Purna Swaraj

The decade of jail-going and compromise ended on a riverbank in the Punjab winter. The Simon Commission — seven Englishmen sent to decide India's future without a single Indian among them — had been met everywhere with black flags and cries of 'Go back'; in Lahore the police had beaten Lala Lajpat Rai in a lathi charge, and he had died of his injuries. Britain's offer of vague 'dominion status', someday, satisfied no one under forty.

At its Lahore session the Congress passed to a new generation: Jawaharlal Nehru, forty years old, took the president's chair at his father's urging and Gandhi's blessing. On the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1929, on the banks of the Ravi, he hoisted the tricolour before a vast crowd as the year — and an era — turned. The goal was declared at last in full: purna swaraj, complete independence, nothing less.

The Congress fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day, and across India people gathered to take the pledge: that submission to British rule was a crime against man and God. Seventeen years later to the season, freedom would come at another midnight — and in 1950 the republic's constitution would be timed to that same 26 January.