Piloo Mody, the Liberal India forgot

Piloo Mody's real importance is in the political questions he chose to ask. How much power should the state exercise over the individual? How much economic freedom can a democracy afford to surrender? And what happens when political authority becomes so concentrated that institutions cease to restrain it? For decades, Indian political memory has oscillated between the grandeur of major mass movements and the influence of prominent individual leaders, creating a dynamic yet often conflicted historical narrative. Scholars and commentators are exclusively obsessed with phases and people in Indian politics. While not all periods were uniform and not all were exclusive to the coverage of major parties and movements, somewhere in between sits a political tradition that is remembered far less than it deserves: the Indian liberal who distrusted excessive state power, defended economic freedom, and believed that democracy required more than periodic elections. Piloo Mody was one of its most distinctive voices. Mody is often remembered as the Parsi parliamentarian with the quick wit, the flamboyant personality, and the ability to puncture political solemnity with a joke. But there were more consequential aspects of his legacy because his real importance lies in the political questions he chose to ask. How much power should the state exercise over the individual? How much economic freedom can a democracy afford to surrender? And what happens when political authority becomes so concentrated that institutions cease to restrain it? In the years of the Swatantra Party and, most dramatically, during the Emergency, Mody gave unusually clear answers to these questions. THE SWATANTRA ALTERNATIVE When C. Rajagopalachari and others established the Swatantra Party in 1959, Indian politics was dominated by the Congress model of centralized planning, public-sector expansion, and an increasingly interventionist state. Swatantra offered an alternative that was unusual for its time. It argued that the state should not attempt to direct every aspect of economic life and that individuals and private enterprise needed room to act. Piloo Mody became one of the party's founding figures and its Executive VicePresident. An architect by profession, he entered electoral politics and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Godhra in 1967 and again in 1971. His politics was not simply a defence of businessmen against taxation or regulation. At its more fundamental level, it was a defence of individual initiative against an overbearing state. This was crucial because Indian liberalism was never merely an imported economic doctrine. In Mody's political life, economic freedom and political freedom belonged to the same conversation. A citizen who was free to vote but whose livelihood, profession, and economic choices were subject to excessive official control was not, in his conception, fully free. This was the intellectual challenge posed by Swatantra: perhaps the Indian state need not own, regulate, or supervise everything to serve the public. It was an argument that remained marginal for much of the period, but its importance became clearer as the costs of excessive controls and bureaucratic discretion accumulated. Mody's own professional background made the question of institutional autonomy particularly concrete. Before entering politics, he had worked as an architect and had been involved in developing the profession's legal framework. His parliamentary role in the passage of the Architects Act, 1972, helped establish statutory regulation of architecture through registration, professional standards, and the Council of Architecture. It was a different arena from economic policy, but the underlying principle was familiar: professions and citizens require institutions that provide order without placing every decision in the hands of arbitrary authority. THE EMERGENCY If Swatantra represented Mody's political philosophy, the Emergency essentially tested the sincerity of that philosophy. On 25 June 1975, when the Emergency was declared, opposition leaders and political activists were arrested under laws including the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Mody was among those detained, and he spent roughly sixteen months in prison, including time in Tihar and Rohtak. That experience gave a personal dimension to his earlier arguments about the dangers of concentrated power. It is one thing for a politician to warn against an over-centralized state while sitting in Parliament. It is another thing to defend liberty after the state has taken away your own. Mody later recorded his reflections in 'Democracy Means Bread and Freedom', published in 1979, where the title itself captures an important feature of his politics. Democracy, in his view, could not be reduced either to material prosperity or to formal political institutions. Citizens needed both bread and freedom. That proposition remains relevant because democracies frequently confront the temptation to treat liberty as an inconvenience. Development requires decisions; governance requires authority; crises sometimes require extraordinary measures. But Mody's experience illustrated the danger of allowing temporary political necessities to justify unlimited power. The emergency, therefore, remains the most serious reason to remember him because his opposition was not theoretical but rooted in the experience of what happens when the machinery of the state becomes stronger than the institutions meant to restrain it. ALTERNATIVE TRADITION OF LIBERALISM In our understanding of political discourse in India today, we should not obscure the fact that, in the post-Independence era, an intellectual consensus dominated by socialism existed and remained quite narrow for decades, limiting the development of other perspectives. Congress's political dominance gave socialism, centralized planning, and an expansive role for the state an influence that extended well beyond economics. Alternatives existed, but struggled to acquire comparable legitimacy. Rajaji's economic liberalism, Savarkar's very different conception of nationalism, and Mody's parliamentary liberalism emerged from distinct traditions, yet all operated in a political environment where liberal ideas occupied limited space. Mody's significance lies in treating liberalism as more than an economic preference. For Mody, individual freedom meant the freedom to act, create, dissent, and make choices without constantly seeking the state's permission. Economic freedom and political freedom were therefore closely connected. Development and welfare could be legitimate objectives of government, but they could not become permanent justifications for expanding state authority over citizens. His ideas appear particularly relevant in retrospect. India's economic transformation eventually dismantled much of the license raj. It created far greater space for private enterprise, the very direction that the Swatantra generation had advocated when it was politically unfashionable. Mody did not live to witness that transformation, but subsequent events gave greater weight to his arguments against excessive state control. In that sense, Mody's place in Indian political history is larger than the fortunes of the Swatantra Party. He represented an alternative intellectual inheritance, one that believed that a free republic required not only political independence but also confidence in the individual, professional institutions, and a public sphere where dissent was legitimate. That inheritance may have remained politically small in his lifetime, but its questions were never insignificant. Such are the takeaways from his story for the liberal tradition today that are worth recovering. His life shows that national strength and individual freedom need not compete, and that economic initiative can strengthen the nation, with government working with the people and for the people. The Swatantra Party may have faded, but the freedom Mody defended has proved far more enduring than the politics that once dismissed it. Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.