“Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.”

– Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Gandhi must have been passing through an extremely clairvoyant phase when he came up with this statement in the Thirties. In the thirty years that have passed since Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Independent India, freedom has very often provided the license for the country’s politicians to err. But if it is human to err, it has been a divine dispensation that has pulled the India that Gandhi so loved over many rough patches. In these three decades, much water has flowed beneath India’s political bridges. Public mentalities have undergone definite changes, and the very definition of “freedom” has taken on newer meanings.  

But there is one common factor in both August of ’47 and August of ’77, and that is the euphoria that hangs over the nation. In August 1947, of course, the euphoria had been justifiable: centuries of British colonialism had at last been shrugged off, and the people of India had finally got to governing themselves. In August 1977, however, the euphoria is due more to the reincarnation of democracy in the country than to anything else. There had been unconcealed glee and rejoicing when the British left India’s shores that August; this August, the rejoicing is more at the fact that there is at last a government in India that swears by Gandhi and promises to undo the damage done in thirty years.  

There is also a subtle difference in the two occasions for rejoicing: in ’47, it was freedom from British imperialism, from the overlordship of the White Babus; in ’77, it was freedom from Indian authoritarianism, from the overlordship of Indira Gandhi.  

Yet, the pundits hailed 1977 as the year in which India had achieved her “second liberation”. If there was a frail, ascetic Mahatma in ’47, there was today a frail, though uncrowned, Mahatma in Jayaprakash Narayan. The wheel had taken three decades to come full circle.  

As August 15, 1977, nears, the talk of “freedom” is growing in strength and frequency in India. The symbolism of the event seems almost as vast as that of America’s Bicentennial last year. This symbolism will take many shapes—in Delhi, it will be marked by the hoisting of the National Tricolor on the ramparts of the Red Fort by Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Elsewhere, there will be eulogies to independence, and elegies for the overcast “21 months” of the recent Emergency.  

Nehru’s infant government had come in on the crest of a huge wave of expectation. Freedom, many people had assumed, would automatically prove to be a mystic panacea for the nation’s traditional ills. But when Nehru died in 1964, he had been rudely jerked out of his Gandhian mould by the war with China that had erupted in the winter of ’62. The nation had been in an introspective and self-critical mood. “What went wrong?” was the question most asked. Nobody seemed to know for sure.  

The manner in which Nehru’s daughter Indira chiseled and blow torched “freedom” to suit her own ends will surely go down in history, viewed in retrospect with probably the same horror as is Nixon’s Watergate. The “tryst with destiny” that Nehru had spoken of on the night the country won independence had somehow, somewhere, been delayed by mixed-up signposts.  

One cannot afford to forget, however, that both Nehru and Indira had their moments of glory. Nehru’s concept of mutual coexistence of the nations of the post-World War II era had won international limelight for him in the Fifties. Similarly, Indira had touched the zenith of her popularity, countrywide and worldwide, in the wake of the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, and in her landslide victory in the 1971 elections, pegged on that ephemeral slogan garibi hatao. But freedom, to Mrs. Gandhi, had implied the ability to foist her ideas on those around her. Strong, centralist rule had been her characteristic. India, said her supporters, is suited to such rule, programmed as the nation has been by centuries of foreign dominance. Events proved otherwise, however, and Indira was hoist on her own petard in March of this year. 

Increasingly, the older people in India today take refuge in harking back to “those golden days” when the British ruled. Though almost all of them celebrated Independence in ’47, they bemoan the fact that the nation has been steadily sliding downhill ever since then. Prices have kept on going up. Inflation seems irreversible. Living conditions have deteriorated. Public morale has never been lower. The babies keep on coming. The rains continue to play hide-and-seek with the economy. Where oh where, the oldsters chorus, is the “security” of Those Golden Days?  

The mood among the younger Indians is hardly better. Beset by unemployment and an expensive future, they sometimes turn around and ask each other a similar question: “What was better Indira or democracy?” Naturally, because for these young people, democracy has been defined by the West. The textbook concept of democracy that they have been exposed to is something they will never see in their own country; yet, brought up on the rhetoric of “freedom”, they often fail to see that reality has been submerged. 

“There has to be a moral and spiritual base for development along with its materialistic content. Freedom from want and freedom from fear have to be secured’ to make that base. We have dedicated ourselves to the task of achieving these freedoms along with the right to liberty”. 

                                                                                                                                     Morarji Desai, April 7 1977

More than four months have passed since the Janata Government was sworn in in Delhi, the first non-Congress government since Independence, and the first government to come in without the presence of the Nehrus, on-stage or in the wings.  

In these months, democracy in the true sense seems to have landed once again on the country’s shores. There is freedom of speech once more, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, freedom of the press. Freedom from fear, and freedom from an impending dictatorship. Freedom is the word most bandied about these days.  

Freedom has also brought with it some of the old problems. Poverty, population, and unemployment have once again shot into the headlines. Labor unrest is spreading, cancerous, throughout the country. Prices have been going up in an alarming series of spurts. The common man, the man in the street, is beleaguered by these forces. He has almost forgotten the fact that he was responsible, four months back, for ushering in democracy, and for showing autocracy to the door.  

But there is absolutely no doubt about one thing: the people of India are proud of themselves, this August of ’77. This pride stems not only from the fact that they convincingly proved their ability to cry halt to a threat to their personal freedom in March, but also from the fact that they have helped their nation regain a lot of the respect and admiration it had been in danger of losing in the recent past. If the leaders of the free world have paid tributes to India’s return to democracy, it has been a tribute, above all else, to India’s people. 

Every bunch of grapes will contain a few sour ones, and the problems that confront India today are certainly not minimized by the exit of Mrs. Gandhi’s government in March. In neighboring countries, too, there has been a dramatic change in systems of government this year. The electoral eclipse of Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka last month was almost as spectacular as Mrs. Gandhi’s. The imposition of martial rule in Pakistan, again during last month, was equally astonishing.  

What do all these developments indicate? First of all, the fact that the will of the people will always reign supreme, whatever system of government the subcontinent will enjoy. If India and her neighbors have not run along in the well-worn grooves of conventional democracy, neither have they settled into the rut of predictable autocracy. In many ways, the subcontinent, in these recent months, has been a huge. crucible of sorts, a vessel in which massive experiments in self- expression have been carried out. And it is the people of India, and the people of the adjacent countries, who have acted as catalysts in these experiments. 

“The people will live on. The learning and blundering people will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds, The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.” – Carl Sandburg: ‘The People, Yes‘ 

The people will live on in India, too. Their prowess at renewal and comeback has been proved time and again. Their capacity to “take it” is prodigious. If they have been sold by one system, they have gone and bought another. Thirty years after independence, after the euphoria of ’47, there has been a renewal of hope this year. Democracy has acquired a new coat of paint this summer, and in the months since then, it has shone forth, its luminosity drawing praise and applause.

So, on August 15 this year, the nation will be commemorating more than just thirty years of Independence: it will be recognizing the nobility of its people; it will be affirming its faith in their capacity to carry the country forward; it will be acknowledging their willingness to weather the temptations and the perils of democracy.  

Disillusionment and disappointment have often dogged the Indian’s footsteps. Yet, he has proved to be one of the most industrious people on earth. If there have been millions of tragedies in the world’s most populous democracy, there have been countless success stories, too— the small trader who scrapes together a living in the large city, the young entrepreneur who ventures out into the uncertain world of business, the housewife who discards her apron to don a white collar and to work beside her mate, the student who graduates with distinction, the farmer who succeeds in extracting a bumper harvest from his soil. It is these people who make up India in 1977. They have passed through as tumultuous a phase as their country has in the last thirty years. And, as their leaders learn the devious art of honest governance, they themselves are passing through the most educative experience of all-the process of becoming a nation of free human beings. More so than at any other time, Sandburg’s lines seem to paraphrase the Indian ethos in ’77.  

But this euphoria seems too transient to be comfortable. Life, if anything, has deteriorated in its expectations, while life expectancies have risen throughout the country. Many of the ills that plagued the nation in the early ’70s seem to have returned in full force. Although there has been a fresh commitment on the part of the government to Gandhian ideals, Gandhi has never been farther from the people’s minds. So many conflicting opinions and clashing aspirations have surfaced in the last four months, that many people wonder whether this situation can continue longer without some drastic interference from stronger forces. The Janata Government seems to symbolize the nation it governs eminently. It is riven by class divisions, and it is taking time to coalesce in the true sense of the term. Mingled with the joie de vivre of August, therefore, one question will trouble many Indians: Will the euphoria last?