“ 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. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when
we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the
soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting
that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the
service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.
At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless
centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success
and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never
lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.
We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.
The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity,
to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave
enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge
of the future?
Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon
this Assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people
of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains
of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow.
Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over
and it is the future that beckons to us now.
That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving
so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one
we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the
millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance
and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest
man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye.
That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering,
so long our work will not be over.
And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality
to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the
world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together
today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace
has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now,
and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split
into isolated fragments.
To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal
to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This
is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill-will
or blaming others.
