The Indian Libertarian

Summary

The Indian Libertarian Vol. IX No. 9 (August 1, 1961) opens with a sharp editorial attacking President Ayub Khan’s Washington diplomacy and Nehru’s deference toward Pakistani complaints about Indian rearmament, then ranges across Kashmir, the Shastri Formula for Assam’s language dispute, Britain’s bid for the European Common Market, and a denunciation of Soviet ‘distortion of language.’ The issue’s signed articles continue the journal’s classical-liberal house line: M. A. Venkata Rao reviews Karl Popper’s defence of the open society against fascist and Soviet totalitarianism; M. N. Tholal attacks the Uttar Pradesh Language Committee’s coercive treatment of Urdu speakers; S. R. Narayana Ayyar argues, in the fifth installment of a serial, that Nehru should resign over his Pakistan policy; and J. M. Lobo Prabhu uses the Planning Commission’s own admissions to indict state enterprises as fiscally ruinous. A four-page Rationalist Supplement carries pieces by S. Ramanathan on the future of rationalism, P. Kodanda Rao on dowry, Roy V. Rosa on the ‘Tower of Babel,’ and an unsigned ‘Mechanical Prayers.’ A Delhi Letter on Nehru’s principles, a feature on Master Tara Singh, a review of Stephen J. Tonsor’s Philosophy of Edmund Burke, and News & Views columns round out the number.

Essays

EDITORIAL

The unsigned editorial ‘Pakistan and India’ attacks President Ayub Khan’s American tour, accusing him of donning a friendly mask in Washington while resuming ‘fire-eating sabre-rattling’ against India through League of Nations–style accusations. The editors mock Nehru for crediting the Egyptian leopard with changing its spots: he gifted Pakistan Rs. 83 crores under the Canal waters agreement and now indulges Ayub’s complaints about Indian arms as if Pakistan rather than India lay open to invasion. They argue that the U.S. is being told an unreasonable story about Indian aggressiveness, and that Nehru’s preoccupation with mollifying Pakistan blinds him to the actual threat of continuing Pakistani probing on the border.

The editorial then turns to the Shastri Formula in Assam, criticising the Congress’s handling of the language question and the suppression of legitimate Bengali concerns; offers a polemical reply to ‘witched blackmailers’ alleging foreign manipulation in Kashmir; assesses Britain’s looming entry into the European Common Market as a structural shift hostile to Commonwealth preference; and closes with a short piece denouncing Soviet ‘Peace’ and ‘Liberation’ rhetoric as a calculated distortion of language designed to deceive world opinion.

• Ayub Khan’s American visit is read as a tactical performance hiding renewed hostility to India.
• Nehru is faulted for giving Pakistan Rs. 83 crores and continuing to defer to its complaints about Indian rearmament.
• The Shastri Formula for Assam is criticised as a Congress fudge that suppresses Bengali grievances.
• Britain’s prospective entry into the European Common Market is seen as breaking up Commonwealth trade preferences.
• Soviet rhetorical use of ‘Peace’ and ‘Liberation’ is treated as deliberate semantic falsification.

Dr. Popper On The Defence Of Democracy

By MA Venkata Rao

M. A. Venkata Rao introduces Indian readers to Karl Popper’s ‘The Open Society and its Enemies,’ calling it the fourth book within six years to attract worldwide attention from a refugee scholar who fled Hitler’s Europe to teach in New Zealand and London. Popper, Rao writes, is read as the foremost philosophical defender of liberal democracy against both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, refuting the historicist closed-society doctrines that Rao traces back through Hegel and Marx to Plato.

The second half of the article argues that democracy in the rendered pages is depicted not as a stable inheritance but as a perpetually threatened acquisition: a successful democracy needs a sustained majority that supports constitutional restraints on its own power, and remains continually vulnerable to the corrupting effects of ‘corporations’ — organised pressure groups that hijack day-to-day elections and bend party machinery to sectional purposes. Rao foregrounds Popper’s worry that proportional representation aggravates this fragmentation and that the failure of constitutional safeguards in inter-war Europe was a failure to police such tendencies.

• Popper is presented as the leading living philosophical antagonist of totalitarianism in both Nazi and Soviet forms.
• Closed-society thinking is traced from Plato through Hegel to Marx as a single historicist genealogy.
• Democracy is reframed as a fragile equilibrium requiring an alert constitutional majority.
• Organised ‘corporations’ and pressure groups are identified as the chief everyday corrupter of democratic forms.
• Proportional representation is treated as an institutional design that worsens fragmentation.

Linguistic Fanaticism

By M. N. Tholal

M. N. Tholal attacks what he calls ‘linguistic fanaticism’ in the U.P. Language Committee’s recommendations, which would in effect downgrade Urdu in the state’s official life despite a large Muslim minority that uses it. Reading the recommendations as a play for the next election rather than a genuine constitutional settlement, Tholal argues that the Committee’s report betrays the All India Congress Committee’s earlier promise to safeguard linguistic minorities and that ‘vested interests’ in the bureaucracy and the legal profession dressed up as Hindi enthusiasts are the real drivers of the move.

Under the headings ‘Vested Interests’ and ‘A Style of Hindi,’ he attacks the artificial Sanskritised register being constructed in U.P. as a synthetic dialect intelligible neither to ordinary Hindi speakers nor to Urdu speakers, and contrasts it with the simple, hybrid Hindustani in which Mohammad Iqbal and others wrote. The piece reads as a defence of natural linguistic usage against ideological purification — and warns that coercive Hindi will drive Urdu speakers, and Muslims more generally, toward exit and resentment rather than national consolidation.

• The U.P. Language Committee’s report is treated as an election-driven document, not a principled settlement.
• Vested bureaucratic and legal interests are identified as the real lobby behind aggressive Hindi-isation.
• The Sanskritised ‘style of Hindi’ is rejected as artificial and unintelligible to most speakers.
• Iqbal is cited as evidence that high Indian literature thrived in a simple, mixed Hindustani.
• Coercive language policy is forecast to deepen Muslim alienation rather than promote unity.

The Prime Minister And The Future Of Our Country

By S. R. Narayana Aiyar

S. R. Narayana Ayyar’s fifth installment of ‘The Prime Minister And The Future Of Our Country’ is sub-titled ‘Nehru Should Resign Office And Lead The Nation.’ Ayyar argues that Pakistan’s persistent hostility flows not from misunderstanding but from its self-definition as a Muslim state, against which India’s secular constitution is structurally an irritant. He uses this to indict Nehru’s whole posture of pleading reasonableness with Pakistan as a category mistake — the conflict is not amenable to goodwill diplomacy because the two states rest on incompatible principles of nationhood.

From that premise Ayyar urges that Nehru step down as Prime Minister and assume a non-executive role of moral leadership for the nation, freeing the government to defend Indian territory and minorities without being hostage to the Prime Minister’s personal investment in Indo-Pakistani conciliation. The article continues into a discussion of the Kashmir problem on the rendered pages of the chunk, framing Kashmir as the live test case for the principles being elaborated.

• Pakistan’s hostility is rooted in its Muslim-state identity, not in resolvable misunderstandings.
• Nehru’s pacifying approach toward Pakistan is judged structurally inadequate.
• Ayyar proposes Nehru resign the Prime Ministership and take up a moral-leadership role.
• Kashmir is treated as the operative test of the author’s framework.
• Indian secularism is presented as an inherent affront to Pakistan’s two-nation premise.

RATIONALIST SUPPLEMENT — The Future Of Rationalism

By S. Ramanathan

The four-page Rationalist Supplement opens with S. Ramanathan’s ‘The Future Of Rationalism,’ which argues that rationalism as an organised movement has had a chequered career in modern India — strong in countries with a Reformation tradition, weaker where rationalist organisations have remained inward-looking debating clubs rather than active reformers. Ramanathan presses Indian rationalists to engage Hinduism and other faiths as social systems rather than as merely intellectual targets and points to the Indian Ambassador’s office as one site where the cause has acquired a respectable foothold.

P. Kodanda Rao’s ‘Dowry’ welcomes the spirit of the Dowry Prohibition Act but warns that legislation alone cannot eradicate a practice fused with marriage as a property transaction. Roy V. Rosa’s ‘What Will God Do Now? Tower Of Babel’ is a Genesis-themed satire on the limits of divine and human cognition. A short unsigned ‘Mechanical Prayers’ lampoons the proliferation of prayer-wheels and ritualised orisons as substitutes for thought. Taken together the supplement positions rationalism as both a political and a cultural project that must engage with everyday social institutions.

• Rationalism’s progress in India is tied to its willingness to engage social institutions, not just doctrine.
• Reformation-style movements in the West are held up as the template for sustained rationalist gains.
• Dowry legislation is welcomed but read as insufficient without cultural and economic change.
• Religious cosmology is satirised through Babel and prayer-mechanisation as critiques of credulity.
• The supplement frames rationalism as a broad civilising programme rather than mere anti-clericalism.

RATIONALIST SUPPLEMENT — Dowry

By P. Kodanda Rao

J. M. Lobo Prabhu uses the Planning Commission’s own internal stocktaking — which admitted that several of the state enterprises bankrolled by the Second and Third Plans had failed to recover even their working costs — to argue that public-sector industrialisation has been a costly fiscal mistake. He notes that the Commission’s tax, debt and inflation policies have been justified by the promise of profitable state enterprises and concludes that, with the promise unmet, the underlying fiscal apparatus stands discredited.

Lobo Prabhu argues that the country’s most experienced industrial managers sit outside government in firms such as TISCO, and that handing strategic plants to ministerial appointees has produced the unsurprising result that scarce capital is sunk into ventures the private sector would not have touched. The piece doubles as an argument for political accountability: when planners admit failure only after irrevocable losses, the legislature and public opinion must reassert oversight before the next plan compounds the damage.

• The Planning Commission itself is cited as having admitted that several state enterprises failed even to recover working costs.
• Heavy taxation, deficit financing and inflation were politically justified by the promise of profitable state firms.
• Genuine industrial competence is located in private firms like TISCO, not in ministerial appointments.
• Capital allocation to politically directed enterprises is treated as a structural cause of failure.
• The author calls for parliamentary and public reassertion of control before the next plan period.

RATIONALIST SUPPLEMENT — What Will God Do Now? (Tower of Babel)

By Roy V. Ross

The Delhi Letter, ‘Mr. Nehru And His Principles,’ reports the Kashmir problem back to a domestic Delhi audience and weighs the Prime Minister’s recent statements against his record. The correspondent notes that Nehru’s principled defence of accession is being undermined in practice by his readiness to entertain unending negotiation with Pakistan, and that Sheikh Abdullah continues to be a contested symbol whose treatment cuts to the credibility of the Centre’s commitments.

The column reads Nehru’s public ‘principles’ as a rhetorical screen for an essentially improvised policy: every concession is dressed as statesmanship, every act of firmness as regrettable necessity. The correspondent argues that this style of leadership has begun to dissolve the moral capital of the Indian position in Kashmir and to confuse foreign observers about what India actually intends to defend.

• The Delhi column treats Nehru’s ‘principles’ as elastic rather than load-bearing.
• Sheikh Abdullah is positioned as the live test of the Centre’s Kashmir commitments.
• Improvisation in policy is said to be hollowing out India’s diplomatic standing.
• Domestic reporting on the Prime Minister’s speeches is read here as an exercise in decoding contradictions.
• The piece functions as an internal liberal critique from within the broader nationalist consensus.

RATIONALIST SUPPLEMENT — Mechanical Prayers

Samuel B. Pettengill reviews ‘The Philosophy of Edmund Burke,’ a selection from Burke’s writings edited by Louis I. Bredvold and Ralph G. Ross at the University of Michigan Press. The review presents Burke not as the conservative caricature familiar from textbooks but as a defender of ordered liberty against revolutionary abstraction — a thinker whose argument against the French Revolution turns on the social cost of severing inherited institutions from the moral imagination that holds them together.

The reviewer recommends the volume to Indian readers as a corrective to mechanical liberal-vs-conservative oppositions and as an entry point to Burke’s broader writings on America, India and Ireland. The book is implicitly enlisted in the journal’s own project: a non-doctrinaire defence of constitutional restraint against utopian planning.

• Burke is reclaimed as a defender of ordered liberty rather than reaction.
• The reviewer recommends the volume as a corrective to glib liberal-conservative binaries.
• Burke’s writings on America, India and Ireland are flagged for further reading.
• The notice ties Burke to the journal’s anti-utopian, constitutionalist programme.
• The book is read as an antidote to mechanical revolutionary thinking.

Planning Commission Wakes Up To Failure Of State Enterprises

By J. M. Lobo Prabhu

‘Gleanings from the Press’ reproduces and lightly editorialises clippings from the contemporary Indian and foreign press, with items on Congress organisational strength, the limits of socialism in a poor economy, and other current debates. The selection sits within the journal’s habit of using the daily press to triangulate its own positions: the editors quote sources whose factual matter supports their critique of the Congress economic and foreign policy line.

• The column functions as the journal’s curated weekly press digest.
• Selected items reinforce the editorial line on planning and Congress politics.
• Foreign and Indian sources are interleaved without separation.
• The format leaves the editors’ commentary terse and the quoted material doing the work.
• The section is positioned as a quick-read complement to the lead articles.

DELHI LETTER — Mr. Nehru And His Principles

By From Our Correspondent

‘News & Views’ collects short notices on current affairs: ‘After Pakistan, the Deluge?’ on the diplomatic momentum following Ayub Khan’s Washington visit; a gathering of ‘Goondas’ tied to Kashmir agitation; a piece on every-League-candidate-is-a-Pakistani-agent rhetoric; a note on the Muslim minister behind the 1945 riots in Assam; ‘Profiteering On State Trading?’ which suspects that state trading corporations are skimming margins under cover of public purpose; and ‘Need For Law Against Waste,’ which urges legislation against the wholesale destruction of food stocks in the name of administrative procedure.

The page closes with ‘This Is Bharat, That Is Free India,’ contrasting public rhetoric with administrative reality, a note on the Alabamarang Umbrella and a short discussion of trading with the IMF. The notes are written in the journal’s signature voice — terse, sceptical of state competence, and quick to read symbolic value into administrative incidents.

• Notices read Pakistan’s diplomatic gains as a warning to Indian foreign policy.
• State trading corporations are suspected of opaque margin-taking.
• Wastage of food stocks is treated as a scandal demanding statutory remedy.
• Communal and partition-era memory is used to caution against current rhetoric.
• The page consistently contrasts official self-presentation with administrative reality.

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