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President K R Narayanan told the country on Tuesday that the ordinary people, whom Gandhiji called the 'dumb millions', are becoming more and more articulate and impatient and it is imperative to maintain a balance between freedom and justice to meet their aspirations.
In his address to the nation on the eve of Independence Day, the President said this balance had so far enabled the country to serve its poverty-stricken people in the face of "the tidal wave of globalisation".
He said the country's biggest achievement since Independence had been "the patient building up of a democracy and of unity in the midst of all our bewildering diversities and overwhelming difficulties".
"This achievement of unity and democracy has been hitched to an unprecedented experiment in social democracy, all our endeavours and our arms stretching constantly to human freedom and social justice," he said.
Narayanan asked "the better off" among the people to ask themselves what they could do for others and the country as inheritors of "our great past and trustees of our future".
He said the 54 years of independence, despite all shortcomings and frustrations, had been perhaps the single longest period in the country's long history when relative peace, progress and a sense of unity had prevailed.
"It is possible to find a hundred faults and failures, during the over 50 post-Independence years, but the fact of our having made forward strides during this period has to be recognised, because it is then only [that] we can build a better and brighter India," the President said.
Stressing that India was today a united nation, Narayanan pointed out that this unity had not been brought about by "blood and iron but by the softer and by the more enduring methods of tolerance and human approach, in short, through the gentle and genuine method of democracy".
PTI
The full text of the President's address
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