'Building a Free India' encapsulates defining speeches that shaped the nation, but not all

M Rajivlochan

The book carries excerpts from speeches made from April 1878 to August 1947, but only 34 public figures have been selected from amongst the hundreds who were equally articulate and represented the diverse strands of development of the Indian nation.

The volume has Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ speech as also Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s interjection on the pledge that the members of the Constituent Assembly were to take on the eve of Independence. But missing are the more meaningful interjections made by Prof KT Shah, another prominent member. Also absent are voices of the Muslims like Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who represented the Muslim League but chose to remain in India. Even more glaring is the absence of SM Muhammad Sheriff, also from the Muslim League, who chose to remain in India and led a very active public life even after Independence.

The learned jurist Tajamul Husain, who was one of the few nationalist Muslims left with the Congress and spoke against dividing India into minority-majority groups, too, does not find any place in this collection. None of the speeches of MA Jinnah or of Chaudhary Khaliquzzaman have been included even though their vision underpins a lot of the present-day unrest in India.

Subhas Chandra Bose does feature here but as seeking the blessings of Gandhi for the success of the Azad Hind Fauj. Important public figures from the Central Provinces and Berar like DP Mishra and Seth Govind Das are missing too. There is nothing from the fiery youth icon Asaf Ali or his equally fiery spouse, Aruna, who eventually was conferred the Bharat Ratna in 1997.

The introduction to this volume repeats the fallacy that India’s movement for Independence was non-violent. This shows a certain category confusion, for all movements for Independence in the 19th and 20th centuries were both violent and non-violent in equal measure. There was nothing unique about the plea for non-violence in India. Nor did people ever heed the pleas of Gandhi to abjure violence.

The British were scared as 1907, the 50th anniversary of the mutiny of 1857, approached and feared that the Indians would rise up even more viciously against them this time.

Thanks to the digitisation of resources, all the material included in this book, and so much more, is now freely available. Intelligent readers would like to read the entire speech rather than an excerpt, become familiar with the context in which those thoughts were being articulated and form their own judgement about history. That also is the only way in which a fair estimation can be made of the thought processes that underlay the formation of the Indian nation.

The ‘defining speeches of our Independence movement that shaped the nation’ deserved better handling.