Hand on your heart—can you really say this country is free?

When seven of every ten people in the country feel despondent, can we still, hand on our hearts, say we are free? As we prepare to celebrate yet another Independence Day, the haunting question once posed by the late people’s poet Adam Gondvi (अदम गोंडवी) demands an answer.

Our social, economic and political freedoms have long been under siege, but today, the powers that be are busy building islands of affluence for the privileged at the cost of the rights of the marginalised and the dispossessed. Not only is inequality rising and deepening, this very phenomenon is being sold as ‘social justice’ with the help of a complicit media.

The common folk are no longer safe even in their own homes. There was a time when they might’ve defiantly asked: ‘What will you do—bring down my house?’ But in today’s bulldozer democracy, tearing down someone’s home and dumping them on the street is par for the course.

This is the very antithesis of Gandhi’s dream of ‘swaraj’ as a tool of self-determination for the poor—a dream that envisioned access to basic amenities for the poorest of the poor. ‘There can be no room for inequality in such a swaraj,’ he’d said. ‘Our freedom will never be complete until we make it possible to deliver these amenities to every poor citizen.’

Gandhi imagined an India where the poorest and most powerless citizen never felt that their voice didn’t matter. After all, there’s barely a human or any other being that doesn’t long for freedom. If liberty weren’t so beloved, it wouldn’t have demanded so many sacrifices in human history. Nor become the foremost political ideal of our time—the idea that no individual, community, nation or state has the right to curb another’s freedom to act according to its will.

And yet, ironically, there is a lot of confusion about what freedom really means. Much of this confusion has been deliberately manufactured. So much so that for many people, it has become difficult to grasp what freedom really is — or what kind of system best guarantees it.

The most popular myth equates freedom with licence—positing that to be free is to be rid of all restraint, that discipline has no place in liberty. Those who fall for this delusion fail to understand that freedom is not synonymous with anarchy or the absence of structure. Nor is it the right to ride roughshod over any form of discipline. Such freedom exists nowhere.

But even scholars can’t agree on what freedom means, what possibilities it holds and whether it’s limitless. Across centuries and civilisations, philosophers have returned to these questions, only for each era to reshape the answers in its own image.

Take a few examples. The British political theorist Harold Laski believed that freedom means creating an environment in which individuals can fully realise their potential. Rousseau, on the other hand, argued that man is born free. Thomas Hobbes defined freedom as the total absence of opposition or control. The political scientist Seeley saw freedom as the antithesis of over-governance. Machiavelli insisted that freedom isn’t the absence of constraints—it’s the presence of appropriate ones, structured not just for individual liberty but for the common good.

Herbert Spencer said that each person’s freedom is valid only so long as it doesn’t violate someone else’s. Karl Marx declared that true freedom—indeed democracy itself—are impossible without collective ownership of the means of production.

Gandhi used to say that while freedom liberates us from foreign rule, it also demands something of us—to be governed by our inner conscience, by self-restraint. Without that internal discipline, freedom loses all meaning. At the same time, he  clarified that freedom must guarantee that no one’s choices or actions are obstructed by someone else’s.

Gandhi said many other important things about freedom: that liberty grows when shared; that only those who recognise and uphold others’ freedoms—and accept the responsibility of reining in their own impulses—have a moral right to claim freedom for themselves.

On returning from South Africa, Gandhi said in plain words that he’d be happy to lead any struggle for independence only if he felt sure that those he was fighting for were not themselves perpetrators of others’ enslavement. A poet once captured this spirit in a single line: ‘To be free is to become a free voice.’

Whenever we speak of an individual’s or a nation’s freedom, it always begins with the freedom to be—to think, believe, express political views, to practise (or reject) religion. Only after that comes the freedom from social barriers. Then the freedom to do what one desires. And finally, the freedom to become what one chooses to be.

Freedom is one of the oldest human longings. The modern slogan of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ emerged in the 18th century—during the French Revolution, when monarchy’s excesses became unbearable. That slogan became the foundation of the 1789 uprising, echoing across Europe and eventually around the world.

And so liberty became a personal goal. In the pursuit of that goal, people rose against empires. As ideas of freedom evolved, they began to include participation in politics, the right to livelihood and eventually—freedom from interference in how we live, what we wear, whom we love, what we believe. Cultural, social, civic and national freedoms all grew out of that one foundational idea.

From our own independence movement, we know this: national freedom means the political right to self-govern. But we also know that this political right is truly secure only when paired with equality—because without equality, there is no real liberty. And without liberty, equality is a sham.

Babasaheb Ambedkar, the man we revere as the architect of our Constitution, believed that if the state failed to build an equal society, then civil, economic and political freedoms would amount to nothing.

Others have echoed this too. Political equality is not simply giving every adult the right to vote. Because without equality, the right to vote is meaningless. In a society with massive economic inequality, voting rights alone cannot guarantee political freedom. What happens when hunger threatens to overwhelm liberty? As the poet Ramdhari Singh ‘Dinkar’ once said: ‘Freedom isn’t food, but they are not enemies; if hunger were desperate, freedom wouldn’t be safe.’

One of the most lyrical visions of freedom came from Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote:

‘Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high,

Where knowledge is free,

Where narrow domestic walls do not divide us,

Where words come out from the depth of truth,

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit,

Where the mind is led forward by Thee

Into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.’

In Vatan Ka Geet, Gorakh Pandey, the radical poet of Hindi and Bhojpuri, conjured similar dreams:

‘A new life for our country, a happiness complete

A new garden, new birdsong, new melodies of love

No kings, no paupers, all equal, all human

No handcuffs on our harvests, no commerce of our hearts

No shackles on our tongues, new light in our eyes

No tears soaking one’s sleeves, no ways echoing Hitler’s’

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But ‘freedom’ today has been twisted into a weapon the ruling class wields against the rest of us. No wonder global rankings now call our freedom ‘partial’ and our democracy ‘crippled’. So here we are, being fed dreams of India becoming a ‘Vishwaguru’, even as the state daily manufactures hate, exploitation and inequality and our most cherished dreams of freedom are tossed aside violently.

Worse still, we seem to be oblivious that we, the citizens of India, are on our way to becoming subjects once again — and many are delighting in the transformation.

But if you do realise what’s going on, then this is the moment to protect your liberty. To unmask the falsehoods that pose as freedom but are really its enemies. And to ask yourself the question that the poet Dhoomil does in his iconic collection ‘संसद से सड़क तक’ (From Parliament to the Street):

क्या आज़ादी सिर्फ़ तीन थके हुए रंगों का नाम है

जिन्हें एक पहिया ढोता है

या इसका कोई ख़ास मतलब होता है?

(‘Is freedom just the name of three tired colours

pulled along by a wheel?

Or does it really mean something?’)

For now, the most urgent question is still the one that Adam Gondvi left us with: Hand on your heart—can you really say this country is free?

(Translated from the Hindi original)