6 min readAug 15, 2026 08:07 AM IST
First published on: Aug 15, 2026 at 06:42 AM IST
Independence Day discourses, speeches and poetry oscillate between, to borrow Freudian terms, the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The pleasure principle is the affirmation of India’s grandeur. It offers, like all nationalisms, a vicarious sense of pride, achievement and hope. No political project, especially a nation, can thrive without a sense of pride, the mechanism by which we produce identification with a people or a cause. It is difficult for a politician to be successful without evoking pride, self-belief, and even a sense of romance. Anger and a sense of injustice only get you so far in politics. But almost as a counter-reaction, there is the temptation to counter the pleasure principle with the reality principle: What is the actual state of the nation?
The Hindi poet Raghuvir Sahay was the master of this. In his poem ‘Adhinayak’, he captures the three standard counters used by the reality principle: Authoritarianism, material deprivation and the maintenance of illusion. He poignantly asked: Who is the Adhinayak who makes us sing these praises? Harcharan, the ordinary impoverished citizen, is conditioned to sing the national anthem, without either true freedom or prosperity. The conditioning is to keep up appearances, to go through the liturgical motions of nationalism, keeping the illusion alive for the rulers that all is well. We are asked to sing its songs but are not allowed to speak in our own voices.
Nissim Ezekiel, in ‘The Patriot’, used exaggerated Indian English to mock the superficial nationalism during the Emergency. The remarkable thing is that every single theme he touched on in 1977 still applies almost verbatim. The first is the gap between the professed fidelity to tradition and actual conduct: The profession of non-violence and paeans to Gandhi do not abate the violence. But how much of the adherence to tradition is performative? “Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct/ I should say even 200% correct/ But modern generation is neglecting — / Too much going for fashion and foreign thing.” There is a reference to unrest: “Other day I’m reading newspaper/ (Every day I’m reading Times of India/ To improve my English Language/ How one goonda fellow/ Threw stone at Indirabehn/ Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.” The discerning citizen re-reads the goonda as student unrest.
The conversion of a student-unrest fellow into a goonda is the alchemy of the authoritarianism and coercion of Emergency, gestured at in the next lines: “Lend me the ears —/ Everything is coming/ Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.” There is the genuine concern of the Patriot: “What you think of prospects of world peace? Pakistan behaving like this/ China behaving like that/ It is making me really sad/ I am telling you/ Really, most harassing me.” There is a mocking pun on abstinence being mistaken for complete virtue: “I’m the total teetotaller/ completely total.” And then there is the poignant: “One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.” This very Indian formulation manages to combine complete certainty (surely) with radical uncertainty (one day).
If the pleasure principle demands assurance, the reality principle has to confront the radical uncertainty. Looking at Independence Day speeches, it is quite remarkable how much uncertainty dominates them till Lal Bahadur Shastri’s tenure. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Independence Day speech in 1960 almost gives up on the pleasure principle in favour of the reality principle. It is all the more remarkable because this is before the war with China in 1962. Nehru reminds his audience that only two courses are open to India’s destiny: “Either to hold our heads high and march forward or downfall if we are weak. There can be no middling status for us.” This is meant to be a call for action. But then he immediately goes on to say, “However, this is not in my hands. You have made me Prime Minister for a few days so I am here. There are innumerable defects in me.”
This could be false modesty, absolving himself from blame, or merely reminding his audience that the nation will not be made from declamations from on high. But then comes the mirror to the nation. Referring to India’s Independence, Nehru said “After hundreds of years, India shone once again and the world heard her voice, which had a profound impact because it was the true inner voice of the nation. India began to be respected once again. But very soon the same people of India who had shown great courage seemed to revert to their own weaknesses and began to fight among themselves in the name of religion or caste, language and province. The world began to wonder if it had made a mistake in judging this nation.” Shastri’s first speech as Prime Minister was pithy and direct, this time confronting the fact that India was facing a potentially catastrophic food crisis.
In Nehru’s speeches, the confrontation with fragility, vulnerability and uncertainty is central. There is the constant refrain that there are two dispositions that can keep India down. The first is pettiness. Pettiness is not the same as self-interest. Self-interest can at least be tied to prudence; pettiness is more destructive. It is almost as if Nehru is haunted by Gandhi’s remark, that “our besetting sin is not our differences, it is our littleness”. The second is fear. He writes: “Telling lies and deceit are all the offspring of fear.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches over the years have been varied. The Viksit Bharat framework has one virtue. It puts a timeline on Ram Rajya’s arrival. Ezekiel’s “one day” is 2047. But Modi is focused on satisfying the pleasure principle of nationalism. That has got trapped in its own circular logic. India is great because now we have to learn to speak of ourselves as great, and the more bombast with which we speak, the more evidence we have of our greatness. In 2014, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan forcefully confronted India’s filth. But alas for the reality principle, it seems like our national self-esteem has, since then, reached heights our municipal councils are yet to discover.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
If the pleasure principle demands assurance, the reality principle has to confront the radical uncertainty. 
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