WHILE Bal Gangadhar Tilak electrified the nation and accelerated the momentum of the freedom struggle with his historic slogan “Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it”, it was M.K. Gandhi who, while speaking at Amravati on March 19, 1921, proclaimed that Indians had the birthright to establish a republic as there had been village republics in India from times immemorial.
That statement of Gandhi to fashion the destiny of India as a republic underlined the struggle of the freedom fighters to invest Indians with citizenship status which sharply negated their standing as subjects of the British monarch. It is instructive that Gandhi’s assertion to constitute India as a republic was a radical departure from its subservient role under the British monarch and so the British regime took harsh penal measures against those who persuasively mobilised people around the vision of converting India to a republic after achieving independence.
Eleven days after Gandhi’s articulation that Indians had a birthright to establish a republic, he explained in his notes, published in Young India on March 30, 1921 under the caption, “Repression and its Lesson” how one freedom fighter Cholkar was being persecuted for speaking in Nagpur for a republican form of government for India.
