THE country will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of independence and look back with pride at the achievement of India becoming free from colonialism on August 15, 1947. Millions of people participated in the freedom struggle, which led to the first historic milestone in the decolonisation process ushered in after the defeat of fascism in the Second World War. Tens of thousands of people sacrificed their lives in the different phases of the freedom struggle.

Below we reproduce the People’s Democracy editorial published on the 40th anniversary of India’s Independence.ON August 15, forty years ago, India attained political independence after 190 years of colonial rule. This momentous development came as a result of the heroic sacrifices that the people of this country had made during their long drawn-out liberation struggle. This was a significant achievement of the defeat of fascism, when world imperialism proved utterly incapable of contending with the rising upsurge of people of the colonial countries.

In the run-up to the 75th Anniversary of India’s Independence, we publish a series of articles from the files of the People’s Democracy, which appeared on important anniversaries of independence. The first in the series is the article by Comrade P Ramachandran, then Polit Bureau member of the CPI(M) that appeared in the PD issue dated August 16, 1998. This article was written on the occasion of the Golden jubilee celebrations of our independence.THE role of the Left in the anti-imperialist movement in our country has been in focus for many years now.