As the midnight hour approached for India 60 years ago on Aug. 15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister designate, took to the podium to address India’s Constituent Assembly in session in New Delhi.
Nehru 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.”
Freedom came with a cost as British India was partitioned to create Pakistan on the basis of an exclusive religious demand of a segment of the Indian Muslim population for a separate state.
Six decades later, in a much altered post-Cold War context of globalization and Islamist terrorism, India’s emergence as a major player in global politics is viewed with anticipation, and not indifference or apprehension in the world’s major capitals.
The March 2006 visit to India by U.S. President George W. Bush was planned to put in place a strategic partnership between the two democratic giants.
The agreement reached between Washington and New Delhi on nuclear co-operation is an acknowledgement by the world’s only superpower that a stable democracy needs to be treated on a basis entirely different from rogue and failed states such as Iran and Pakistan.
India is an ancient land of immense contrasts and contradictions. Here, all faith traditions have found a home and received respect, while India as a civilization grew rich on borrowings from other cultures.
More languages in greater numbers are spoken in India than in Europe, and next to China with over a billion people India is multicultural without requiring of Indians to put multiculturalism on parade.
But India remains poor, and its poverty is a huge drag on its progress.
Since the midnight hour of freedom the immense challenge for India’s political class has been one of meeting the basic needs of the poor hile remaining committed to ensure Indians can benefit fully from the modern world of science and industry.
The proudest achievement of Indians—despite the terrible toll of communal riots, secessionist movements, communist insurgencies, political assassinations, regional grievances, wars and natural disasters—remains their firm commitment to maintaining democracy and constitutional rule.
Indeed, modern India has held together and grown stronger over the years only because democracy has been the uniting factor for a people historically divided by caste, ethnicity and religion.
In the hour of India’s severest test—its independence stained by the wounds of religious nationalism precipitating the partition of the land—its leaders did not falter in their commitment to make of India a democratic and secular republic.
As the world’s largest democracy, India’s lesson for the developing countries of Africa and Asia is that neither freedom can be effectively protected nor needs of the poor met with some measure of success and dignity in the absence of democracy.
India’s troubled relationship with the West, especially during the peak of the Cold War years, is now history.
The future holds the promise of the West and India joined together to provide for a likely coalition of democracies protecting freedom and human rights against countries and ideologies that fear or resent the modern world of deepening globalization.
It is certain that as this future unfolds increasingly prominent will be India’s role.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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