THOUGHTS FOR I-DAY

Tomorrow we will be celebrating the Independence Day. Seven decades ago on this date the Tricolour was unfurled signalling the birth of a new nation. Hopes replaced despair and the dream of the founding fathers to breathe in free India was realised. But that was just a beginning as there were many such dreams that were to be fulfilled in the free nation.

Every Independence Day thus is a time for stock taking to find out how far we have come. Naturally, we need to look at the bench marks that were set. The pledge of Independence as taken by the people of India on the Purna Swaraj Day (January 26, 1930) may serve as a useful guideline. While the entire text of the Purna Swaraj Day pledge may not be possible to be reproduce, selected portions have been quoted below:

“We believe that it is inalienable right of the Indian people, as of any other people, to have freedom and to enjoy the fruits of their toil and have the necessities of life, so that they may have full opportunities of growth…India has been ruined economically. The revenue derived from our people is out of all proportions to our income. Our average income is seven pice per day, and of the heavy taxes we pay 20 per cent are raised from the land revenue derived from the peasantry and 3 per cent from the salt tax which falls most heavily on the poor.

“Culturally the system of education has torn us from our moorings and our training has made us bug the very chains that bind us.”

The revolutionary youth of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association stated their avowed goal as to work for a revolution which would end exploitation of man by man.

There we have many such objectives that prompted men and women, young and old, to join the freedom movement. But there is a need to now evaluate how far those objectives have been achieved and how much more remains to be done. For a country of overwhelmingly large young men and women, this is all the more important because they opened up their eyes in a different country altogether. They neither saw the struggle nor the exploitation during the British rule. Therefore, in order to connect them with the nation, it is very important to make them understand how this India was built and what were the dreams of the founding fathers.

How do we measure the strength of our democracy? Well, we may take a cue from the acceptance speech of Senator Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention in Denver as given in the New York Times website on August 28, 2008. It is quoted: “We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the ‘Fortune 500’ companies, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a sick and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off and look after a risk kid without losing her job; an economy that honours the dignity of work.”

These words make a lot of sense today as we enter into yet another year of our independence. It is not a time to worry about how tenable things are in the country today. It is about doing things to realise the dreams of our founding fathers.