INDEPENDENT India is a young country, which is 70 years old. Demographically too, ours is a young country, boasting of an average age of just 28 years. The youth of our country have many dreams about their future. Today, the generation that had fought for our independence is slowly disappearing. As a result, many among the youth do not have the direct experience of interacting with those who had fought against the British colonial rulers. With BJP government’s efforts to distort history, there is every chance that they might be forced to be ignorant of facts.

THE shocking fact that India, an “emerging economic superpower”,was ranked 131st among 188 countries on the Human Development Index of the UN in 2015 may be brushed off on the grounds that rankings say little about absolute levels of living or changes in them. So let us take another statistic. Consider the calorie norms that constitute the official benchmark for poverty, namely 2200 calories per person per day in rural India and 2100 calories per person per day in urban India.

AS India marks its 70th anniversary of independence, it is necessary to recollect that the current political and social battles that are going on in our country emerge from a continuous ideological battle between three distinct visions of what should be the character of the political and social structure of post-independent India that arose during the course of our epic freedom struggle, particularly in the decade of the 1920s. The mainstream Congress vision had articulated that independent India should be a secular democratic Republic.