It’s been 69 years since India became independent. Surviving freedom fighters feel that the sacrifices made by them to empower the dumb millions have not borne fruit yet.
The country continues to encounter numerous problems — poverty, corruption, social inequality, caste system, intolerance, terror attacks, etc.—they say and call for a movement on the lines of the freedom struggle to make the freedom meaningful to common people.
Nonagenarian freedom fighter G.Vandhanam, who took part in the Quit India movement as a youth with high hopes and aspirations, recalls that “we felt that Independence is the panacea for all ills afflicting the nation like inequality, poverty, price rise and unemployment.”
Even after India became a republic, a majority of the people still languish in poverty, thanks to a gradual shift from a mixed to market economy, he says in a conversation with The Hindu here. The sorry state of affairs is witnessed despite the progress made by the nation on the technological front, adds the 90-year-old freedom fighter.
“The nation now needs selfless leaders like Tanguturi Prakasam Pantulu, who sacrificed the enormous wealth earned by him as a barrister during the freedom struggle to ensure that the fruits of development reached the common people,” asserts Mr. Vandhanam, who had worked for the victory of the first Chief Minister of Andhra State formed in 1953 in the elections then. It had become ritualistic for politicians to pay floral tributes to Mahatma Gandhi after giving the go-by to Gandhian principles, laments another nonagenarian freedom fighter Aswath Narayana, who had donated his ancestral property for construction of a school in the remote Nandanavanam in Zarugumalli mandal.
