Indian independence and the unfinished project of freedom

Every year, when August knocks on the door, we remember the night of 15 August 1947. We recollect the sacrifices of our freedom fighters, the raising of a new flag and also the phenomenal fact that, after 200 years of colonial rule, we, the people of India, became politically independent. Yet, perhaps, the most pertinent question one can ask is not only what unfolded in 1947, but what do we mean when we say India became free?

In our daily conversations, the words freedom and independence are often treated as synonyms. There is no problem with that. But when we treat these as political concepts, they are not the same. Primarily, independence means a political condition in which a country is no longer ruled by an external sovereign power. Freedom is something more than that. It concerns our capacity to determine our own lives and participate in shaping our conditions. It also means existing in a world without humiliation, domination and arbitrary power. Paradoxically, therefore, a country may be independent while its citizens may not still be equally free.

In the Indian case, this distinction is particularly important. With the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947, the British ceased to be the sovereign authority over our country. But independence by itself could not eradicate poverty, illiteracy, caste, patriarchy and class exploitation. Political sovereignty was transferred, but the material conditions that shape everyday life could not be transformed overnight. In this sense, Indian independence should not be understood merely as a narrative ending with a triumph. It was, indeed, the beginning of a new question: what are we to do with this political independence we have obtained?

Of course, we are not the first to raise this question; it was at the core of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s thoughts. As the Chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, Ambedkar was of the opinion that political democracy could not sustain itself by relying exclusively on constitutional arrangements and elections. The first condition of democracy, for him, was social democracy: a way of life founded upon the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity at the social level. Formal equality can be established by the Constitution, but constitutional provisions alone cannot eliminate the social practices that make equality unrealised in everyday life. For Ambedkar, political emancipation could not be meaningful without substantive social emancipation. If we think about this matter dialectically, we can grasp the fact that independence was indeed a thesis rather than a synthesis.

To speak of dialectics inevitably leads us to Karl Marx (1818–1883). He was of the opinion that profound material inequality can coexist with formal freedom. For instance, we may be legally free to sell our labour, while at the same time economic necessity may leave us with little choice about how, where and for how much that labour is sold. There is no doubt that political rights are fundamental, but they do not fully encompass the meaning of emancipation. Without addressing material inequality, the possibility of creating a genuinely democratic political order would be severely restricted.

The achievement of 1947 was immense, but its importance lies partly in the possibilities it opened up and the imaginations it unleashed rather than in a freedom it supposedly completed. Freedom is an unfinished project. This is precisely where the ideas of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026), who passed away recently, become valuable. In his influential essay ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, he argued that the ideals of modernity—reason, freedom, equality and democratic government—remain incomplete rather than fully realised. This incomplete realisation does not make them insignificant. Instead, each generation inherits the responsibility of carrying forward a project whose goals have never been fully attained.

Indian independence can be understood in this way. The project that commenced in 1947 was not only about the creation of an independent state. It was an endeavour to build a political community in which equality, democratic participation and, most importantly, freedom could become realities. The institutional form of this aspiration is embodied in the Constitution. However, the Constitution cannot permanently secure it. It must be defended and extended at regular intervals.

Here democracy plays a crucial part. Democracy does not only imply choosing rulers through elections. At its very core, it means that the citizens who are governed should have a significant role in shaping their collective life. Here, Habermas’s emphasis on the public sphere is particularly relevant. A truly democratic society demands spaces where citizens can speak, deliberate, disagree and scrutinise authority. Freedom, therefore, includes not only independence from external control but also active engagement in determining our collective political existence.

When we talk about freedom and the collective life of society, one cannot avoid mentioning our very own Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Tagore’s ideas of freedom cannot be narrowed down to national sovereignty. To the astonishment of many, he was not a supporter of nationalism but was deeply suspicious of it. He was also sceptical of the way nationalism could turn human beings into instruments of collective power. Tagore’s concept of freedom points towards the freedom of the mind: a condition in which narrowness, fear and inherited divisions do not imprison human consciousness. Perhaps this finds its truest manifestation in the lines of the poem: ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’. The poem was indeed his prayer for a country where people would enjoy the freedom to think and express themselves without the fear of being socially and politically judged. Achieving political independence can free a nation from foreign domination, but it cannot by itself liberate the mind from fear, intellectual conformity and prejudice.

An interesting fact is that the meaning of independence evolves from generation to generation. For those who experienced colonial rule, independence meant liberation from a foreign sovereign power. For those of us who were born decades later, it is an inherited condition; we do not have the experience of being colonial subjects and of the humiliations that came with it. We have received an independence that others struggled for. The task entrusted to us is therefore not only to celebrate their achievements but also to ask whether their promises have extended to everyone.

Every generation is inclined to believe that the political successes of the previous age have settled the fundamental questions of freedom. However, new inequalities emerge, while old structures of domination are reconfigured into new forms, and technology opens up new possibilities of control and surveillance. In this ever-changing context, freedom must, therefore, remain an open question rather than a settled one. It is for this reason that the distinction between freedom and independence matters. Independence is fundamentally about who governs us, while freedom asks how we live and how much control we have over the conditions of our lives. Independence is essentially about sovereignty; freedom is about human agency. Independence can be proclaimed on a particular day, but freedom cannot be achieved in a single moment.

The most valuable way to remember 15 August, therefore, is not to imagine that the story of freedom ended in 1947. It was exactly then that the saga began. Now the struggle is no longer only against a foreign power but also a battle to live by the tenets that political independence set forward in 1947: equality without humiliation, democracy without domination, liberty without exclusion and citizenship without hierarchy.

We would be at risk of committing an error if we judged the unfinished character of this project of freedom as a reason for despair. ‘Unfinished’ does not mean ‘failed’. It means that the promises remain alive. Our independence should, therefore, be commemorated not merely as the moment when British rule ended in India but as the occasion when we acquired the responsibility to determine what freedom would mean. The task was set in motion in 1947 and continues in every generation—in institutions and classrooms, in Parliament and in the street, in public debate and private life.

The flag that is unfurled every 15 August morning commemorates a sovereignty already achieved. But the freedom that independence made possible remains a task.

On a particular night, India became independent, but it never finished becoming free.