Unsung hero: Chakravarti Rajagopalachari

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would not have been known as the architect of reforms if India had listened to another sage voice in the 1960s. In the second of the series on unsung heroes in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of india's independence, CNBC-TV18 profiles Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.

If India is a resurgent economy today at age 60, it is thanks to its embrace of an economic philosophy that it was denied in its younger days, as an Independent nation. Chakravarty Rajagopalachari defied the mantra of socialism, and founded the Swatantra Party to advocate free enterprise. He did not win the Bharat Ratna for that, though. His party is long dead, but the ideas are alive and kicking, though India still swears by socialism in the preamble to the Constitution.

In May 1959, touching 80 years, Rajaji launched the Swatantra Party. The tipping point was the Congress threat to adopt cooperative or collective farming through the Nagpur resolution. The business of the state is government, not business, he said rather inelegantly. The party's founding statement called for decentralized distribution of industry, by nurturing competitive enterprise and encouraging the self-employed peasant farmer who stands for initiative and freedom.

Nehru was quite intimate with Rajaji, and wanted him to move from being the only Indian governor-general to becoming its first president, but Sardar Patel's choice prevailed. Rajaji fell out with Nehru over economic policy and the cult of the personality.

Rajaji's party supported the abolition of zamindari, but not the fragmentation of land-holdings. It believed in heavy industrialization, but not the state capturing the commanding heights of the economy. The sanctity of contracts was inviolable - so it opposed the abolition of privy purses to maharajas, and also bank nationalization.

Would India have been different, if it had adopted Rajaji's philosophy early on? Perhaps. But it is not as if Nehru imposed centralized planning on an unwilling capitalist class. A group of leading industrialists had said in the so-called Bombay Plan that in the early stage of industrialization, the state would have to exercise considerable intervention and control.

There are those who argue, that despite reformers, the Congress is decidedly illiberal and the BJP has its unacceptable face. Now that the mood has changed, we need a party that genuinely believes in classical liberalism, markets and governance. For believing in Indians long before they had the self-confidence to believe in themselves, CNBC-TV18 salutes Chakravarty Rajagopalachari in this 60th year of independence.