India's president, Mr K. R. Narayanan, called for a national movement against corruption, communalism and criminality in politics last night as India observed its 50th anniversary of independence from British colonial rule.
"We will have to strain every nerve to purify our political, administrative and electoral processes and to remove the distortions that have come into the functioning of our democracy," President Narayanan told the two houses of parliament at a special historic session to recreate the moment when India became free in 1947.
Mr Narayanan, who is India's first "untouchable" Hindu ever to become president, said a new countrywide social movement involving the people and government was necessary to excise the corruption which was corroding the "vitals" of Indian politics.
Before the president spoke, parliament observed a minute's silence for over 500,000 people who died when India was partitioned and the state of Pakistan created after years of struggle for independence. At the stroke of midnight, the historic moment when power passed from the colonial government to India, parliament heard a recording of the moving speech by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.* "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny," began Nehru's impromptu speech, "and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not only in full measure but very substantially.
"At the stroke of the midnight hour," he continued, "when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance." This was followed by speeches from Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace who led the independence struggle, and Subhash Chander Bose, a militant who took up arms against the British.
Earlier, thousands of Indians from the country's 25 states, carrying the national flag and led by around 100 former independence fighters, participated in the March of the Nation down New Delhi's main avenue to parliament house. The march concluded with a laser show and fireworks display. From the start, India's achievement of independence was tinged with sadness as the stark division of the subcontinent into two nations - India and Pakistan - was accompanied by the massacre of hundreds of thousands and the uprooting of millions of families.
Freedom at midnight in August 1947 was followed two months later by war with Pakistan over Kashmir. Three months after that, Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic.
Today, which is independence day, the prime minister, Mr Inder Kumar Gujral, will inspect a military guard of honour outside the 17th century Red Fort built by Mughal kings in Delhi, after which he will address the nation from the fort's ramparts. The celebrations will end with a fly-past of modern jet fighters recently purchased from Russia.
Few Indians, however, feel there is anything to celebrate as nearly 400 million people - India's population at independence - remain below the poverty line, denied housing, jobs, education and basic medical services. "India's 50th year of independence is being celebrated more outside the country, particularly in Britain, than at home," says Mr Rakesh Luthra, a barrister in New Delhi.
The mood across India, he says, is despondent, and the overall feeling that little has been achieved over the past 50 years. Other commentators and social activists say India's despair is not that affairs are unmanageable, but that there is little chance of them getting any better. Their anger is directed at politicians who have subverted and corrupted the democratic process for personal profit and at inefficient, greedy civil servants. According to India's best known columnist, Khuswant Singh, the balance sheet of India's achievements and failures is weighted heavily on the debit side.
"On the credit side will be self-sufficiency in food and the fact that we have been able to hold together as one nation," he says. But on the debit side are a galloping rate of population which swallows up everything the country produces, insufficient schools, hospitals and colleges.
"Poverty and ignorance, violence and corruption have reached record heights," says Singh. Even the prime minister, Mr Gujral, admits that corruption is all-pervasive, but says the state and its instruments are helpless in countering it. Transparency International, a Berlin-based, non-governmental anti-corruption watchdog group places India as the world's eighth most corrupt country, down a notch from last year.
Conceived of as a secular, egalitarian and socialist society in 1947, India is today divided along religious, caste, community and class lines, as greedy politicians have made genetic heritage the basis for social and employment discrimination. "Fifty years ago our politicians and leaders had nationalism, patriotism and pride," says Dr Bharatinder Singh, a Delhi physician. Today, we are poor materially, but even poorer morally.
Economic reforms in the early 1990s brought a sense of optimism as the old "licence raj" controlled by politicians and civil servants was slowly being dismantled and foreign equity began flowing in. But political turbulence over the past 18 months has slowed down India's economic reforms, robbing a depressed nation of a glimmer of hope.