On July 22, 1947 — this day tomorrow, seventy-seven years ago — independent India’s first identity marker unfurled into our life.

The Constituent Assembly was in session in the round, red-and-pink sandstone building which, until a year ago, housed the Parliament of India in our national capital. The members were seated in the semi-circled seating rows in what then was called the Constitution Assembly Hall and, from 1952, called the Central Hall.

I imagine that the day was as hot and humid, but long, very long, fans whirred above the hugely sagacious heads of the Assembly’s members as Dr Rajendra Prasad took his presidential seat as the clock struck 10. The business of the day was listed as “Resolution regarding the national flag”. Just that, five simple words. But what magnetism was packed into them, what history, what aspirations, what faith!

The flag had evolved from the first design crafted by a now almost-forgotten hero of the freedom struggle, Pingali Venkayya (1878-1963), an agriculturist-educator from Andhra Pradesh, who as a 19 year old had been a soldier in British India deployed, briefly, to South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in which M.K. Gandhi had also served as a non-combatant. Venkayya had, on returning to India, become a nationalist and Congressman who wanted the Grand Old Party to have a flag of its own in place of the Union Jack which it would customarily unfurl at its sessions. Designing such a flag in red and green, he presented it in 1921 to Gandhi who suggested to Venkayya that he add a third, white. The idea was that the flag should hold a message for all of India. That done, a charkha, the spinning wheel, which Gandhi felt would connect India to its roots in an artisanal, organic bond with its creative roots, was added.

That original flag had been raised by freedom fighter after freedom fighter all over India, many of its ‘raisers’ and ‘holders’ suffering baton-charges and even bullets; the immortal Matangini Hazra who, at age 73, fell to the British raj’s bullets in 1942 in Tamluk, Bengal, while holding this very flag, standing tall among them.

This national flag, redesigned to replace the earlier spinning wheel (charkha) at the centre by the Ashoka chakra, was the subject of the day’s work in the Constituent
Assembly that day in the shape of a resolution.

Resolutions in legislatures have to be ‘moved’ by a member and this one was moved by none other than Jawaharlal Nehru, not yet prime minister but about to be that. Described in the agenda papers of the day as The Honourable Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (United Provinces: General), he said: “… when I move this Resolution, I think of this concentrated history through which all of us have passed during the last quarter of a century. Memories crowd upon me. I remember the ups and downs of the great struggle for freedom of this great nation. I remember and many in this House will remember how we looked up to this Flag not only with pride and enthusiasm but with a tingling in our veins; also how, when we were sometimes down and out, then again the sight of this Flag gave us courage to go on. Then, many who are not present here today, many of our comrades who have passed, held on to this Flag, some amongst them even unto death. and handed it over as they sank, to others to hold it aloft. So, in this simple form of words, there is much more than will be clear on the surface. There is the struggle of the people for freedom with all its ups and downs and trials and disasters and there is, finally today as I move this Resolution, a certain triumph about it a measure of triumph in the conclusion of that struggle.”

And turning to the problems of the then ‘present times’ in India, which had just been through the nightmarish trauma and suffering of Partition, he said “… The problems are not anything new to us. We have faced many disagreeable-things in the past. We have not held back. We shall face all the other disagreeable things that face us in the present or may do so in the future and we shall not flinch and we shall not falter and we shall not quit.” And this was greeted by a loud applause.

Among those who spoke on July 22, 1947 on the ‘Flag Resolution’ was, like Venkayya, another Indian of Telugu descent and an internationally respected philosopher and teacher, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who would go on to become India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, India’s first vice-president and, then, its second president (after Rajendra Prasad, the very first). If Nehru’s words had come from a historian and political thinker in the line of Ashoka, Radhakrishnan’s came from the mind of a
philosopher in the tradition of the Adi Shankara.

Said the sage: “Times are hard. Everywhere we are consumed by phantasies. Our minds are haunted by myths. The world is full of misunderstandings, suspicions and distrusts. In these difficult days it depends on us under what banner we fight. Here we are Putting in the very centre the white, the white of the Sun’s rays. The white means the path of light. There is darkness even at noon as some People have urged, but it is necessary for us to dissipate these clouds of darkness and control our conduct-by the ideal light, the light of truth, of transparent simplicity which is illustrated by the colour of white.”

Only a mind steeped in India’s spiritual intelligence like Radhakrishnan’s could then have added: “This wheel which is a rotating thing, which is a perpetually revolving thing, indicates to us that there is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. Our Dharma is Sanatana, eternal, not in the sense that it is a fixed deposit but in the sense that it is perpetually changing. Its uninterrupted continuity is its Sanatana character. So even with regard to our social conditions it is essential for us to move forward… The red, the orange, the Bhagwa colour represents the spirit of renunciation it is said:(Sarve tyage rajadharmesu drsta)… The green is there our relation to the soil, our relation to the plant life here on which all other life depends. We must build our Paradise here on this green earth. If we are to succeed in this enterprise, we must be guided by truth (white), practise virtue (wheel), adopt the method of self-control and renunciation (saffron). This Flag tells us ‘Be ever alert, be ever on the move, go forward, work for a free, flexible, compassionate, decent, democratic, society in which Christians, Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists will all find a safe shelter.’”

As we remember July 22, 1947, the saffron of renunciation, the white of purity, and the green of our relation to plant life tell us what India is in dire want of: first, the relinquishing of politics’ commonest disease — the lusting after power; second, transparent simplicity among all wielders of office symbolised by the shrill hoot of the lal batti and, third, amongst all of us, leaders and led, a sense of responsibility towards our natural resources under the safety of its common sheltering. The Himalaya, our rivers, forests and coasts do not distinguish between Indian and Indian. We are its equal offspring and wards.

We walk past and pass by the flag every day.

We unfurl it, pull the lanyard to hoist it, by way of rote. Those in transient office fly it on their cars as they cut the traffic signals and screech past others not privileged to do so.

The flag must not become a power-flaunting cloth of clout.

It is the fabric of our Republic’s conscience, the keeper of its faith in the manifold dharma-s of freedom. It is the mantle of India’s selfhood as a just nation.