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Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Nation

Building Brand Bharat

Ram Madhav

As India rises in the new world with self-confidence, it should not be dominated by the old Western institutions. India should assuage today's global anxiety by promoting its distinct ideas

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the nation on Independence Day, New Delhi, August 15, 2024
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| Freedom Issue 2025: Politics

The Rediscovery of India

Rajeev Deshpande

The lesson from Trump’s tariff wars is that while multipolarity may not be dead yet, it is time for India to pursue the more ambitious goal of becoming a pole on its own strength

| Freedom Issue 2025

Editor’s Note

S Prasannarajan

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Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Patriotism

The Song of the Nation

National anthems, like national flags and independence days, are shortcuts to patriotism. Their elevation to iconic status makes them supersede their immediate contexts by becoming timeless emblems of peoples nations

Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, May 11, 1946

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Politics

Anomaly at Midnight

Pakistan was created by a tortured argument which diminished a universal faith, Islam, into parochial nationalism. Within a decade, Pakistan had degenerated into a 'jelly state'

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Protesters in ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina's reidence, Dhaka, August 5, 2024

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Neighbourhood

The Ghost of Partition

It is time we in India recognised that 50 years after his death, the killers of Mujibur Rahman have launched a civilisational war on India. As in 1971, it is India. As in 1971, it is a battle against those who won’t stop unless they have undermined India's political and cultural foundations

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Legacy

The Grace of the Guru

Sree Narayana Guru’s genius lay in offering a synergistic model for holistic human liberation. The three pillars of castelessness, education, and enterprise formed an unbreakable chain of progress

Refugees leaving for Pakistan, New Delhi, September 27, 1947

Cover Story | The Freedom 2025: Memory

A History of Healing

With over 12,000 oral histories, the 1947 partition archive is using storytelling to mend the scars of one of the most traumatic episodes that the subcontinent experienced

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Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Inheritance

Half a Legacy

Partition was a division of not just land but a shared civilisation down to its files, flags, furniture and even postage stamps

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Identity

Who Are We?

From the massacres in Noakhali in 1946 to the ongoing revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, the Hindu part of the Indian identity has been seen as a threat. But it is no longer taboo to say there should be an element of faith in Indianness

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Portrait

Hasrat Mohani: Mystic As Rebel

A freedom fighter and poet with a grand vision for India, Hasrat Mohani—a communist, a devout Muslim who admired Tilak and worshipped Krishna, and the coiner of the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’—had called for ‘Poorna Swaraj’ from British rule as early as 1921, a demand then rejected by Gandhi but endorsed many years later

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Technology

Digital Sovereignty

National autonomy will be lost and won at the altar of artificial intelligence and the odds are against democratic societies. There is a perfect storm coming from China. The price of India’s AI revolution is a permanent state of high alert

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Accessory

Requiem for the Gandhi Topi

After a brief revival, the cap that once adorned nearly every leader’s head is almost extinct

A Tamil Nadu tableau on Republic Day shows the practice of Kudavolai in the 10th century, New Delhi, January 26, 2024

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Politics

Tracing the Roots of Self-Governance to the Countryside

It takes a village

Indian servants attend to General RG Woodthorpe and his guest W Groves in Bangalore sometime in the late 19th century

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Legacy

The Post-Imperial Hangover

Britain did not take easily to its diminished status after 1947. Britons loved the men that India had made of them. India held mythic status in the minds of upper-class Brits. Nothing quite like that has appeared to take India’s place

A drawing of Yol Camp watchtower and Dhauladhar range by Ottone Menato

Cover Story | Freedom Issue 2025: Personal History

The Fugitive’s Tryst with Destiny

As I travelled around India by retracing the steps of my great-uncle who landed here 80 years before I did, the irony struck me: here I was, an Italian in India by choice, chasing the ghost of a dear relative who had been brought to Bombay in chains in December 1940 by the British

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