India, unlike Sri Lanka, has never had a liberal party, but there has been no dearth of liberal thinking in India since the days of Ranade, discussed in an earlier chapter. Most prominent in the period around the achievement of Indian independence was Minoo Masani, who was a pillar of the Swatantra Party, which conceptualised intellectual opposition to the socialist consensus that dominated the ruling Congress Party. Unfortunately opposition to government took on sectarian tendencies, and even when the monolithic hold of the Congress Party was broken in the 1977 elections, ideology seemed less important than other considerations.

Though, in common with world trends, the role of the state began to decline through a general consensus from the eighties onward, India did not really have think-tanks that adequately advanced a liberal perspective. This has changed however in the last decade, and Indian liberal thinkers and social activists are in the forefront of the movement for change.

One area in which, despite official dogma, India continued to provide space for private sector activity, was through the popular response to imaginative entrepreneurship. In this chapter Barun Mitra, who heads the Liberty Institute, examines the enduring strength of this sector, and its potential to strengthen current efforts at political reform that will enable society to work at its full potential.