S.V. Raju has been waiting since 1994 for the Bombay high court to hear his case. He approached the court after failed efforts to convince the Election Commission of India to register his party, the Swatantra Party.
Raju says that his friend and fellow litigant L.R. Sampat died without the case coming up. “I sometimes joke that the courts are now waiting for me to go,” Raju says.
Even if the court hears his case, it is unlikely it will rule in his favour. That’s because a 1989 amendment to the Representation of the People Act says that only political parties that swear their ideological allegiance to secularism, democracy and socialism can be registered. And the Swatantra Party was set up in 1959 to oppose Nehruvian socialism. Since 1989, when the amendment took effect, Raju has fought to register his party, a champion of free enterprise, without having to declare itself socialist. A party can’t contest elections without being registered.
The amendment and the fact that all the members of Parliament, who represent India’s 1.03 billion population, belong to parties that have sworn their allegiance to socialism mean that everyone is a socialist in an economy that is discovering the benefits of free enterprise and capitalism.
“We are hypocritical,” says Suresh Prabhu, a member of Parliament who belongs to the right-wing Shiv Sena party. “What we say we do not mean and what we want to say we never ever truly do. This is best manifested in our swearing by socialism,” he adds.
Rajiv Gandhi, who was prime minister of a Congress government with absolute majority, had said in Parliament when the amendment was being discussed that any party not willing to “submit itself” to the Constitution of India “does not deserve to be recognized as a political party”. That rule would seem to apply even today. Historian Ramachandra Guha says this could be because with millions of poor in the country, no party wants to be identified as pro-rich.
Guha adds that each party professes socialism only when or where it is out of power, such as the communists outside West Bengal or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ever since it lost the 2004 general election. “That is also why,” he says, “the Congress, despite wooing the market, plays up the aam aadmi (ordinary man) rhetoric.”
“Socialism will remain relevant so long as it is in the Constitution. Those who don’t like it should get it replaced by capitalism,” quips Devendranath Dwivedi, a former additional solicitor general and chairman of the Congress party’s Vichar Vibhag, or think tank, in Delhi.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines socialism as a “political and economic theory or policy of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, capital, land, property, etc.” It adds that in Marxist theory, it is “a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.”