum from Marx to Mahatma Gandhi - from the Socialism to Swatantra. It is in his last phase as a leader of the Swatantra Party that this writer came to know and understand him well. After he lost his seat in the Lok Sabha in the General Elections of 1971, he retired from party politics for good, but continued to be active in public life till death claimed him on May 27, 1998.

During the course of his birth centenary year, Freedom First will endeavour to bring to the attention of the younger generation information about the man and his works. We begin with an assessment of Minoo Masani as a principled politician - an oxymoron in today’s political dialogue . Today the word politician draws sneer and derision. That it was not always so we seek to establish with this brief assessment of Minoo Masani’s role in Indian politics between 1934 and 1971..

What led Masani, a founding member of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in February 1934, to join C. Rajagopalachari 25 years later to found the Swatantra Party in August 1959 whose avowed objective was to oppose Pandit Nehru’s socialist pattern of society?

The leadership of the CSP was a who’s who of India’s Socialist leadership - Jayaprakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan, Yusuf Meherally, Ram Manohar Lohia, Asoka Mehta, S. M. Joshi and Minoo Masani. Interestingly, one more person who claimed to be a. socialist but who was not prepared to join the CSP formally was Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who however, blessed the venture. The CSP was, until its conversion soon after independence into the Praja Socialist Party, a pressure group within the Indian National Congress.

Rejects Socialism; Quits CSP

Five years after he helped form the CSP, Masani quit the party and for a while, quit politics until 1942, when he returned to the Indian National Congress and participated in the Quit India struggle. Why did he leave the CSP? He did so because he understood very early the real nature of international Communism directed from Moscow and the tactics of the United Front. But as he was not able to convince his colleagues that the Communists had to be thrown out, he quit the CSP.
Bertram Wolfe, himself a former Communist and author of “Three who Made a Revolution”, an outstanding book on the Bolshevik Revolution, has, in an article he wrote on Yusuf Meherally, quoted the latter; “Minoo was right of course, although we did not know it then. Some time later when. I got out of prison, I discovered that the Communist Party was guilty of double-dealing and had constituted itself as a hostile conspiracy within our movement”.

“The Stalinist purges of the thirties and the changing attitudes of the Soviet Union to World War II - first when Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, it was an “Imperialist War” and later when Hitler turned on Russia, it became a “Patriotic War” resulted in Masani giving up his admiration for Communism. He may have been the first in India to gain such an understanding. of Communism but internationally, he was in the distinguished company of such luminaries as Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Louis Fischer, who gave up the “God that Failed”.

Socialism Reconsidered

Masani’s rejection of Communism was but the first step to his questioning of some of the basic premises of socialist thought.

Five years after his resignation from the CSP, he published an essay entitled “Socialism Reconsidered”. He explained, “While World War II and the Quit India campaign were proceeding along their respective paths, I was engaged in intensive rethinking of my own position vis-a-vis the problems of socialism and a free society. Marxism and state socialism had lost all appeal for me. The question was what philosophy or way of life was to take their place”.

He attributed this change of thinking to two factors - “... the failure of the Soviet Revolution to deliver the goods in any sense of the word and the influence of Mahatma Gandhi”.

This led him to consider the role of the State in the economy. He was not about to give up the humanitarian aspects of socialism nor look kindly at the exploitative aspects of capitalism as he then understood it. Introspection led him to the concept of a mixed economy. In a series of lectures at the Bombay University, Masani declared that while one could not wish away the State, it was possible to give capitalism a human face through practising the Gandhian concept of Trusteeship.

Wrote Masani in his autobiography, “Bliss Was It in That Dawn...”

“If money power is dangerous, . a combination of political and economic power, as in a nationalised economy where the State is the universal employer and the sole producer, will be doubly dangerous to liberty”, concluding, “the programme of state plus free enterprise is the only practicable programme that any Government of India could adopt”.

Masani had completed his travel from Marx to Gandhi; from Socialism to Liberalism. Not long afterwards, Masani was a part of the Liberal International, soon to be its Patron.

Birth of the Swatantra Party

Forty years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Minoo Masani saw the system as one that had failed though even he could not have predicted the way and speed with which the Soviet Empire broke up. It was fifty years again before the Government of India, no doubt compelled by economic compulsions, gave up statism, aptly labelled by Rajaji as the ‘Permit-Licence-Quota Raj’.

Masani realised that his liberal views would need a political vehicle if they were to have a chance of becoming official policy. Rajaji, with whom Masani had earlier crossed swords as a socialist, was his natural ally when the two decided that it was time to give the country a real alternative to the Stalinist system that was leading the country to economic bankruptcy on the one hand and an all pervasive corruption on the other. Thus was the Swatantra Party born.

The rise and fall of the Swatantra Party is a story in itself. Suffice it to say that never before 1962 in free India’s Parliament or after 1971 was the liberal point of view so forcefully expressed and recorded. as it was between 1967 and 1971 when the Swatantra Party was the single largest party in the opposition in the Lok Sabha.

Yet another achievement of the Swatantra Party was that the word Socialism which had become a mantra and which nobody dared criticise publicly lost its respectability - long before the Congress party effectively jettisoned the word (even though it continues to disfigure the Preamble to the Constitution of India).

The man responsible for putting Liberalism on the political map of India, more than anyone else, was Masani. It is not given to many to see their predictions come true. Masani was among those fortunate few who lived to see his position vindicated.

Masani’s Vision of Liberalism for India

What kind of Liberalism did Masani prescribe for the Indian context?

In a lecture on ‘Liberalism’ he observed:

What are these teachings (of Western Liberal thought) that we graft on to Liberalism or fuse with Liberalism? First, that ends and means are interlinked: that if we want a decent society, our methods must be decent. We cannot create a free and equal society by expropriation, liquidation, lying, as the Communists claim they can.

Secondly, as Gandhiji used to say repeatedly, ‘that Government is best which governs the least – minimum government. The essential thing is to leave the people free.

Thirdly, Trusteeship, that those who have the good things of life, those who have wealth must use them for the good of the community. While we have a good time with what we have, we must not be devoid of a social conscience or a sense of social obligation. Gandhiji called it Trusteeship of the rich for the poor. He said: let every rich man use his wealth. Certainly, let him keep it. Nobody should take it away. But let him use it so that he can have a good conscience that he is doing what he can for those around who are not so fortunate.

Last of a Generation

Masani quit active party politics in 1971 but continued in public activity till almost 1990 when failing eyesight compelled him to slow down. It was impossible for him to be indifferent when he felt that things in society were not going right. Soon after independence when the communist threat to the country was real and present, he founded the Democratic Research Service in 1954 which did yeoman work in exposing communist undercover activities. When he was convinced that what the young generation needed was training in citizenship, he started the Leslie Sawhny Programme of training for democracy in 1968. Lately, he got himself into the middle of a controversy by demanding for the terminally ill their right to ask for withdrawal of life support systems and to die with dignity.

I often wondered what would have happened if the Swatantra Party had, by some miracle, come to power in Delhi. I am convinced that we would have found Masani, not on the Treasury Benches, but leading the Opposition! Governments compromise and programmes and policies of parties when not in office get considerably diluted when they assume office. In such a situation, Masani might have agreed to a small change here or a minor modification there, but would have refused to compromise on fundamentals and left the Government.

I have yet to see anyone (other than Jayaprakash Narayan) so totally disinterested in office and its perquisites, if it involved sacrificing principles. He proved this by resigning from the Chairmanship of the Minorities Commission when he was convinced that the then Janata government was not serious about the work of the Commission.

Minoo Masani ws among the last of a generation of politicians whose passion for integrity and courge of conviction gave politics a meaningful direction. For men like Masani, politics was public service and not a profession. Power to Masani was the means to an end - not an end in itself.

Difficult to believe in today’s world of politics. But this was so not so many years ago.