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How it all started: Lord Mountbatten announcing that India is free
To understand what the word 'freedom' means to us in the 63rd year of our Independence, we conducted face-to-face interviews with 500 people in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai. Here are the findings:
In a telling indicator of our troubled times, India sees the security forces as the institution that safeguards our freedom the most.
The media was seen as the next biggest safeguard of freedom, followed by the judiciary and civil society activists.
Perhaps our politicians and bureaucrats will be chastened to find that a mere 7% and 2% of respondents respectively picked them as the institutions that safeguard India’s freedom. Or maybe it is too much to ask that they see the rebuff for what it is.
Another indicator of the extent to which Indians feel imperiled is the fact that 53% said the government should be allowed to monitor phone calls, bank accounts and e-mail accounts and a further 19% said this should be allowed for a suspect person. That left a mere 28% of Indians holding the opinion that such monitoring was an unacceptable intrusion into personal privacy.
But what exactly do Indians associate with the notion of freedom, 63 years on? Interestingly, the most popular response was ‘the freedom to move freely’, followed by the freedom to vote in elections. Clearly, the atmosphere in the sub-continent has played a role in determining this response. The right to protest, which many other democratic societies might have seen as one of the most crucial aspects of freedom, ranked last from among the six choices.
Isn’t the right to raise your voice against wrongdoing by the "system" a key aspect of being a free country? Yes, said 45%, but 32% qualified the response, saying such protest was right only up to a point. Another 21% took the "my country, right or wrong" approach.
In a telling indicator of our troubled times, India sees the security forces as the institution that safeguards our freedom the most.
The media was seen as the next biggest safeguard of freedom, followed by the judiciary and civil society activists.
Perhaps our politicians and bureaucrats will be chastened to find that a mere 7% and 2% of respondents respectively picked them as the institutions that safeguard India’s freedom. Or maybe it is too much to ask that they see the rebuff for what it is.
Another indicator of the extent to which Indians feel imperiled is the fact that 53% said the government should be allowed to monitor phone calls, bank accounts and e-mail accounts and a further 19% said this should be allowed for a suspect person. That left a mere 28% of Indians holding the opinion that such monitoring was an unacceptable intrusion into personal privacy.
But what exactly do Indians associate with the notion of freedom, 63 years on? Interestingly, the most popular response was ‘the freedom to move freely’, followed by the freedom to vote in elections. Clearly, the atmosphere in the sub-continent has played a role in determining this response. The right to protest, which many other democratic societies might have seen as one of the most crucial aspects of freedom, ranked last from among the six choices.
Isn’t the right to raise your voice against wrongdoing by the "system" a key aspect of being a free country? Yes, said 45%, but 32% qualified the response, saying such protest was right only up to a point. Another 21% took the "my country, right or wrong" approach.
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