A public warning against Anand Prasad’s “Liberal Party of India”

I have no time or inclination to discuss the many thousands of individuals who’ve connected with my work over the past 20 years and then turned out to be far less than what they said they were.

But I make do an exception in a few cases, to illuminate the public record.

This is one such occasion. This post is mainly about the highly questionable person by name of Anand Prasad, a lawyer.

I received an email today from one alleged Liberal Party of India (screenshot here). Anand Prasad owns the domain liberalpartyofindia.org  – see screenshot taken today. (Btw, I owned this for 13 years but allowed it to lapse after we decided on SBP as the name of India’s liberal party. See archival records of this domain on archive.org e.g. see a screenshot here).

It is essential to discuss the kind of leadership of this alleged “liberal” party, so no one in India is possibly confused and it is clear to all that SBP is the ONLY liberal party of India.

DEEP SEATED PROBLEMS WITH ANAND PRASAD’S IDEOLOGICAL STANCE AND ABILITY TO KEEP HIS WORD:

Exactly one year ago, Anand Prasad showed a lot of interest in joining Swarna Bharat Party. I spent many hours on the phone with him, despite his tendency to ramble endlessly and not stick to the point. He also had some seriously flawed ideas and could only barely be called liberal. But I was happy to engage with him – I like to encourage everyone to become a liberal leader of India.

He then sent me a document which contained his ideas. It was absurd and half-socialist. One of our party members reviewed it and wrote: “I would like to state that the document leaves a lot to be desired as a classical liberal document, as it has a lot of opinions and objectives that can only be best described as socialist.” Further, “These are all classic socialist mumbo jumbo.” This party member’s review of the Anand document here (in Word, tracked).

I’m very kind to people, so I provided him with firm but polite feeedback (This is the link to my feedback (in Word, tracked).

After this,I spent many hours again with Anand over the phone. He needed to agree broadly with the SBP’s manifesto before he would join the party. He also had to specifically point out where he disagreed. I recall discussing this and he soon said that he agreed entirely with our approach. ONLY THEN was he invited to join the party.

But while he had agreed with the SBP manifesto, at a meeting of some people in Delhi, he again put forward his own manifesto – that too without incorporating the feedback we had already provided. Basically he had PRETENDED to agree with SBP’s manifesto.

Almost immediately after his joining we had a regular Skype call among party members in which he was also present. At that meeting he suddenly raised the issue of the party name. I explained the long history of how the party name came about and said if he wished he could, within a week, provide a set of options that had been tested with the grassroots. It is amazingly difficult to change party names, but I was once again encouraging and agreed with his proposal to test alternative names.

He said he would. There are many witnesses to that skype call, in which there was agreement that despite the great challenge involved in changing the party’s name, we would once again consider an alternative. We went over BACKWARDS to accommodate his concerns.

Then, within a week of that call (and of joining), he resigned.

AFTER HE RESIGNED he started calling all SBP leaders across the country over phone, asking them to resign from SBP and join him, instead. NO ONE LEFT SBP.

Clearly, the entire time he spent engaging with me was a pretence, designed to better understand the party from within, and to find out all details of its key leaders. ANAND HAD BEEN CLEAR FROM THE BEGINNING THAT HE WOULD RUN A PARTY WHICH HAD HIS AGENDA AND WHICH HAD THE NAME HE WANTED TO GIVE IT.

That’s not how we function on SBP. Everything is decided by vote. My preferred name since 2000 or so has been Liberal Party of India (and I even launched one in 2005 for a short while) but I have always deferred to the opinions of the team and this name was chosen after a number of voting processes.

I would like to warn everyone therefore that they engage with Anand Prasad’s “Liberal Party of India” at their own risk.

a)  IT IS NOT A LIBERAL PARTY and has close to ZERO understanding of liberty or economics.

b) IT IS RUN BY SOMEONE WHO’S WORD MEANS NOTHING.

That’s all I wanted to say.

Note that even though the Liberal Democratic Party of Prodyut Bora is not a liberal party, I have no reason to provide any adverse comment about his party or about him. Prodyut’s character is impeccable. Out here, the situation is different.

FINALLY, to anyone who has been misled by Anand Prasad, I say this: join SBP if you are a genuine liberal. We have a lot of work to do to liberate India. Don’t distract this work with fake parties.