And finally the appointed day came and the sensation of freedom overweighted the pain felt at the prospect of partition. Jawaharlal said, “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Jawaharlal and his colleagues were sworn in. In a statement to the press he said—“The appointed day has came, the day appointed by destiny, and India stands forth again after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent.” The first free government of the people, after some centuries, could not miss its opportunity and Jawaharlal announced a policy which is to remain today, the objective of higher standards of living for the people, communal harmony, abolition of untouchability and freedom for all people from colonialism and racial discrimination, non-alignment with power blocs and world federation.
Post-independence period
Everybody was celebrating freedom but there were two places, which were mourning and had less happiness and more grief. Jawaharlal was not inattentive to this condition. He knew that a lot of work has to do because after the formation of Pakistan, a great number of people were killed and there were migration, with attendant murder, and abductions, of at least five to six million each way. People have lost their reason completely and are behaving worse than brutes. There is madness about in its worst form. All calculations had gone wrong. Partition, which had been accepted by the Congress as a drastic way out of communal hatred, had only multiplied it. Nehru was honest enough to acknowledge his own errors of judgment. With the reaction in India to the atrocities in Pakistan, Nehru’s main task was to carry his own people back to sanity.
Nehru said, “Life here continues to be nightmarish. Everything seems to have gone away although superficially we seem to be improving. But our foundations have been shaken and all our standards seem to have disappeared. Only a certain pride and a sense of duty keeps one going…we have to build anew and that building must begin with the foundations at home. If the roots dry up, how long will the leaves and flowers continue?”
Nehru moved tirelessly round Delhi, extending the protection of his personal interest to frightened Muslim families, and frequently jumped into mobs of fanatic rioters to scold and even to invite in order to quell. He addressed meetings throughout northern India and broadcast repeatedly that they should build an India where no citizen felt insecure because of his religion.
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