CBI Files Case Against College Trustee and Faculty Member for Alleged Bribery
New Delhi, August 25: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has filed a case against Pratik Mori, a trustee of Nobel Ayurvedic College in Junagadh, Gujarat, and faculty member Dr. Abhay Nalavade. They are accused of attempting to bribe a member of the hearing committee of the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM) ... Read more CBI Files Case Against College Trustee and Faculty Member for Alleged Bribery
Some Unknown Footnotes Of Independence
ASHOK OGRA Lord Mountbatten announced the Partition plan on All-India Radio on 3 June 1947. He was followed on the microphone by Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh (speaking for the Sikhs). The next morning, the Viceroy addressed a press conference. It was here that he suggested, for the first time, that the British would leave not by June 1948 (as originally planned) but by the middle of August 1947, that is, in less than ten weeks. There were many interesting moments leading to Independence that are not talked about as often. Here are a few of them. DEMARCATING BORDERS The task of partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was entrusted to a British judge named Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He was given just 35 days to divide colonial India into two nations. He had no prior knowledge of India (this was deemed an advantage). He was assigned four advisers: two Muslims, one Hindu, and one Sikh. But since they fought on every point, he soon dispensed with them. He did not bother to visit the areas that were to be demarcated. Journalist Jayanta Kalita writes that Radcliffe submitted his final boundary maps on August 12, 1947. But Mountbatten decided not to make them public immediately. So, when Pakistan became independent on August 14 and India on August 15, people did not know exactly where the border would run. The Radcliffe Line was announced only on August 17. The confusion that followed was enormous. Families suddenly discovered that their homes were in one country and their fields in another. In Punjab, Muslim-majority areas of Gurdaspur district went to India, giving it an important land route to Kashmir. Pakistan strongly opposed the decision. In the east, the mainly Buddhist Chittagong Hill Tracts went to East Pakistan, leading to tensions and displacement. Radcliffe left India on August 18. Disturbed by the bloodshed, he reportedly burned his notes, refused his 3,000 fee and never returned to the subcontinent. The story of integrating the princely states presented a greater challenge. RECALCITRANT PRINCELY STATES India became independent on August 15, 1947, but the India we know today had not yet fully taken shape. More than 560 princely states had to decide their future. Most had acceded to India, but some important states were still holding out. Kashmir had not joined either India or Pakistan. Maharaja Hari Singh remained ambivalent. Hyderabad wanted to remain independent, while Hindu-majority Junagadh opted for Pakistan, creating a serious problem. Bhopal, Travancore and some other states had also shown reluctance to join India. There were other smaller princely states across central, northern and western India that had their own doubts and concerns. Jodhpur and Indore, too, hesitated at different stages. The possibility of India ending up as a patchwork of separate territories was not entirely out of the question. Writer-journalist Josy Joseph, in his well-researched book Birth of a Nation: Twenty-One Days That Made India, gives a fascinating account of those anxious days leading up to Independence. He writes about the pressure being put on the princes as their hopes of remaining independent began to fade. Nehru was firm. Patel and his ministry were prepared to go beyond persuasion if necessary. One of the first princes to come over to Patels side was the Maharaja of Bikaner. His Dewan was K. M. Panikkar, a widely respected historian who, more clearly than other people, could see that the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history. This encouraged other princely states in the region to voluntarily join the Dominion of India. A number of people worked behind the scenes. One of the most important was V. P. Menon. He had started his career as a typist and rose through the administrative system to become Patel's key aide in dealing with the princes. Officials, activists and intelligence operatives also played their part. In one of his books, Menon describes in some detail the tortuous negotiations with the rulers. The process of give and take involved much massaging of egos: one ruler claimed descent from Lord Rama, another from Sri Krishna, while a third said his lineage was immortal, as it had been blessed by the Sikh Gurus. I have a personal memory connected with the late V. P. Menon. Capt. C. P. Nair, founder of the Leela group of hotels, was a dear friend. Whenever I was in Mumbai, I would often stay at the Leela. He was a nephew of V. P. Menon and would regale me with stories about his uncle-his pragmatism, his practical approach and the way he could be soft and firm at the same time while dealing with the princely states and their Dewans. Manipur and Tripura had their own stories. They acceded to India in 1947 but retained considerable internal autonomy before their complete merger with India in 1949. The major unresolved cases were settled later, and in different ways. Junagadh eventually became part of India after a hectic parleys and pressure. Hyderabad was integrated in September 1948 through Operation Polo. Kashmir acceded to India in October 1947 after tribal forces from Pakistan entered the state and the Maharaja sought India's military assistance. This was the uncertain political situation when the Constituent Assembly met in Delhi on the night of August 14-15 to mark India's freedom. THE MIDNIGHT SESSION The Constituent Assembly met at 11 pm, with Dr Rajendra Prasad presiding. Sucheta Kripalani opened the proceedings by singing Vande Mataram. Rajendra Prasad paid tribute to Gandhi and reassured minorities about their rights. Then came Nehru's Tryst with Destiny speech: At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. Nehru also reminded the country that Independence was not just an occasion for celebration. It carried a responsibility to serve India and its people. There were other important voices that night. Muslim League leader Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman, who was still a member of the Indian Constituent Assembly, supported Nehru's pledge and spoke of governing without favour. S. Radhakrishnan spoke about India's largely peaceful transfer of political power and contrasted it with the violence that had often accompanied such changes elsewhere. At midnight, the members stood and took a solemn pledge, dedicating themselves to the service of India and its people and to world peace and human welfare. Then came another memorable moment. Hansa Mehta presented the national flag to the Assembly on behalf of the women of India. Sucheta Kripalani later sang Sare Jahan Se Achha and the first verse of Jana Gana Mana. In the early hours of August 15, Rajendra Prasad and Nehru went to Viceroy's House to formally inform Mountbatten that the Constituent Assembly had approved his appointment as independent India's first Governor-General. There is a delightful little story from that night. Nehru handed Mountbatten an envelope that was supposed to contain the list of portfolios of his new Cabinet. Mountbatten opened it and found only a blank sheet of paper. The correct list was soon recovered. Yet, amid all the uncertainty, a new country had been born. Millions of people were now beginning the difficult task of building a democratic India and deciding what kind of nation it would become. What followed was an experiment in democracy that often looked untidy and chaotic, but proved remarkably resilient. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith memorably called India a functioning anarchy. The phrase sounds dismissive, but its more interesting word may be functioning. India argues, protests, quarrels and frequently appears chaotic, yet the democratic machinery somehow keeps moving. (The Author works as Advisor with Apeejay Education, New Delhi)
Every August, India performs a ritual of remembering that risks becoming a ritual of forgetting. We hoist flags, recite a familiar pantheon of names, and retire the past into ceremony. But independence was not a single, luminous event delivered on the morning of 15 August 1947. It was a wager, made by exhausted and divided men and women, that a civilisation of extraordinary diversity could govern itself as one republic rather than dissolve into its many parts. That wager has not yet been fully settled. It is renewed, or betrayed, in every generation that inherits it. The twenty-one days that could have ended differently It is worth remembering how contingent the whole enterprise was. Between 25 July and 14 August 1947, as Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah sparred in public and Lord Mountbatten prepared to preside over two new dominions, a small, largely unheralded group of civil servants worked in near-obscurity to prevent a third catastrophe: the Balkanisation of the subcontinent into hundreds of fragments. Over five hundred and fifty princely states, ruling nearly two-fifths of the land and a quarter of its population, stood legally free to remain independent, join Pakistan, or join India. There was no constitutional inevitability that they would choose union. The India we take as a settled fact was, until the last possible hour, an open question and the investigative journalist Josy Josephs recent account of those twenty-one days is a useful reminder that the republic was assembled, not merely declared. This matters philosophically, not just historically. We tend to speak of nations as though they possess an essence some prior, natural unity waiting to be liberated from colonial rule. But Indias founders knew better. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V.P. Menon, working through the States Department, did not appeal to a pre-existing oneness; they built one, through negotiation, pressure, and an act of collective will. The nation was not found. It was made. And anything that is made by human hands and human choices can, by the same token, be unmade by human neglect. This is the first hard truth an honest article on independence must confront: sovereignty is not a possession, like an heirloom passed down and simply held. It is closer to a practice, like a language, or a marriage, that persists only for as long as it is actively spoken and renewed. A struggle that belonged to no single community There is a second, equally uncomfortable truth: the freedom that was won in 1947 was not won by any one community on behalf of the others. It was, in the fullest sense, a shared inheritance and the amnesia that has crept into public memory on this point deserves to be named plainly as a distortion, not a difference of opinion. Ashfaqulla Khan, a young poet and revolutionary from Shahjahanpur, went to the gallows in December 1927 alongside his comrade Ram Prasad Bismil for their part in the Kakori conspiracy, having chosen armed insurrection over accommodation with an empire he considered illegitimate. His last words are said to have invoked both his faith and his country in the same breath, seeing no contradiction between the two. A decade later, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan the Frontier Gandhi built among the Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier a movement of nonviolent resistance so disciplined that the British feared it more than they feared the sword, and he paid for that discipline with decades of imprisonment, first under colonial rule and then, bitterly, under the postcolonial state he helped bring into being. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, meanwhile, offered a rival vision of nationhood to the very idea of Partition that a composite Indian identity, rather than a religiously defined one, was both truer to Indias civilisational history and more durable as a political foundation. And Bhagat Singh, executed at twenty-three for the bombing of the Central Legislative Assembly and his defiant courtroom testimony, remains perhaps the starkest case of all: an avowed atheist and socialist revolutionary whose sacrifice has since been folded into every ideological camp except, often, the internationalist and irreligious one he actually held. To set these lives side by side is not an act of statistical balancing, some anxious effort to ensure proportional representation among the dead. It is to recover a simple and inconvenient fact: the freedom struggle was pluralist in its very architecture, animated by believers, atheists, socialists, and conservatives who disagreed profoundly with one another about the shape of the future India should have, yet judged the present subjugation intolerable enough to die for its end. A nation that silently edits this plurality out of its founding story is not correcting history; it is impoverishing itself, trading a complicated but true inheritance for a simple and false one. What it means to protect, rather than merely possess, a republic Here the argument must turn from memory to obligation, because the past, however faithfully recovered, cannot by itself discharge our present duties. What, then, does it mean to protect a nation once it exists? It cannot mean merely defending its borders, though that is necessary. Nor can it mean defending its symbols like flags, anthems, dates, though these too have their place. The deeper protection a republic requires is the protection of the conditions under which the original wager continues to make sense: that people fundamentally unlike one another in faith, language, and inheritance can nonetheless share equal standing before a common law. This is a more demanding and more fragile achievement than unity of blood or creed, precisely because it rests on nothing more solid than mutual recognition, continually re-extended. The moment one communitys citizenship is treated as more original, more authentic, or more entitled to define the nations character than anothers, the philosophical basis of 1947 - the shared sacrifice memorialised above - is quietly repudiated, even if the flag still flies and the anthem still plays. There is a temptation, especially in times of anxiety, to imagine that a nation is protected by tightening its identity or by deciding, at last, who really belongs. History suggests the opposite. The princely states were not absorbed into India through an exercise of narrower identity, but through an act of expansive accommodation, one that had to persuade Hindu-majority Travancore and Muslim-ruled Junagadh, Sikh Punjab and animist tribal belts alike, that a plural union served them better than isolation or division. The instrument that held the country together in 1947 was not sameness. It was a negotiated, sometimes uneasy, mutual guarantee, the precursor to what the Constitution would later formalise as equal citizenship. To protect the republic today is to keep faith with that instrument, not to discard it in favour of the very fragmentation it was built to prevent. The wager renewed Freedom, then, is not a state achieved once and inherited passively thereafter, like property. It is closer to what philosophers have called a practice of self-legislation - a people continually choosing, through its institutions, its speech, and its treatment of the vulnerable among it, to remain the kind of political community its founders judged worth dying for. Ashfaqulla Khan and Bhagat Singh did not sacrifice themselves for a flag; Ghaffar Khan did not spend decades in prison for a date on the calendar. They wagered their lives on the proposition that a genuinely plural, self-governing India was possible and worth having. Eight decades later, the question is not whether that wager was won in 1947. It plainly was. The harder question - the one this anniversary should force upon us, uncomfortably, each year - is whether we are still willing to place the same wager today, in a country grown large, unequal, and impatient with the difficulty of holding so much difference together. Independence was the easier half of the task, if anything about it can be called easy. It required courage, but courage aimed at a visible, external adversary - an empire whose injustice was, in the end, legible to the world and to history. What remains is a subtler and lonelier struggle, aimed inward, without the moral clarity of a foreign oppressor to unite against: the daily, unglamorous, often thankless labour of protecting a plural republic from its own worst instincts, its own appetite for simplification. This is the harder inheritance, and unlike the flag or the anthem, it cannot simply be received. It must be re-earned, by each generation, in the manner it chooses to treat the citizen who prays differently, speaks differently, or remembers 1947 differently than it does. That, finally, is what it would mean to have been worthy of what Ashfaqulla Khan, Bhagat Singh, and Ghaffar Khan gave up. Malik Daniyal is an economics graduate from Delhi University.
Two Arrested in Major Online Share Trading Fraud in Gujarat
Surat, August 12: The Cyber Crime Cell of Gujarat has arrested two individuals from Junagadh in connection with a significant online share trading fraud. The case involves a scam where a victim was defrauded of 42.98 lakh. During the investigation, authorities discovered links to three other cyber fraud cases across various states, with total losses ... Read more Two Arrested in Major Online Share Trading Fraud in Gujarat
Asiatic lion rescued after getting trapped in spiked gate in Gujarats Junagadh
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Fire department rescues people stranded in floodwaters in Junagadh, Gujarat
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2 Women Killed, 15 injured As Bus Carrying Pilgrims Overturns In Gujarat
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