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"It was a terrible time for us. In the middle of the night we would get calls urging my father (Dr Rustom Cavasjee Cooper) to welcome the Emergency. All our family, including my sister and I were shadowed on our way to and from school. Our phones were tapped. My father’s employees would be stopped outside his office in Jehangir Wadia Building (now Mulla House) in Fort and interrogated, as were our chauffeurs. But my father had fought for the fundamental rights of the people of India so welcoming the Emergency was totally out of the question,” recalled his elder daughter Feroza Cooper.

On the 75th anniversary of the Republic of India and the 50th anniversary of the declaration of the infamous Emergency in 2025, The Indian Express article on "women and men who reshaped the Republic” featured Rustom. Stated his younger daughter Farida, "My father tried his best on behalf of the people of India and we are blessed to know that he is remembered with respect.” To remind the readers of his convictions and contributions, the sisters shared information on their father along with a 1970 article penned by him for Himmat  (a weekly that reflected the thinking of the Moral Re-Armament movement) and another piece written on him by the Observer Research Foundation. 

  Top (2nd row, extreme right) and inset: Rustom Cooper at the inauguration 

  of the Swatantra Party in Bombay on August 15, 1959

In 1975 when the Emergency was declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress party, Rustom was among those targeted even though he believed that as he had stepped down from politics he would not be under duress. But he was a founder member of the Swatantra Party established in 1959 to counter Nehruvian socialism, and had served as both treasurer and general secretary of this political party which was dissolved 15 years later. With Minoo Masani as Party president, the Swatantra Party had emerged as the single-largest opposition party in Parliament in the general elections of 1967. 

Despite being a member of the opposition, Rustom’s financial acumen was respected by the government. When Congressman Lal Bahadur Shastri was Prime Minister, Rustom had been appointed member of the Research Programme Committee in the Ministry of Finance as also member of the Central Direct Taxes Advising Committee. A prominent chartered accountant, he had served as the president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in India and had contributed to the Institute’s Code of Ethics. Earlier Rustom had been called upon to depose before the Select Committee of Parliament in relation to amendments to the Company Law Act of 1956.

When Indira Gandhi came to power, Rustom was known to be openly critical of her pro-Communist stance that led her to align herself with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Marxist) whose support she sought to form a government. According to him, "Nationalization of means of production cannot and has not achieved the Marxist dream of equality. A question that comes up is, why then, are we not prepared to change our thinking on socialism? The answer to this is provided by the fact that the type of socialism practised by our leaders in this country (India) has helped to create new vested interests through state capitalism in which the leaders have everything to gain and the public has everything to lose.”

He had also lambasted Gandhi’s decision to devalue the rupee in late 1966. But his most vociferous opposition was to her firing her finance minister Morarji Desai, taking over his portfolio, and within three days in July 1969 unilaterally announcing nationalization of 14 banks by Presidential Ordinance without consulting Parliament. Her justification for doing so was supposedly to provide greater access to bank financing to the middle classes, in particular the agrarian sector. 

  r: Rustom and Zarin Cooper with Morarji Desai and wife

"The main reason why I felt very strongly about bank nationalization was the way in which it was done. I thought it was done with unreasonable haste, in a totalitarian manner,” Rustom had written in an article titled "Why I moved the Supreme Court,” carried in Himmat, February 1970. "My main object in taking this matter to the Supreme Court was to establish the sanctity of the Constitution, the rule of law and the fundamental rights of the individual, particularly the small man and the small shareholder.” Being a director of the Central Bank of India and the Syndicate Bank in Karnataka as also a small shareholder of several banks which had been nationalized, the petition to the Supreme Court on behalf of Rustom was filed by jurist Nani Palkhivala. "Unfortunately none of the chairmen or members of the old boards of directors of the nationalized banks or eminent businessmen and industrialists came forward to join us in this fight for democracy,” Rustom rued. 

The landmark case, R.C. Cooper vs The Union of India, lasted six months until February 1970, when a 11-judge bench of the Supreme Court gave a 10:1 majority verdict in favor of Cooper. Following the Supreme Court ruling that the Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1969 was discriminatory against the 14 banks and the compensation offered was not fair, a revised Banking Companies (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1970 was passed. In his Himmat article Rustom commented, "I feel that the Supreme Court’s judgment is very important in so far as the shareholders of the nationalized banks as also the shareholders of any industries which may be taken over or nationalized in future are concerned. Now they can expect justice to be done in the matter of compensation, both as regards the quantum of compensation as also mode of payment.”

More than a politician, Cooper was inherently an economist who had qualified as a chartered accountant from England as also earned his PhD from the London School of Economics. He became a partner in the firm of P. C. Hansotia and Company before his 30th birthday. Ahead of his time he engineered his firm to be the Indian associate of the American accounting giant, Touche Ross Bailey and Smart which is now known in India as Deloitte Touche. He was also president of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber.

After distancing himself from politics, he was once again immersed in his profession as a financial consultant when his friends in the Congress alerted him on his impending arrest. With only a small suitcase, 53-year-old Rustom left for Singapore and made a fresh beginning there. One of the few people he knew was a Parsi banker, Burjor ‘Baji’ Palkhiwala who was then senior vice president at American Express Bank. Palkhiwala recommended Cooper to many of the Bank’s clients as financial advisor and his first assignment was as advisor to a Chinese timber merchant from Indonesia.

By 1977 Rustom had established his consultancy firm Coopers Pvt Ltd along with his lawyer wife Zarin. Initially their clients included those who had relocated from other Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand. In later years his projects took him to the UK, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Maldives. He was appointed on the board of directors of reputable companies both in the UK and Singapore, including Assam Oil Company and Duncan MacNeill (The Assam Tea Company) that were then part of the multinational Inchcape Group. So too was he on the board of the Singapore subsidiary of the iconic German automotive company, Porsche Motors. He authored two books — Job Sharing in Singapore (1986) and War on Waste (1991).

As a citizen of Singapore, he would regularly travel to his birthplace Bombay and lightheartedly described himself as a "proud white, if not red Singaporean,” alluding to the colors of Singapore’s  national flag, and his own anti-communist/Marxist sentiments. He died in 2013 at the age of 90 while on a visit to London.

Spiritually inclined, apart from being a committed Zoroastrian, Rustom was greatly inspired by the teachings of Jesus and would daily read a portion of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. When asked how he handled the challenges in his life, Rustom always responded, "By the grace of God.”