I have been asked to inaugurate this convention of the Swatantra Party. I do it with great pleasure as well as with a due sense of responsibility. I am not inaugurating merely a party. I think we are inaugurating a movement of freedom. Forty years ago, when I was forty years old, after twenty years’ practice at the Bar, and twelve years of political life in connection with the Congress and the Nationalist Party of that time and the Home Rule Movement, I joined the Non-cooperation Movement in close collaboration with and under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.
Now when I am twice that age, I am leading a revolt against what I have come to believe to be a fatally wrong direction taken by the Indian National Congress in the governance of this great country. I have come to the conclusion that a movement for freedom, as important and as serious as the movement for independence against British rule, has now to be inaugurated against this misconceived progress of the Congress towards what will finally end in the suppression of individual liberty and the development of the State into a true Leviathan.The State is becoming a giant entity by itself menacingly poised against the citizen, interfering with his life at all points, mistrusting the people, imposing restrictions, introducing a series of controls and regulations, stepping into the fields of agriculture, industry and trade, creating an army of officials, tremendously increasing the cost of administration and therefore the taxes paid by the nation, hypnotising the people with slogans that are mistaken for thought and wisdom, a scheme of Government in which it is taken for granted that the citizen is ignorant of what is his own interest. My criticism of the Congress policies and tendencies and their inevitable consequences is strong but not exaggerated.
