But to come back to India, we have, ever since I moved this Objectives Resolution before this House – a year and eleven months ago, almost exactly – passed through strange transitions and changes. We function here far more independently than we did at that time. We function as a sovereign independent nation, but we have also gone through a great deal of sorrow and bitter grief during this period and all of us have been powerfully affected by it. The country for which we were going to frame this Constitution was partitioned and split into two. And what happened afterwards is fresh in our minds and will remain fresh with all its horrors for a very long time to come. All that has happened, and yet, in spite of all this, India has grown in strength and in freedom, and undoubtedly this growth of India, this emergence of India as a free country, is one of the significant brothers and sisters who live in this country, significant for Asia, and significant for the world, and the world is beginning to realise – chiefly I think and I am glad to find this – that India’s role in Asia and the world will be a beneficent role; sometimes it may be with a measure of apprehension, because India may play some part which some people, some countries, with other interests may not particularly like. All that is happening, but the main thing is this great significant factor that India after a long period of being dominated over has emerged as a free sovereign democratic independent country, and that is a fact which changes and is changing history. How far it would change history will depend upon us, this House in the present and other Houses like this coming in the future who represent the organised will of the Indian people.
