Editor's Note

Forty years is not a long time in the continuum of a nation's life. But it is long enough to require us to indulge in serious introspection. We have indeed come a long way, and achieved many good things, but is it the way we wanted to take? Or should we rather have taken a different path to attain the goals that our founding fathers had envisaged?

Forty-one years after we were delivered from the clutches of a rapacious occupation army, after nine months of a bloody war that cost the lives of three million of our men and women, it is time for us to look back, and look back we must to take stock of where we are and where we are heading. Only then can we make adjustments to our way ahead.

We are celebrating 41 years of our Victory amidst a degree of political uncertainty stemming from the apparently inflexible positions of the two major parties on a core issue. And it does little honour to the memory of our martyrs that we are yet to evolve more nonviolent and acceptable way of addressing the core national issues.

Today we join with the rest of the nation in recalling the sacrifices of the martyrs and freedom fighters and pay our homage and respect to them. It is a day when we must also recall with gratitude the support of those individuals and countries that had come forward unhesitatingly in support of our cause, in particular to the people and the armed forces of India without whose unstinted support our Victory would have been certainly delayed if not stunted.

But above all it is a day when we must take a resolve to fulfil the hopes and aspirations that motivated our freedom fighters to take up arms against a vastly superior force and give us a free country.