Editor's Note | 75 Years of India’s Independence: A licence to dream

Seventy-five years ago, a famous midnight speech by our first prime minister heralded the birth of a new Nation. Meanwhile, the architect of independence was fast asleep, over 1,500 km away, where he had gone to douse the flames of a communal riot.

Until his death 17 years later, Jawaharlal Nehru presided over the building of a new India - dams, steel factories, institutes of learning, a foreign policy and a space programme, but also a debacle (with China in 1962) and a dynasty, the latter a harbinger of a style of politics widely reviled — if also copied — today. Gandhi was gone less than six months after independence, gunned down by a Hindu fanatic, who is celebrated today in some circles.

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Between them, one by the last years of his life and the other by his death, they inoculated India against the sort of instability that would plague other emerging nations. An experiment its detractors, including some of the departing British, hoped would fail, survived — a surprisingly hardy plant in a desert of poverty, corruption and disease.

Thanks to the sacrifices and intellect of a generation and those who came after, despite some egregious missteps, the plant has today become a towering tree, among the world’s top economies and a force to be reckoned with. Gone is that sense of inferiority, confidence fuelled, solidly, by remarkable achievements at home and abroad, and more fragilely, by a fake-it-till-you-make-it nationalism.

It could be said that the very basis of all this, for which one man died and another toiled, the Idea of India, is in danger. It’s important to remember that the goals worth striving for are the more difficult ones, like creating an India where all Indians are equal in the eyes of the State; the ones that come easily are often brutish, like the hegemony of one group; unintelligent, like language dominance; and often just plain mean-minded and unworthy of a great nation.

Of course, the genius of an ancient land has a way of restoring equilibrium. We can certainly hope. Perhaps India at 100, two-and-a-half decades hence, would have hit that sweet spot of a socially just, dynamic nation whose moral strength is such that it need bend before none, one that doesn’t consume itself with hatred or corruption, where merit comes through in the end, whatever your beliefs, your language, or your parentage. It would have built on the ideas of its founders, and taken the good from all those who came after them, denying neither credit nor blame, for lifetimes of individuals, like those of a nation, are invariably a mixed bag.

Of the first 75 years, you could say this: Thanks to what has been achieved, these wishes are horses we — no longer beggars in any sense — have a licence to ride.