Statement of Intent

As India goes to the polls to elect its 15th Lok Sabha, we are again confronted with a slew of political parties making wildly irresponsible fiscal promises, with atleast a third of all candidates having criminal records, and with a quality of discourse that is a disgrace to the high ideals that animated those who brought us our Independence 62 years ago.

This site is aimed at becoming the first building-block for an alternative political party committed to the high ideals of our struggle for freedom, and to the common-sense economic reforms that will unleash the untapped potential of India's people.

A note on the name: I have chosen to call this party "Subhashbadi Swatantriya Dal" to signify the twin aims of an unshakeable commitment to India's security in determining the nature of our foreign relations ("Subhashbadi"), and liberalism (minimal government intervention and rent-seeking) in economic policy ("Swatantriya"). In other words, the party will be animated by the spirit of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in foreign relations and internal security, and the ideals of Rajaji Chakravarti Rajagopalachari in economic policy.

To me, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose represents the highest ideal of patriotism in our Independence struggle. By creating the Indian National Army (INA) from among 30,000 PoWs of the British Indian Army and atleast another 40,000 volunteer patriots from Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand and Indonesia, he dealt the fundamental death blow that ended the British Empire. When the INA took control of Nagaland, parts of Manipur and the Andaman & Nicobar (Swaraj & Shaheed) islands in April-May 1944, the flag of free India was first planted in our nation by the Arzi Hukumat-e Azad Hind. Although subsequently defeated in Imphal and forced to retreat across Burma to Thailand, the INA won the peace: the INA trials from November 1945 to February 16th 1946 set off a nationalist upsurge (reinvigorating the Congress party that had been moribund since the crushing of the Quit India movement by February 1943, and uniting it in a national cause with the Muslim League) that culminated in the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) mutiny -- which began on February 18th 1946, and encompassed 88 of the 98 ships of the RIN. This first mutiny of the British Indian armed forces since 1857-8 soon spread to half of the Royal Indian Air Force, and the Jabalpore and Madras regiments of the Indian army -- leading Auchinleck and Wavell to inform Attlee by the end of February 1946 that it would be impossible to hold onto India as the loyalty of the sword arm of Empire was no longer clear. Churchill had promised another thousand years of Empire in 1942, and the British had no intention of "transferring" power to India. It was the INA (created by Netaji Subhas) that fundamentally weakened the British hold on India's armed forces (and their implicit loyalty to the Raj), as acknowledged in a book by the former British spy Hugh Toye in 1958. This is one of the untold stories of our freedom movement. We in the Subhashbadi Swatantriya Dal will never forget: we will stay committed to doing whatever is necessary to always secure India's internal and external security. Subhashbadi patriotism is our first pledge.

Rajaji's Swatantra Party laid out an alternative vision of a liberal economic order in the 1950s that, unfortunately, has been forgotten by our political class in the last three decades. "Socialism" under the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty basically amounted to policies that ossified our social structure, by blocking all routes to upward (or downward!) mobility, while also increasing opportunities for rent-seeking on a grand scale by those who participated in politics and milked the mammaries of the licence-control-quota raj. While licenses and quotas have been partly dismantled under pressure since 1991, our national discourse remains coloured by a commitment to a Socialism that debilitates us. Labour-market rigidities protect a tiny "labour aristocracy" (of less than a tenth of our work-force) with the full panoply of late-1940s legislation akin to Old Labourite Britain -- while keeping nine-tenths of our people from gaining the higher-productivity jobs in labour-intensive industry that have lifted millions from poverty in every developing society since the Industrial Revolution (from Britain to America to Germany to Japan, Korea, Singapore and China). Rajaji and the Swatantra Party were a forlorn voice in the wilderness excoriating the stupidity of the Nehru/Mahalanobis model that destroyed the textile and other labour-intensive industries that could have been the quickest ticket out of poverty for Indians in the 1950s. Before the Luddite vision of perpetual "Reservations" of jobs in stagnant government companies eats further into the vitals of the private-sector-driven Indian economic miracle, we need a re-assertion of the efficacy of the Swatantra Party's brilliant insight: that entrepreneurship was India's genius, and must be unleashed if India is to prosper anew. The Subhashbadi Swatantriya Dal will be unswerving in its commitment to unshackling the entrepreneurial drive of all our people, from farmers to share-croppers, mazdoors to banias, businessmen, bankers, scientists, leaders, managers. Let India's genius flourish anew!