It is easy to miss the wood for the trees in an Independence Day speech. While there was nothing “new” in what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said from the ramparts of the Red Fort, and mercifully neither a laundry list of programmes implemented nor promises of more to come, the key message of the prime minister’s address to the nation should not get lost. It is a message that every Indian should understand, believe and internalise. The message is simple: while free India offers a model of growth and development within the framework of democracy, 63 years after Independence, the Indian people must once again renew their commitment to the principles of a liberal democracy and the policies of inclusive growth. At that monsoon midnight when India’s tricolour unfurled in New Delhi, it was hoped this country’s journey as a democratic and secular republic would hold promise for millions of poor and unfree people around the world. Indeed it did. India’s freedom struggle inspired anti-colonial struggles around the world. India’s Independence shook not just the British Empire to its foundations, but all empires and all dreams of empire-building.
But freedom from foreign rule was in itself not the only objective of India’s national movement. It was defined by other motivations as well — to build a secular, liberal and inclusive democracy, where there would be no discrimination based on the religious, ethnic, caste and linguistic identity of a citizen. In this journey there have been many deviations, many hurdles and many mishaps. Yet, six decades after Independence, India remains a beacon of hope for all those who wish to seek not just freedom, not just development, not just the banishment of poverty, ignorance and disease, but all these together within the framework of a secular democracy. That is what makes the Indian experiment unique, in many ways. Other developing country democracies have seen far too many ups and downs, and the roots of democracy and inclusive growth have not yet been well and firmly struck. Nevertheless, India has company and increasingly so, and this gives hope. Countries like Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa — developing countries, former colonies now free and democratic nations.
While Dr Singh said all the right things in his speech about fighting inflation, extremism and terrorism, about protecting the rights of minorities and empowering the dispossessed, about seeking friendship and development in India’s neighbourhood and so on, the key message of the prime minister was that the people of India must never forget the ideas and ideals that guided India’s freedom struggle and must renew their commitment to building a more prosperous, but socially, politically and economically more inclusive India, within the framework of a liberal and secular democracy. It is worth repeating this message so that every Indian constantly remembers what is it that India celebrates on the 15th of August, especially in the week after the Union Cabinet agreed to conduct a caste census!
