Anniversaries are useful occasions as a way to remind us of the values that are enshrined in our history. The golden jubilee year of Indian and Pakistani independence, 1997, is an opportunity to remember those whose sacrifices ended colonial rule. This year also serves to highlight the values of hope and patriotism which infused the struggle for independence. The national struggle for control of the state was one which allowed the oppressed to experience the powerful consequences of organised social action. While current historical scholarship correctly demonstrates the fissures within the national movement in British India, it misses the mighty sense of belonging engendered by the movement. A dalit man in the 1930s spoke of donning a Gandhi cap and feeling at that moment, in the crowd, during a demonstration, like an Indian, like all those around him who constituted themselves in opposition to the authoritarian state. Those who came into the orbit of the national movement found their sense of self in struggle and in fellowship.
For this reason, our celebration of 1947 must not degenerate into the glorification of Great Men – those heroes (as Gandhi liked to call them) could only become so because of the immense sacrifice of the masses. Freedom ought to be remembered as the collective struggle which possessed within itself the possibility not only for the creation of bourgeois republics, but also, in time, of socialist societies.
If one dalit man felt fellowship, another felt betrayed in 1947 by the limited nature of our freedom. "Listen friend Nihala, have you seen freedom?" asked the communist poet from Jalandhar, Guramdas ´Alam´. "No, my brother Prava, I have neither seen nor eaten her, but I heard from Jaggu that she has come upto Ambala." She has her back to the common people, he sang, and her face to Birla.
Of course, the promulgation of the secular Republic in India (1950) and the Islamic Republic in Pakistan (1956) allowed for far more political initiatives than what was permitted during British rule. But the assassination of the secularist Liaquat Ali Khan in October 1951 and the persecution of the communists significantly narrowed the scope for political action in the latter, while the dismissal of the 1957 communist ministry in Kerala and the police actions against the guerrillas in Hyderabad somewhat constricted the space in the former.