ON 18 JULY 1947, a bill received Royal Assent at Westminster, running to twenty sections and three schedules in the flat, unbothered prose that statutes reserve for everything alike, whether they are regulating the sale of milk or dismantling an empire. As from the fifteenth day of August, it provided, two independent Dominions shall be set up in India; the appointed day was named, the territories described, and the Crown’s paramountcy over five hundred princely states was allowed to lapse, three centuries of treaty and tribute closed out in a single subsection. That is the legal instrument of our freedom, an Act of a Parliament in which no Indian sat by right, bringing two hundred years to an end in the passive voice.
While it was being printed, about fifteen million people were walking.
I have never been able to hold those two facts in one hand, and I have stopped trying, because both of them are the founding of India and neither cancels the other. In a room in London a clerk was checking the numbering of the clauses; on a road somewhere between Lahore and Amritsar a woman was deciding which of her children she could carry. Trains were arriving at stations with nobody alive inside them, children were being handed across a border that had not existed the previous month, and in the middle of it all, in a hall in Delhi, a few hundred people sat down and conducted themselves as though this thing had a future.
Underneath it lies a proposition of almost unbearable optimism, that you do not first become fit for citizenship and then receive it, but that you become a citizen by the act of exercising citizenship.
The appointment
They met at eleven at night on 14 August, Rajendra Prasad in the chair in white khadi, the hall flood-lit, the panels where the portraits of the viceroys had hung covered over with flags, and the traffic jammed along Parliament Street because crowds had come to hear the loudspeakers. Nehru rose and spoke first in Hindustani for about six minutes, which almost nobody remembers, then changed language and said the sentence that has been quoted at every one of us since: long years ago, he said, we made a tryst with destiny.
Sit for a moment with the word he chose, because a dozen others were available and not one of them would have meant this. A tryst is not a destiny and not an arrival, not an inheritance received nor a right at last vindicated; it is an appointment made privately between two parties, at a place and an hour agreed long before, and it carries no force beyond the willingness of both of them to turn up. He was not telling a country that something had been given to it. He was telling it that a promise made long ago had at last come round, and the only thing that has ever kept an appointment is somebody arriving to keep it.
Then, in the same breath and the same sentence, he said the part that is almost never quoted, which is that the pledge would be redeemed not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.
Nine words at the highest emotional altitude any Indian politician has ever reached, and they are the vocabulary of partial performance. In front of a country that had waited two centuries to be told it had won; he conceded that the promise was being met in installments and a balance remained outstanding. I cannot think of a more honest thing said from a stage in the last century, nor of one we have forgotten more completely.
The rest of the speech keeps that discipline. The famous line about the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps and India awakes to life and freedom, is worth hearing against the fact that the world was not sleeping at all: Lahore was not sleeping, Amritsar was not sleeping, and our great sentence of triumph was delivered over a country that was burning while he spoke it. What he asked for was work, because the service of India, he said, means the service of the millions who suffer, and he named what would have to end before any of it could be called freedom: poverty, ignorance, disease, inequality of opportunity. There is no revenge anywhere in that speech. And at the close he reached past politics and said that the ambition of the greatest man of our generation, meaning Gandhi, who was not in the room and not in Delhi at all, had been to wipe every tear from every eye, which is Revelation almost word for word in the mouth of a declared agnostic, because nothing smaller was available to him that night.
Then came the conch and the flag, and every member of that Assembly rose to take a pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people, one by one, by name, in the middle of the night. The Act had been passed for us in London by strangers. The pledge was taken here, by people who could be held to it.
Little men
Six weeks earlier, on the evening of 3 June 1947, Nehru had gone on the radio to tell the country that its leaders had accepted Partition, which is to say that he was announcing a defeat, and it was in that broadcast, and not in any moment of triumph, that he said the line I keep returning to:
We are little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great, something of that greatness falls upon us also.
Read it again knowing what he was announcing and it stops being a graceful sentiment and becomes something nearer an apology: not a man taking possession of a country but a man agreeing to cut one in half for want of a better road, hoping the cause will forgive him. They were vain, they quarrelled, they miscalculated, and some of what they decided got people killed, so I have no interest in making saints of them. But there is a consciousness running through the founding language that is rarer than courage, which is that they understood the country to be larger than they were, and themselves to be passing through it.
A criticism comes easily here and I have made it myself: a republic founded in the language of its departing rulers, argued in English by a room full of lawyers, authenticated in a tongue almost nobody could read. It is not wrong, but the paradox is better to sit with than the accusation, because those same men then handed those same unlettered Indians the whole of the sovereign power, without conditions.
The wager
They could so easily have said the other thing, and it was the respectable position across most of the newly free world that decade: we are too poor, half the country is in flight from the other half, eighty-five in every hundred adults cannot read a ballot paper, so give us literacy first, and bread, and order, and democracy in a decade when the people are ready for it. India’s founders looked at those same figures and refused, writing a franchise with no qualification of literacy, no qualification of property, no probationary period and no exception for women: every adult over twenty-one, at once, whatever their caste or wealth or schooling. Underneath it lies a proposition of almost unbearable optimism, that you do not first become fit for citizenship and then receive it, but that you become a citizen by the act of exercising citizenship.
Nehru rose and spoke first in Hindustani for about six minutes, which almost nobody remembers, then changed language and said the sentence that has been quoted at every one of us since: long years ago, he said, we made a tryst with destiny.
Signed by mark
There is an old and quiet rule in our law that I have always found moving: a person who cannot read may still execute a document by making a mark, a thumb pressed into ink and attested by someone who can, and it binds him exactly as a signature would, because what the law looks for is not literacy but assent. That is how the tryst came to be kept a second time, in the winter of 1951, by people who could not have read a word of what they were agreeing to.
Sukumar Sen, a mathematician turned civil servant and for a long time the only Election Commissioner the country had, was handed an electorate of some 173 million, five in every six of whom could not read a name on a slip of paper. He translated the republic downwards until it fitted their hands, giving every candidate a symbol and every symbol its own ballot box, so that a voter who could read nothing at all could still find the pair of bullocks, or the lamp, or the hut. History asked India whether mass democracy was possible in a country in this condition, and the Indian state answered by ordering eight thousand tonnes of steel and manufacturing two million ballot boxes.
In the hills they voted first, because the passes would close and there is no arguing with snow. On 25 October 1951, months ahead of the rest of the country, polling began in Chini tehsil in what is now Kinnaur, the ballot material carried up by mule, and a schoolteacher on election duty named Shyam Saran Negi reached the booth at Kalpa before seven in the morning and became the first voter of the Indian republic. His polling party then walked ten days across the valley so that everybody else could vote as well. He never missed an election again, casting his thirty-fourth vote by postal ballot at a hundred and five and dying three days later, a man whose whole trade was literacy, standing first in the queue of a country voting almost entirely without it.
The first thing the new electorate did with its new power was to defeat B. R. Ambedkar in Bombay, turning out the man who had drafted the document by the votes of the people he had insisted on enfranchising. It is a terrible little fact, and I have grown to love it, because a franchise incapable of humbling its own author is not a franchise at all.
Not wholly, nor in full measure
It held, and that is the astonishing part, so ordinary now that we have stopped noticing. We remained one country through war and famine and insurgency and assassination and a poverty difficult to picture from where most of us are sitting; governments lost elections and went home; power passed between parties without a tank leaving its barracks; and the Republic came through even the Emergency, which was not a scratch on the surface but a tear through the middle. Anyone who tells you that outcome was likely has not read the newspapers of 1947.
But survival was never the whole promise, and this is where I find myself uneasy on the eve of our eightieth Independence Day, seventy-nine years to the night since that sitting. Have we confused the survival of India with the fulfilment of India?
Nehru answered that before we thought to ask it. He knew the pledge was being redeemed in instalments and said so on the night itself, which leaves one question: whether the instalments are still being paid, or whether we decided somewhere along the way that what was handed over in 1947 was the entire sum.
So the questions worth putting tomorrow are not about any government and will outlast every government that ever holds office here. Whether a person can disagree with the State without being told he has disagreed with the country. Whether a majority can hold power without making a minority feel like a guest in the house. Whether power in this country can still bear to be contradicted, which is the only thing power has ever found genuinely difficult.
A tryst has two parties, and we have never once been careful about naming the second. Gandhi told us who was waiting at the other end of that meeting.
The terms of reference
Any lawyer who has argued over an old instrument knows the difficulty that arrives once the parties are dead. The words stay where they are, but their reach does not, and what was promised cannot be settled by reading the clause more slowly, you look instead for the intention behind it, and if you are fortunate the makers have left you something to read it by.
Ours did. Among Gandhi’s papers, recovered after they shot him, was a note usually dated to August 1947, the very weeks of the Act and the midnight speech, and it remains the only rule of construction this republic has ever been given:
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away.
What he set down in the wreckage of that time was not a principle to be admired but a procedure to be applied, with a human face at the centre. It works exactly as a canon of construction works, when you cannot tell what the promise meant, do not read the clause again. Look at him, and you will know.
A tryst has two parties, and we have never once been careful about naming the second. Gandhi told us who was waiting at the other end of that meeting. It is the poorest and weakest person you have ever seen, who was on the road in 1947, and at the ballot box in 1951 with ink drying on his finger, and who will be there again tomorrow morning in a place from which the flag is not visible.
An intercession
We did not win our independence, we inherited it; we did not draft the Constitution, we inherited that too; we did not hold this country together in 1947 and have not been asked to since. Inheritance is the single manner of receiving anything that creates an obligation instead of discharging one.
So when the flag goes up and the loudspeakers start, do not ask whether India has survived, because we know that it has and survival can no longer serve as anybody’s excuse. Ask the other question, the one Gandhi left us the method for. Recall a face, the woman on the road outside Lahore deciding which of her children she could carry. Then ask whether the country we are presently building would be of the smallest use to her.
She kept the appointment. She kept it in 1947 when it cost her everything she owned, and again, standing in queues in the sun for governments that had forgotten her by the following day.
The question on this Independence Day is not whether they kept faith with us. It is whether we have ever, even once, turned up for her.