"Why do I lay so much stress on liberalisation? I do so because I believe that the business of government is to govern and not to be in business. How true that Gujarati proverb : `where the king becomes a trader, there his subjects become beggars'." - Minoo R. Masani (1994) A TRIBUTE TO MINOO MASANI by Barun S Mitra Minoo Masani, the doyen of the liberal movement, and among the last few surviving members of the Constituent Assembly, passed away last week after a prolonged illness. He was 92. For many of us political awakening came in the turbulent 1970s, through Masani's column As I See It in The Statesman -. His was a voice of sanity that came through loud and clear over the general political din. Be it in his firm opposition to Emergency, his fearless defence of freedom of speech and the press, his commitment to human rights, his categorical stand against the license and permit raj, his unequivocal support for a free and open economy. Now, when the issue of Kashmir is once again dominating the Indo-Pak relations, it would be worth recalling Masani's ardent plea not to treat the problem in Kashmir as dispute over some real estate, but to win the hearts and minds of the people of Kashmir. A true liberal if there was one, he epitomised what Tagore had said in one of his famous poems, 'If no one responds to your call, then you walk alone…' Nani Palkhivala, the eminent jurist and a colleague, had written on the occasion of Masani's 80th birthday, "If this duty had not been performed , regardless of personal considerations, by few brave and perceptive citizens, like Minoo Masani at crucial moments, the history of this country would have been tragically different." So strong was his political convictions that for 15 long years he was not speaking terms with Pandit Nehru, because the latter considered Stalin to be a "progressive" and refused to entertain any criticism of the man he admired so much. Even Khruschov's famous speech in 1956 failed to cure Nehru's blind admiration for Stalin. Masani squarely held Nehru responsible for the disasterous result of his "acceptance of Stalin's planning and state capitalism, which he thought was socialism." He often said that if one was 20 and was not attracted to socialism, one did not have a heart; but if one were 40 and remained a socialist, then one did not have a head. Masani had himself travelled the whole political spectrum. Like many of his generation he had returned from England after becoming a barrister at Lincoln's Inn, and like others had absorbed socialist ideals. In the mid 1930s he was instrumental in forming the Congress Socialist Party within the Indian National Congress. By 1940, Masani, along with leaders like Lohia, Achyut Patwardhan, Ashok Mehta resign from CSP in protest against the Communist tactics. Disgusted, he quit politics and joined the Tata's in 1941, where he became one of the trusted aides of JRD. Later in 1944, he published one of his seminal critique of socialism in Socialism Reconsidered. Soon he plunged in to the Quit India movement and was imprisoned in 1943. On his release he was elected the Mayor of Bombay Municipal Corporation. Later he was elected to the Constituent Assembly and played an active role in the Fundamental Rights Sub-committee and the Union-Powers Committee. Masani was very effective in Parliament in independent India where he was elected to the Lok Sabha thrice. Along with people like C. Rajagopalachari, Masani founded the Swantra Party in 1959. In the 1960s, Swatantra Party filled the role of not only the principal but principled opposition to monolithic Congress. In 1975, Masani was again at the fore front of J.P. Narayan's movement against the Emergency. Masani fought the censors and kept his journal Freedom First, which he had founded in 1952, going and helped expose the nature of Emergency. A sterling achievement, along with Ramnath Goenka's Indian Express, at a time of the gravest national crisis when, as a top censor official put it later, most of the press was willing to crawl when the authorities only asked them to bend. Masani was active in politics, but was not a politician, and although he spent most his political life in opposition, he remained an optimist. And like liberals such as Gandhi and Gokhle, Masani always stressed on the importance of building civic awareness. In his lucidly written widely read book - Our India (1940) - Masani inculcated a new civic consciousness among a whole generation of youngsters. Idealist and intellectually inclined, nevertheless Masani was deeply aware of the need for institutions that would nurture and sustain the spirit of freedom. He helped establish a series of organizations. With the blessing of Sardar Patel, Masani established the Democratic Research Service in 1950 to "contribute towards the education of public opinion in India to a fuller realisation of the need to defend India's national independence and her culture and of the possibilities of social and economic advance through democratic process." DRS published the liberal journal Freedom First since 1952 till 1995, when the journal was transferred to Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom for administrative reasons. ICCF was another of the organizations founded by Masani in 1951 to promote intellectual liberty, cultivate a spirit of free inquiry and an appreciation of the arts among scholars, writers, artists, scientists and others. The Indian Liberal Group was formed in 1965 to espouse the cause enunciated in the Liberal Manifesto drawn up in Oxford in 1947. For a period Masani was elected the President of the Liberal International. In 1968, the Leslie Sawhny Programme of Training for Democracy (LSP) and the Leslie Sawhny Centre at Devlali, near Nasik, was set up. Tens of thousands of people have since participated in the seminars and workshops organized by LSP aimed at training citizens for leadership, citizenship, and public service. To keep alive and propagate the ideals of C. Rajagopalachari, a close colleague and mentor, Masani founded the Rajaji Foundation in 1972. The foundation annually hosts the Rajaji Memorial lecture by a person of eminence. Always seeking to explore new territories, Masani in the last decade of his life championed the Right to Die with Dignity. A society was formed in 1981 to assert the right of every man and woman of sound mind the freedom to choose to live or die, within legal limits. Masani must have been happy to note recent judicial pronouncements that have sought to decriminalize suicides. Minoo Masani was among those extremely fortunate people who lived to see many of his dreams and prophesies come true - the collapse of the Soviet block, the move away from Nehruvian planning in India. Today as we struggle to break free from the dead weight of the misguided policies of the past, and are searching for a new conviction, one of Masani's favourite Gujarati proverb : "If the King becomes a trader, the subjects become beggers", could provide just that impetus. Writer's address: Barun S. Mitra 96/10 Pushp Vihar - 1 New Delhi 110 017.