in Kerala was considered a culmination of that trend. In 1959, the
Congress’s Nagpur Resolution on cooperative farming – albeit within a
‘mixed economy’ – was denounced as ‘communism’ by, among others,
Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and N.G. Ranga. These were the figures
at the core of the Swatantra Party, established in the late 1950s, and which
was, after the fourth general elections in 1967, to emerge as the main
opposition party in Parliament. The Swatantra Party was established
under the ideological banner of a reasoned and non-communal conser-
vatism by Rajagopalachari, and was supported at its establishment by
landlords, princes, traders and retired ICS officers. Among its other
leading lights was N.G. Ranga, an academic who had in the 1930s been
one of the main founders of the Kisan Sabhaand had therefore counted
as one among the Congress Socialists (he had seen his organisation
captured by the communists by the 1940s). He now counted among the
agrarian conservatives who were uneasy about Congress’s economic and
in particular agrarian policies, accusing the Congress of having been
captured by the Communist Party. Perhaps the most articulate of its
members was Minoo Masani, who had mastered the language of the
Western side of the Cold War, organising a Forum for Free Enterprise and
chairing the Indian branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. In
addition to its legitimating rhetoric drawn from the Cold War, it required
a suitably ‘indigenous’ idiom; it claimed, therefore, a lineage drawn from
the nineteenth century economic nationalism of Ranade, Naoroji and
Gokhale, further enabling a self-description of ‘liberal’ (because these
economic nationalists had, at a time of high liberalism, also linked their
legitimating rhetoric to liberalism) – others’ readings describe the
Swatantra Party as ‘conservative’. There was also, inevitably, the whiff of
Gandhism that always went down well as legitimating rhetoric.
If it was Nehru’s influence that prevented the Congress from finding
its natural equilibrium as a party of the centre-right, Kerala can be seen
as the beginning of a gradual slippage of Nehru’s authority to do this.
Nehru’s ascendancy within the Congress assumed the energetic and cogent
interventions of a prime minister whose only hope of continued success
depended on an unfailing energy and an ability to oversee and anticipate
everything with which his government might be concerned. But Nehru,
who turned 70 in November 1959, was beginning to recognise the limits
of his physical and mental energy. In April 1958, pleading exhaustion, he
had asked for a spell as a ‘private citizen’, only to be refused by his party234 HIGH NEHRUVIANISM AND ITS DECLINE, c. 1955–63