Election Manifesto

Summary

The Swatantra Party’s 1967 Election Manifesto presents India as being in political, economic, social, and international disarray after two decades of Congress rule. It criticizes constitutional amendments and the erosion of Fundamental Rights, inflation, taxation, debt, industrial stagnation, corruption, social division, and what it describes as an ineffective policy of non-alignment. Against proposals for greater centralisation, Statism, or dictatorship in the name of Socialism, the manifesto defends individual initiative, private enterprise, personal freedom, property, and restrained government.

Key points

• The manifesto frames the 1967 election as a choice between continued Congress rule and a Swatantra government committed to restoring civil liberties and democratic institutions.
• It advocates reducing government expenditure and taxation, abandoning deficit finance, stabilising the rupee, opposing bank nationalisation, and encouraging private investment.
• Agriculture is treated as India’s basic industry, with proposals for secure tenancy, fair prices, credit, irrigation, food security, relief from indebtedness, and fewer controls on agricultural production and trade.
• The programme opposes monopolies, excessive regulation, the Permit-Quota-Licence Raj, coercive central planning, and the proposed Fourth Plan; it calls for competition and advisory planning instead.
• The manifesto supports workers’ organisation, collective bargaining, closer labour-management cooperation, good wages, and “progress sharing” linked to productivity.
• It promises constitutional restoration, full civil liberties, speedy and inexpensive justice, independent ombudsman institutions, clean administration, and electoral reform.
• Its foreign-policy section rejects non-alignment as practised by Congress, calls for a more security-oriented policy toward Communist China, supports defence alliances, and advocates closer regional cooperation.
• Education policy combines expanded state responsibility for primary education with institutional autonomy, parental choice, moral and religious instruction on a voluntary basis, and stronger science and technology education.