It was the day before a new dawn, the day of rain and storm before the bright sunshine and ecstatic happiness of 15th August 1947. It was a day when the pangs of decades of labour and the trauma of partition slowly died away and a newborn nation was delivered to the fervent cries of 'Vande Mataram'. They were two short days, two brief moments in the continuum of time towards which Indians had strived for decades. On the arrival of the midnight hour, when August 14th passed into history and August 15th was born, at that magic hour, while the world slept, India kept its tryst with destiny and awoke to a new life and freedom. Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of free India, spoke in the Central hall of Parliament to assembled members of the Constituent Assembly.

"Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge. Not wholly or in full measure but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting, that at this solemn moment, we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people, and to the still larger cause of humanity. At the dawn of history, India started on her unending quest, and feckless centuries are filled with her strivings and the grandeur of her successes and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike, she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step and opening of opportunity to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough, and wise enough, to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? Freedom and power bring responsibility that responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom, we have endured all the pains oflabour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we might fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the ones we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance, and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over. And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible. So is freedom. So is prosperity now and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated segments."