PORTRAIT OF A CRUSADER

V. K. NARASIMHAN

If Rajaji’s return in 1952 to Madras to take up the Chief Ministership of the State, after the Congress party had lost its absolute majority in the first post-independence general elections, was an extraordinary event by any test, the manner in which Rajaji busied himself with a series of public activities after quitting the Madras Ministry was even more remarkable for a man who was past the Psalmist’s limit of three score and ten. How many leaders in their seventies or eighties could have thrown themselves heart and soul into such a variety of causes as Rajaji did in the ’50s and ’60s of this century? What he did in those years, culminating in the launching of the Swatantra party and the tireless campaign for individual freedom and human dignity, mark him out as a great campaigner for causes in which he was interested whose performance cannot be equalled by much younger men.

And what a variety of causes did he campaign for using the brilliance of his intellect and the amplitude of his enthusiasm!

In the ’50s when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a frightful game of nuclear testing with increasingly powerful bombs, Rajaji emerged as the conscience of mankind in protesting against the menacing pollution of the atmosphere by nuclear tests which could affect the lives of generations unborn. With indefatigable energy he wrote letters to the world’s leaders including Khrushchev and Kennedy. He campaigned in the press and ultimately he took a delegation under the auspices of the Gandhi Peace Foundation to Washington to plead with Kennedy for the renunciation of nuclear tests. The success he had with the Soviet Union is remarkable even if it is argued that Khrushchev agreed to the unilateral stopping of nuclear tests in air and water only after the Soviet Union had completed its first round of tests. On his way back from Washington he pleaded with the Pope in Rome to lend His Holiness’s support for the same cause.

Campaign Against BCG

Again, when the Government sponsored a nationwide campaign for BCG Vaccination as a means of immunizing the population against tuberculosis, Rajaji had serious doubts about the utility of the programme and the motives of those sponsoring it. Immediately he started studying all the literature on the subject and created such an atmosphere in the country that the sponsors of the programme got alarmed. The question is not whether Rajaji was right or wrong in campaigning against BCG vaccination. His historic service lies in the fact that he warned all concerned against the dangers in going ahead on a mass scale with an immunising technique which was still in the experimental stage. He was opposed to Indians being used as guineapigs for testing a new vaccine.

He conducted the whole campaign against BCG vaccination with such relentless thoroughness and with such a mastery of all the facts and data that many professional medical men were amazed at his knowledge.

Again, when Rajaji launched the campaign against the imposition of Hindi as the sole official language of the Indian Union for all inter-State purposes, he was crusading for a cause which was unlikely to make him popular in Northern India. But he never flinched from carrying on the battle to the bitter end. It is unlikely that the Congress and Pandit Nehru would have given the assurances regarding the retention of English as an official language indefinitely but for Rajaji’s powerful campaign, reinforced by the strong political opinion in the southern States, particularly in Tamil Nadu.

My only regret is that Rajaji made the campaign for English sound entirely as a demand in the interests of the non-Hindi-speaking States. I have held the view that the indefinite retention of English at the Centre for national and inter-State communications is necessary as much in the interests of the Hindi-speaking population as in those of the non-Hindi States. If Rajaji, with all his powers of persuasion, had tried to convince the Hindi States of the importance and value of English for their own development and progress, I have no doubt he would have won support even from Hindi-speaking States. Nobody would have mistaken his advocacy of English as an unpatriotic act. They would have realised that his plea for English was entirely in the general and national interests and not in the interest of any particular section or segment of the population.

Right to Property

The crowning achievement of his crusading career in the ’60s was the launching of the Swatantra party as a party avowedly committed to the maintenance of individual rights, including the right to property. In an atmosphere in which most people were inclined unquestioningly to accept socialism as the only means to the elimination of poverty and the achievement of social justice in India. Rajaji’s championship of the right to private property and his campaign against socialism as a doctrine that was likely to undermine individual freedom and destroy human dignity required enormous political courage and strength of conviction. In the debate that he conducted during those years he marshalled all the arguments that could be presented in favour of preserving property rights, subject to reasonable restrictions and limiting the tide towards collectivist statism in the name of socialism. By any test India was perhaps the most suitable country for the development of a pluralist State in which the rights of private property would be protected with due regard for social justice and the public interest. In a country in which there were millions of small farmers and petty traders who were earning a living by the cultivation of their small farms or running their small businesses, there is clearly a mass base for a large middle class party which recognises its social responsibilities and which could provide a strong element of stability for the political system.

I believe Rajaji conceived the Swatantra party primarily as a national party of the middle class which would be opposed to socialism and big business, on the one side, and which would be opposed also to exploitation of the poor and the weak, on the other. It is one of the misfortunes of the country that the Indian middle class did not respond, on a sufficiently wide scale, to the centrist philosophy represented by the Swatantra party.

I still believe that the basic ideas which Rajaji developed during this period in defence of democratic values and against thc growth of the State as an all-embracing octopus, deserve to be taken up by the younger generation as embodying a pluralist political philosophy most suited to the needs of India. A country of India’s size and variety, with its myriad socio-economic problems, cannot adopt anything but a pluralist approach if it wishes to preserve the basic institutions of democracy and at the same time seeks to solve the problems of poverty and inequality. The revival of interest in Gandhiji’s ideas during the past two years should lead also to a revival in Rajaji’s attempts to find a Gandhian alternative to unrestricted capitalism and the Procrustean bed of communism. The enormous output of writing which marked Rajaji’s activities in the ’50s and ’60s can be a perennial source of inspiration and ideas for solving India’s problems in terms of an authentic Indian approach.

–Courtesy Swarajya

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