Toward a free economy: Swatantra and opposition politics in democratic India.AdityaBalasubramanian, (Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. 352. ISBN: 9780691205243. Hbk £38)

Soon after Indian independence (1947), politicians ruling the new nation started giving shape to a vision of economic development crafted in the last days of British rule by intellectuals close to the Indian National Congress. In that vision, the federal state would expand in scale and capacity, partly to contain the forces that could potentially weaken the union, and partly to take leadership in investing in infrastructure and industrialization. Starting in 1955, India shifted to a Soviet-style industrialization plan. Instead of focusing on textiles, trading grain or cotton, and processing plantation products such as tea or coffee as it had in the past, the country began investing in heavy industries such as machinery, metals, and chemicals. Since few business groups were yet ready to stake big money on these industries, the government had to access and use taxpayers’ money. The ruling party won elections so easily and consistently that it knew its government-controlled approach would not be seriously threatened. It felt safe supporting democracy. The vision faced internal challenges. Congress balanced the interests of big businesses that funded it with those of the workers employed by those businesses. Communism and M.K. Gandhi's village-centred idealism influenced parts of the urban middle class. Rural landholders had different priorities from all these groups. During the anti-colonial movement, Congress was not troubled by these divisions, but they resurfaced after independence. The new developmental model partly accommodated Gandhi's ideas but remained largely unaffected. Jawaharlal Nehru's charisma and electoral success enabled him to pursue ‘antipolitical strategies’ (p. 8), such as letting experts such as the statistician P.C. Mahalanobis plan India's economic future. Congress’ dominance, technocratic approach, and pursuit of capital-intensive industrialization by enlarging the state and the executive started to unravel from the 1960s. Although the state sector and the big businesses that moved into the new fields employed many more middle-class service workers, the same middle class grew anxious about corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and delays, and above all, rising food prices. The accent on industrialization had deprived the countryside of needed investment. A massive harvest failure in 1966 exposed the fragile foundation of Nehru's socialist model. The growing power of the central government alarmed provincial politicians. Some were not worried about losing authority but about losing their cultural identity. With that unrest in the backdrop, a new force emerged in national politics in the 1960s, called the Swatantra Party. Founded in 1959 by publicists, intellectuals, lawyers, and regional leaders, the party had three goals, not all articulated very clearly. First, it wanted to create a strong parliamentary opposition to Congress. Second, it stood for ‘free enterprise’, incorrupt and smaller government, and protection of private property threatened by socialism. And third, it stood for decentralization and empowerment of regions and provinces. The core ideal was a libertarian one. Like the imperial state that ended in 1947, the movement supported free private enterprise and a limited role for the state. But unlike imperialism, it was nationalistic. It seemed to share with Congress the mild xenophobia that governed policies towards foreign capital. Unlike Congress, Swatantra was more concerned about the economic power held by the state, and by those business houses the state favoured. Toward a Free Economy is an intellectual and political history of the movement, asking where Swatantra came from, who its most influential publicists were, and its legacies. A specific aim is to explain the spectacular electoral success of the party in 1967, and its collapse and subsequent obscurity just 4 years later. The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the immediate post-1947 years, when alternative economic visions would enter a contest. Chapter 2 traces the rise of Indian libertarianism through figures such as Ranchhodas Lotvala and his daughter Kusum Lotvala. Chapter 3 explores Swatantra's politics, including the regional and caste-based roots of the movement. Chapter 4 deals with the variable meanings of ‘free economy’. Chapter 5 is about the party's communication and mobilization strategies. Chapter 6 reflects on the legacy in politics and in ideology. The scholarship is meticulous, building on poorly preserved and obscure private documents, as well as a rich body of historical works published in the 2000s and dealing with the political economy of the transitional years. The prose is lucid and of consistently high quality. A pleasure to read, the book makes an intervention at many levels. The only other serious academic study available on the movement is a book by the political scientist Howard Erdman (The Swatantra Party and Indian Conservatism). Published just after the 1967 elections and possibly written before it, the book placed Indian libertarianism (or economic conservatism) in the mainstream discourse on politics. It also showed why some people at the time saw the movement to be flawed: by defending private property and trying to gain local support, its leaders ended up aligning with landlords and former princes, figures often viewed as regressive. Led by accomplished lawyers, the party had fought and won cases that slowed, and possibly derailed, India's land reform programme. Balasubramanian demonstrates this apparent contradiction with much more material, especially from regional politics. The book suggests that the contradiction began with India's Constitution, which protected both the right to property and the principle of substantive equality, the latter goal the land reforms were trying to achieve through redistribution. Despite the pathbreaking contributions of a woman, Kusum Lotvala, to the making of Indian libertarianism, the movement stayed firmly male-biased, and the book asks why. The book offers a different account of Swatantra's collapse. By the end of the 1960s, Indira Gandhi's populist anti-elite stance had split the Congress into radical and conservative factions. Her emphatic win in 1971 drowned both the conservatives and Swatantra. Subsequently, the conservative faction moved towards Hindu nationalism, appropriating a part of the libertarian programme. The distance in time enables Balasubramanian to ask a question of contemporary relevance: can secular libertarianism re-emerge in India? A fascinating chapter shows how the freedom of enterprise ideal did revive, through actors who were not always aware of the antecedents but drew on some of those discourses. Toward a Free Economy is much more than a history of a political party. It offers a new interpretation of a turning point in Indian political economy and shows why the movement's message endured even as the politics died. The book makes a significant contribution to a scholarship that debates the functioning of Indian democracy, especially the role economic ideology has played in shaping politics.