C. Rajagopalachari - Split From Congress - Parting of Ways

Parting of Ways

Following his resignation as Chief Minister, Rajaji took a temporary break from active politics and instead devoted his time to literary pursuits. He wrote a Tamil re-telling of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana which appeared as a serial in the Tamil magazine Kalki from May 23, 1954 to November 6, 1955. The episodes were later collected and published as Chakravarthi Thirumagan, a book which won Rajaji the 1958 Sahitya Academy award in Tamil language. On Republic Day 1955, Rajaji was honoured with India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.

Rajaji tendered his official resignation from the Indian National Congress and along with a number of other dissidents organised the Congress Reform Committee (CRC) in January 1957. K. S. Venkatakrishna Reddiar was elected President and the party fielded candidates in 55 constituencies in the 1957 state assembly elections, to emerge as the second largest party in Madras state with 13 seats in the legislative assembly. The Congress Reform Committee also contested 12 Lok Sabha seats during the 1957 Indian elections. The committee became a fully-fledged political party and was renamed the Indian National Democratic Congress at a state conference held in Madurai on September 28–29, 1957.

On June 4, 1959, shortly after the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress, Rajaji, along with Murari Vaidya of the newly established Forum of Free Enterprise (FFE) and Minoo Masani, a classical liberal and critic of socialist Nehru, announced the formation of the new Swatantra Party at a meeting in Madras. Conceived by disgruntled heads of former princely states such as the Raja of Ramgarh, the Maharaja of Kalahandi and the Maharajadhiraja of Darbhanga, the party was conservative in character. Later, N. G. Ranga, K. M. Munshi, Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa and the Maharaja of Patiala joined the effort. Rajaji, Masani and Ranga also tried but failed to involve Jayaprakash Narayan in the initiative.

In his short essay "Our Democracy", Rajaji explained the necessity for a right-wing alternative to the Congress by saying:

since... the Congress Party has swung to the Left, what is wanted is not an ultra or outer-Left, but a strong and articulate Right

Rajaji also insisted that the opposition must:

operate not privately and behind the closed doors of the party meeting, but openly and periodically through the electorate.

He outlined the goals of the Swatantra Party through twenty one "fundamental principles" in the foundation document. The party stood for equality and opposed government control over the private sector. Rajaji sharply criticised the bureaucracy and coined the term "license-permit Raj" to describe Nehru's elaborate system of permissions and licenses required for an individual to set up a private enterprise. Rajaji's personality became a rallying point for the party.

Rajaji's efforts to build an anti-Congress front led to a patch up with his former adversary C. N. Annadurai of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Annadurai grew close to Rajaji and sought an alliance with the Swatantra Party for the 1962 Madras legislative assembly elections. Although there were occasional electoral pacts between the Swatantra Party and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Rajaji remained non-committal on a formal tie-up with the DMK due to its existing alliance with Communists whom he dreaded. The Swatantra Party contested 94 seats in the Madras state assembly elections and won six as well as won 18 parliamentary seats in the 1962 Lok Sabha elections.

India's use of military force against Portugal to capture the Portuguese enclave of Goa was criticised by Rajaji who said of the operation and subsequent acts of international diplomacy, "India has totally lost the moral power to raise her voice against the use of military power."