EVERY August, we raise the flag and call ourselves free. But on the first morning of that freedom, in 1947, Faiz, in Subh-i-Azadi, looked at the long-awaited dawn and said it was not the one: ‘yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazida sehar’ — this stained, night-bitten dawn is not the morning we had set out for. Seventy-nine years on, our national day deserves an honest question: did we win a country and quietly postpone its freedom? In 1947, we changed the nationality of our rulers and left the harder task — changing the nature of rule — to a later generation. That is our unfinished independence — still ours to finish.

Begin with the one thing the British empire left behind that no repeal can reach: not a law, but a habit of mind. Colonial rule does not merely occupy a land; it occupies the imagination of those it governs, teaching them to see themselves through the ruler’s eyes — as subjects to be managed, not citizens to be served; supplicants at a counter, not owners of the state. Ashis Nandy called colonialism, above all, a colonisation of the mind — a condition that outlives the flag.

This servility was not an accident of empire; it was its design. In 1835, Lord Macaulay told the British that education in India should produce a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect — trained not to rule but to serve. That reflex — to defer, to request rather than require, to treat power as something........

© Dawn