When 75 years ago this day, India became a Republic, our first Prime Minister (PM) Jawaharlal Nehru invited Indonesia’s first President Sukarno to come as an honoured guest. Just one year into his office, Sukarno was the only head of State from another country to have been so invited. A great painting of the swearing-in of India’s first President, Rajendra Prasad, with Sukarno seated beside Nehru, hangs in the corridors of Rashtrapati Bhavan. It is most apposite that on the 75th anniversary of the Republic of India, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, again just one year into his office, and the eighth in that line, should be the chief guest at the festivities.

Sukarno came expecting to see and did, indeed, see in the new Republic, a yearning for the inauguration of change — social, political and economic. A change seeking to find expression through its democratic institutions and the instruments of constitutional empowerment being established. As legatees of struggle, Sukarno and Nehru used the propulsions of history to seek a new millennium for their people.

President Subianto and his host, India’s 15th President, the noble and by virtue of her tribal origins, a trailblazer, Droupadi Murmu were born after Indonesia and India became Republics. So, for that matter, has India’s wholly self-made and unprivileged PM Narendra Modi. Both leaders, Subianto and Modi, owe their positions not to their nations’ freedom struggles — India’s from the British and Indonesia’s from the Dutch. They owe them to the fresh political........

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