Swatantra Party

Two articles in two days take a look at the Swatantra Party in the context of India today.
Andy Mukherjee writes in the Bloomberg news (28 June 2007) that India's Markets Need to Hear From Conservatives: The Swatantra Party
"The Indian middle class has over the past 15 years benefited greatly from economic freedoms grudgingly granted to it by the same politicians and bureaucrats who had for four decades run a ``license-permit raj'' under the garb of socialism. "It was only when the controlled system collapsed in a balance-of-payments crisis in 1990 that economic planners realized their mistakes and sought to correct them. Yet, the embrace of free markets is a reluctant one in India, as is evident in the ruling Congress Party's ambivalence about, among other things, selling government stakes in business enterprises."... ...
"It was only when the controlled system collapsed in a balance-of-payments crisis in 1990 that economic planners realized their mistakes and sought to correct them. Yet, the embrace of free markets is a reluctant one in India, as is evident in the ruling Congress Party's ambivalence about, among other things, selling government stakes in business enterprises... ...
"Without job creation, economic inequality is bound to rise in a country where half the people can't read or write and even more haven't been taught the skills needed for participation in the rapidly growing modern economy.
That, in turn, is fertile ground for left-wing extremism, which is already recognized by the government as probably the largest security threat facing the country today. ``It will require a traumatic shock to move the Generation Next,'' S V Raju says.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aDNHH6F8.fOk&refer=home

In the second article, Ashish Sharma and Pragya Singh analyses why "Everyone’s a socialist in one of the world’s fastest growing economies" in the Mint (26 June 2007) . The 1989 amendment to the Representation of the People Act says only political parties that swear their ideological allegiance to secularism, democracy and socialism can be registered. S.V. Raju has been waiting since 1994 for the Bombay high court to hear his case. He approached the court after failed efforts to convince the Election Commission of India to register his party, the Swatantra Party.Raju says that his friend and fellow litigant L.R. Sampat died without the case coming up. “I sometimes joke that the courts are now waiting for me to go,” Raju says.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, a national spokesperson of the BJP, says the Constitution of India has left socialism open to interpretation. “Historically, from Stalin and Pol Pot to Gandhi, socialism has embraced an array of approaches. To us, socialism means equity above all else. While the Congress debates how to distribute the bread, we want to increase the quantity of bread available for distribution,” he says...

Subhash C. Kashyap, an expert on the Constitution and a former secretary general of the Lok Sabha, says: “By no stretch of imagination or any dictionary definition can the policies of the present government, for instance, be called socialist.” The legal requirement to attest to socialism, he adds, is “fraud” and “poppycock”...

“We are hypocritical,” says Suresh Prabhu, a member of Parliament who belongs to the right-wing Shiv Sena party. “What we say we do not mean and what we want to say we never ever truly do. This is best manifested in our swearing by socialism,” he adds...

Historian Ramachandra Guha says this could be because with millions of poor in the country, no party wants to be identified as pro-rich...
Please read the complete article here.

A liberal complaint

The threat to liberalism comes mostly from Indian liberals. They want a big government that constantly interferes with personal freedom. It puts barriers in the way of private enterprise, not realizing that people enrich themselves by trading with each other, and not by depending on charity. Their commitment to freedom is incomplete—they defended the free speech of M.F. Husain or Chandramohan against those Hindutva fanatics, but not of the Danish cartoonists or the publisher who was jailed for publishing a Sikh jokebook. They are driven by politics, not principle, writes Amit Varma in the Mint (28 June 2007) "A liberal complaint"
URL: http://www.livemint.com/2007/06/28000419/A-liberal-complaint.html

Welcome to the world of Indian Liberals

Dear IFAN Members and Fnst,

I welcome all of you to join this blog. At the outset I must congratulate Barun and Seetha for creating this blog.

The very basic idea of creating this blog is that we all can learn and share our ideas,work and activities. Also this is a market place for our activities.

Since Indian FNST Alumni Network is being setup with a vision to ''achieve a liberal society'', we all have to work hard to bring our dream into reality. Our members from different parts of India are working hard in their projects and creating a light for others in the process of liberalism. I congratulate all of them. Simultaniously I welcome all our members to continously stay in touch and post your comments, your work, experience, achievements and even small activities which you have undertaken.

This network will surely bring lots of hopes and will provide an opprotunity to learn from each others work. We will appreciate your comments, ideas and thought about our group. Keep in touch and infrom all of us about the happeings.

With warm regards,
Ashraf Ahmed Shaikh
National Coordiantor,
Indian Fnst Alumni Network - IFAN

Welcome to the IFAN blog

Dear IFAN members,

This is my first attempt to set up a blog for our members. This could be adapted and modified, as the blog becomes a more effective medium for communication between the members. For some time we felt that a blog might be more effective means of communication than a email list. So I hope you will use it to share information, ideas, and help nurture this liberal network in India.

Please feel free to post your comments, and provide links to your blogs and websites.

Please allow me to take the first shot at information sharing. We have created a new web site www.InDefenceofLiberty.org This is a kind a web based liberal newspaper and media clippings that seek to promote liberal values and ideas in India, and across Asia. You could become a partner, and publish your own articles and recommend relevant articles. It has a user friendly CMS to help the partners publish their articles. The articles can be classified in major sections as per their subject. And there is a keyword feature that allows the articles to be searched more easily.

The difference between this web site, and this blog is that the web site has a more formal structure, and the published material are more or less stand alone articles. This blog I presume will be more informal in character, with network members being able to quickly know about others, and jot down their grief comments in the process of a dialogue.

That is all for now. Let me see how this comes out on the blog.

To liberalism,

Barun Mitra