Times change, but some issues don't

I-Day speeches mirror two distinct trends. One, a handful of ‘pressing issues’ appear in virtually every speech since 1947. So much for progress there. Two, some other topics — many once notable and controversial — find little or no mention anymore. Their absence is a great indicator of substantial change elsewhere.
Besides trite references in all their I-Day speeches to amity, our glorious past and social justice, all PMs have always had something to say about rising prices, poverty, social inequality, unemployment, corruption and tackling fundamentalism.With food shortages a major problem until the late 60’s, PMs from Nehru to Indira kept slamming ‘hoarders’, ‘profiteers’ and ‘black marketers’. Corruption, closely allied to such avarice, has also been a running theme. Indira made it a focal point of some of her speeches in the late 60’s and 70’s. Rajiv and Rao, reeling from corruption charges levelled against them, also made it a point to condemn it in all walks of Indian life. Gujral chose to make it his theme when he got to mark 50 years of freedom in 1997.
Poverty, still an open sore for the republic, has always found many references on I-Day. As has the rampant ‘evil of casteism.’ Inflation and rising prices appear to have been a problem forever. Even Morarji’s triumphant post-Emergency speech in ’77 is tempered with promises to address ‘the biggest issue’ of ‘runaway inflation’. Rajiv, Rao, Vajpayee and Manmohan have all promised various measures time and again to combat rising prices and promote savings. Just as they’ve all repeatedly called for the need to combat fundamentalism and the communal virus.
I-Day speeches also allow us to map national change, real or imagined. India’s foreign policy, for one, has clearly moved on. Its old ‘moral core’ clearly jettisoned for a policy based on enlightened self-interest. Nehru’s I-Day speeches until the 60’s — when he actually strode the world stage as a moral voice in global affairs — contain extensive references and explanations of distant foreign events: Korea ’52; Suez in ’56, African independence in the 60’s; Apartheid in ’52. But all that stops in 1961-62. Nehru’s call to face the Chinese border situation of ‘62 with ‘a stout heart’ is, in hindsight, laced with so many shades of irony that it qualifies as tragic poetry.
His successors in the 80’s and after have mostly referred to world events only if they have had something to do with Indian interests. No more ‘non-alignment’, for instance. The shadowy ‘foreign hand’ in many problems, an Indira favourite, is gone. So are populist calls for austerity and plainness in public life. Food crises are no longer an existential problem for the nation. Swadeshi remains a recurrent theme, but its clear-cut connotations of self-reliance are largely absent in modern calls for development.
National integration and unity were also themes a new nation took a while to get used to. Having won freedom the hard way, Nehru’s speeches (and, indeed, the writings of many of his peers) greatly stress the need to take ‘pledges for unity’ and to fight ‘parochialism’, ‘narrow-mindedness’ and ‘clannish tendencies’.
The ‘Idea of India’ clearly took a while to take root. We probably take it for granted today. As do our PMs when they step up to deliver speeches about further building ‘the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell’. That is in itself a tremendous achievement.