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| speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Ministr of independent India to the Constituent Assembley in the Parliament on the eve of India's independence. |
As India’s 70th Independence Day nears, as the ruling government is striving to malign the image of her first Prime Minister, it is fitting to remind ourselves of the dream of India that Nehru gave us on the day she acquired her freedom.
Nehru’s 10-minute speech heralds the moment when India achieved freedom, “when we step out from the old to the new”. He talks of the “pledge of dedication” we must take, not only to India and her people, but also “to the still larger cause of humanity”.
Nehru refers to India’s glorious past, but only to remind us of our responsibilities and of the work cut out for us to restore that glorious past after the “period of ill-fortune”. He asks us to move on, reminding us that “the turning point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about”.
He reminds us that “through good and ill fortune alike”, India “never lost sight of that quest or forgot the ideals which gave her strength”, and questions whether we are “brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?”
Nehru tells us that “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”. He tells us that “we have to labour and to work, and work hard” to redeem our pledge. He asks, “and what shall be our endeavour?” And then succinctly lays out our goals – “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”.
In a world where we are encouraged to think of ‘yours’ and ‘mine’, of how one religion or people are superior that the other, Nehru’s vision of a world that “can no longer by split into isolated fragments” and of “nations and peoples who are too closely knit together” may sound strange. He advises us that our world is interdependent and that “this is no time for petty and destructive criticism”, or for “ill will or blaming others”. He warns us that “no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action”.
You can read the full speech here
