India marks its 80th Independence Day today, and with it, eight decades of a nation’s argument with its own destiny. Every anniversary is an occasion to celebrate; this one is an occasion to reckon, with the battles fought within our borders and beyond them, with the price paid for the freedom we now take for granted, and with the distance travelled from a fragile young republic to a civilisation that once again speaks in its own voice.
There was a time, not so long ago, when India was reduced in the Western imagination to a curiosity: the land of snake charmers, a country whose poverty was assumed and whose potential was doubted. Visitors from the West arrived expecting to be unimpressed and often were. We had no seat at the high table of diplomacy; at best, we were permitted to stand at its edge, non-aligned by policy and, in truth, unaligned with power itself. The world’s trajectory was decided elsewhere. India watched and waited.
