At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to completion of 60 years of unfulfilled promises, unrealized potential and shattered dreams. In few hours we would celebrate our 60th Independence Day, which by definition should be a celebration of our nationhood but in reality seems nothing more than an annual holiday.

Pandit Nehru in his famous “Tryst with destiny” speech has said:

“Freedom and power bring responsibility. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.”


60 years have passed since then and today…

We have more poor than we had then.
We have still not eradicated polio.
We still look towards quotas to provide equal opportunity.
And worst of all, most of us seem to be ignorant about all this.

We are ignorant because glitzy malls that have come up everywhere have hidden the acres of slums.
We are ignorant because bollywood fund raisers for AIDS have made us forget that even today more people in India die of typoid and malaria.
We are ignorant because our media screams out that India has most number of billionaires in Asia but hundreds of people dying of hunger and cold are dismissed as too repetitive a news.
We are ignorant because Raisina Hill has a woman president and so we no more remember how frequently women get raped in capital of Republic of India
We are ignorant because what brings us out in streets is debacle of Indian cricket team in world cup and not our government’s lousy decisions.

And in this ignorance , what we are celebrating today is …

Fact that even after 60 years of independence, our country’s politics is still dictated by casteism, regionalism, communism and appeasement.
Fact that every year with alarming regularity we read about deaths due to floods, cold winters and hot summers but we have done nothing about it.
Fact that we have still not eliminated dowry deaths, female infanticide and polygamy.
Fact that our laws still read as Hindu undivided family act and muslim personal law instead of Uniform civil code
Fact that Biharis are beaten out from Mumbai and Tamils are mobbed in Bangalore
Fact that in one form or another we are facing civil unrest in Kashmir, Assam, Nagaland, Chhatisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Mizoram.
Fact that we are biggest democracy but we have more criminals in parliament than anywhere else in the world.

Frankly speaking, people who would be celebrating tomorrow will only be the ones who can’t look beyond BPOs , Sensex, IT czars, Retails Malls, Multiplexes, Private engineering colleges, IIM salaries and Sania Mirza .

And somehow I believe there is more to India than just that.

And so tonight, 60 years after Britishers left us to chart our own destiny, we shouldn’t have been celebrating our freedom from foreign rule but instead we should have been celebrating fulfillment of the dream of a modern, just and vibrant India that inspired our forefathers to lay their lives for the freedom of this country.

Alas, in all these years we seem to have forgotten that what those thousands of “unknown volunteers and soldiers of freedom” fought for was not just independence but everything that can be gained from independence.

And so I believe that tomorrow is not a day to celebrate, but it’s a day to renew a pledge that Pandit Nehru read out on 14th August 1947.

“The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.
We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be. We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard”.

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And so if we want to celebrate our INDEPENDENCE DAY in its true spirit, let's go and get what independence should have brought and let's promise ourselves that we would do more than just cribbing to make India how we want her to be.

Jai Hind