The Indian Libertarian

Summary

This 1 January 1959 issue of The Indian Libertarian (Vol. VI No. 20), the Bombay fortnightly edited by Kusum Lotwala, opens with an editorial on ‘The Fall of Mao-Tse-Tung’ and runs more than a dozen short articles and departments on Indian foreign policy, the China border question, economic planning, decolonisation in Africa, and the failings of the Congress. The rendered pages carry the masthead, the editorial, and the opening of two signed articles by M. A. Venkata Rao and M. N. Tholal. The journal’s classical-liberal frame is constant: scepticism of Nehruvian planning and of accommodation with communist China, paired with a defence of free economy and a free press.

Essays

Our Borders with China

By MA Venkata Rao

M. A. Venkata Rao’s ‘Our Borders with China’ examines the disputed Sino-Indian frontier, weighing the cartographic ambiguities (‘maps and chaps’) and the historical background of India’s northern borders. Against the editorial’s broader critique of Nehru’s China policy, the article presses the case that India’s boundary claims rest on firmer ground than the government allows and warns against complacency toward Chinese intentions.

• Surveys the cartographic and historical basis of India’s northern frontier with China.
• Questions the government’s handling of the border and its trust in Chinese intentions.
• Sits within the issue’s wider scepticism of Nehru’s China policy.

”Enemies” of the Plan

By M. N. Tholal

M. N. Tholal’s ‘“Enemies” of the Plan’ takes up the rhetoric by which critics of state economic planning are cast as enemies of national development. The opening, in the rendered pages, sets out a sceptical reading of communal and political framing around the Plan and India’s social fissures, characteristic of the journal’s planning-critique line.

• Interrogates the labelling of planning’s critics as ‘enemies’ of the Plan.
• Connects the planning debate to communal and political tensions of the moment.
• Advances the journal’s recurring critique of state economic planning.

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