Letter to Mr Minoo Masani

Summary

A short private letter dated 24 January 1963 from C. Rajagopalachari at 60, Bazlullah Road, Tyagarayanagar, Madras to Minoo Masani in Bombay, running to two paragraphs on Swatantra Party tactics in Parliament and on the Prime Minister’s posture toward China. Rajaji opens by rejecting N. G. Ranga’s belief that the party had ‘gained’ by the Prime Minister’s refusal to move for acceptance and by the debate closing without a resolution — that reading, he tells Masani, is an illusion, because the P.M. ‘has scored being an adept in such matters.’ He nevertheless treats Ranga with sympathy, describing him as doing his best to hold together what Rajaji calls ‘the mixed flock of sheep, goats and wolves,’ and concludes that ‘everyone has spoken pretty well and that is good enough for us.’

The second paragraph turns to the aftermath of the Sino-Indian conflict. The Chinese have refused ‘total acceptance,’ and Rajaji reads the Prime Minister’s response as another smokescreen — an outwardly belligerent pose behind which the government will, in the end, send representatives to talk. The sting of the letter is in its diagnosis of purpose: talks are acceptable so long as ‘we keep up war mentality going, that is to say, the Defence of India Act is kept alive.’ The letter thus fuses a piece of Swatantra internal politics with a civil-liberties critique of the emergency-style powers being sustained under the cover of the China crisis.

Key points

• Rajaji writes to Masani from Madras on 24 January 1963; the letter is stamped received in Bombay on 28 January 1963 (No. 01879).
• He rejects N. G. Ranga’s optimistic reading that Swatantra had ‘gained’ by the Prime Minister refusing to move for acceptance and letting the debate end without a resolution.
• He credits the Prime Minister as ‘an adept in such matters’ who has in fact ‘scored’ in the parliamentary exchange.
• He defends Ranga personally as doing his best to hold together a coalition he memorably characterises as ‘the mixed flock of sheep, goats and wolves.’
• On foreign policy, he notes that the Chinese have refused ‘total acceptance’ and reads the Prime Minister’s fresh belligerence as a smokescreen.
• He predicts the Prime Minister will nonetheless send representatives to negotiate, using continued ‘war mentality’ as the pretext.
• His sharpest point is that the true purpose of the war mentality is to keep the Defence of India Act alive — a civil-liberties concern rather than a strategic one.