Gurcharan Das, one of India’s most insightful liberal thinkers, in his recently released book The Dilemma of an Indian Liberal laments the absence of a liberal party in India. He points out that the liberal is unelectable and the single option available for him is to join a mainstream party and nudge it to make a little liberal change within it.
Indian liberalism had concrete political formations in the past like the Indian National Liberal Federation founded by Surendranath Banerjee, Tej Bahadur Sapru and MR Jayakar in 1919 and the Swatantra Party founded by C Rajagopalachari in 1959.
But the ‘socialist clause’ inserted into the Preamble of the Constitution in 1976 practically ousted Indian liberals from party politics. Socialism is a closed system of thought and as such it muzzles other rival ideologies like liberalism.
Meanwhile, liberalism is an open-ended and ever-evolving frame of thought based on the principle of ‘discussion, debate, and dissent’. The insertion of the ‘socialist clause’ to the Preamble has been unwarranted as social justice had already been enshrined in the Preamble. As Nani Palkhivala rightly observed, socialism is to social justice what ritual is to religion, and dogma to truth.
Voiceless liberals
India won its political freedom in 1947 but it soon lost its economic freedom to a socialist command economy for the next four decades. The Licence-Permit Raj had a substantial resemblance to the British Raj. India awoke to economic freedom only in 1991 when the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh duo opened India's economy to the liberalization drive.
However, illiberal socialist statism is still India’s reigning ideology even three decades after the watershed economic reforms of 1991. The ruling Hindu Right stands for a strong macho state whereas the Left still advocates for a state-controlled economy. The Congress agenda is, as always, redistributive and statist and the mushrooming caste-parties practice communitarian politics that subdues individuality.
Liberals are left with no political voice as the ‘socialist clause’ in the Preamble effectively prevents them from forming a political party and propounding liberal and individualist ideals. The Swatantra Party, which was dissolved in 1974, was the only true liberal party that India has ever had. “There is an important role for a clear-headed, pro-market, pro-business party that does not depend on religious politics, and does not prioritise one religious community over all others...the Swatantra Party for example...but the party died. I wish it would be revived”- Amartya Sen said in 2014. But the ‘socialist clause’ to the Preamble makes the resurrection of the Swatantra Party legally impossible.
Incompatible with the Constitutional core
Socialism was at loggerheads with the framers of the Indian Constitution. The Socialist Party and the Communist Party boycotted the Constituent Assembly. The Communists demanded a Constitution based on the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ instead of parliamentary democracy and the Socialists stood for the nationalization of private property and unrestricted Fundamental Rights.
During the Constituent Assembly debates, KT Shah proposed an amendment seeking to declare India a "socialist nation". Successfully opposing the amendment, Dr Ambedkar said: “Constitution is merely a mechanism for the purpose of regulating the work of the various organs of the state...What should be the policy of the state, how the society should be organised in its social and economic side are matters which must be decided by the people themselves according to time and circumstances. It cannot be laid down in the Constitution itself, because that is destroying democracy altogether..."
“It is perfectly possible today, for the majority of people to hold that the socialist organisation of society is better than the capitalist organisation of society. But it would be perfectly possible for thinking people to devise some other form of social organisation which might be better than the socialist organization of today or of tomorrow. I do not see therefore why the Constitution should tie down the people to live in a particular form and not leave it to the people themselves to decide it for themselves,” he added.
Maulana Hasrat Mohani moved another amendment to the Preamble that demanded to constitute India into a Union of Indian Socialist Republics on the lines of the USSR. But the founding fathers rejected that proposal too. “Its [socialism’s] appropriation by the Soviet Union seems to suggest that a socialist form of government can be dictatorship, which is foreign to our Constitution,” said HM Seervai in his Constitutional Law of India. From the above facts and opinions, it is clear that the insertion of the ‘socialist clause’ to the Preamble runs against the noble vision and original intent of our founding fathers. It arguably violated the basic structure of India’s liberal Constitution.
Time to weed out
SV Raju, a staunch liberal and Swatantra doyen, attempted to re-activate the Swatantra Party in 1994, two decades after its break-up. He felt that against the backdrop of the New Economic Policy of 1991, a party that believed in a market economy was needed to explain, encourage and support the dismantling of the Licence-Permit Raj and carry forward the reforms to their logical conclusion. When Raju applied for the registration of the new Swatantra Party, the Representation of People Act 1951 (as amended in 1989) emerged as a stumbling block.
Under sub-section (5) of Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, it has been made mandatory that “the party shall bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India as by law established, and to the principles of socialism, secularism, and democracy and would uphold the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India”. Since the Swatantra Party was envisaged as a true liberal party, it could not declare allegiance to the principle of socialism.
Raju wrote to the Election Commission of India regarding the injustice of asking parties that do not believe in socialism to swear by it. He met the then Chief Election Commissioner, TN Seshan, who told him that there was nothing he could do since the law bound him. Get the law changed, he advised Raju. Raju filed a writ petition before the Bombay High Court in 1996 but in vain. Thus the unwarrantedly inserted ‘socialist clause’ in the Preamble aborted the resurrection of the Swatantra Party as a true liberal party in India.
Socialism is an Apple of Sodom which is delightful to behold but poisonous to the body politic. Hence, the ‘socialist clause’ must be weeded out from the Preamble to enable the formation of a true liberal party or the revival of the Swatantra Party which is a need of the hour. Such a constitutional atonement would be a positive first step towards building a genuine open society, a free economy, and a liberal democratic state in India. Only a true liberal party can save India’s liberal Constitution and fight effectively against the rising tides of illiberal democracy propelled by authoritarian populists.
(Faisal CK is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal.)
