INDEPENDENCE DAY ‘Swaraj is my Birthright and I shall have it’- Bal Gangadhar Tilak India celebrates its Independence Day on 15th August every year. Independence Day reminds us of all the sacrifices that were made by our freedom fighters to make India free from British rule. On 15th August 1947, India was declared independent from British colonialism and became the largest democracy in the world. "Tryst with Destiny" was an English-language speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, to the Indian Constituent Assembly in the Parliament, on the eve of India's Independence, towards midnight on 14 August 1947. The speech spoke on the aspects that transcended Indian history. It is considered to be one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century and to be a landmark oration that captures the essence of the triumphant culmination of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule in India. The Indian independence movement was a series of historic events with the ultimate aim of ending British rule in India. The movement spanned from 1857 to 1947. The first nationalistic revolutionary movement for Indian independence emerged from Bengal. It later took root in the newly formed Indian National Congress with prominent moderate leaders seeking only their fundamental right to appear for Indian Civil Service examinations in British India, as well as more rights (economical in nature) for the people of the soil. The early part of the 20th century saw a more radical approach towards political self-rule proposed by leaders such as the Lal Bal Pal triumvirate, Aurobindo Ghosh and V. O. Chidambaram Pillai. The last stages of the self-rule struggle from the 1920s was characterized by Congress's adoption of Mahatma Gandhi's policy of non-violence and civil disobedience, and several other campaigns. Nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose, Swatantryaveer Savarkar, Bhagat Singh, Bagha Jatin, Surya Sen preached armed revolution to achieve self-rule. Poets and writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Subramania Bharati, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam used literature, poetry, and speech as a tool for political awareness. Feminists like Sarojini Naidu, Pritilata Waddedar, Begum Rokeya promoted the emancipation of Indian women and their participation in national politics. B. R. Ambedkar championed the cause of the disadvantaged sections of Indian society within the more significant self-rule movement. The period of the World War II saw the peak of the campaigns by the Quit India Movement led by Congress and the Indian National Army movement led by Subhas Chandra Bose with the help of Japan. In 1946, the Labour government in Britain, its exchequer exhausted by the recently concluded World War II, realised that it had neither the mandate at home, the international support nor the reliability of native forces for continuing to maintain control in an increasingly restless India. On 20 February 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that the British government would grant full self- governance to British India by June 1948 at the latest. The new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power, believing the continuous contention between the Congress and the Muslim League might lead to a collapse of the interim government. He chose the second anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, 15 August, as the date of power transfer. The British government announced on 3 June 1947 that it had accepted the idea of partitioning British India into two states; the successor governments would be given dominion status and would have an implicit right to secede from the British Commonwealth. The Indian Independence Act 1947 of the Parliament of the United Kingdom partitioned British India into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan (including what is now Bangladesh) with effect from 15 August 1947, and granted complete legislative authority upon the respective constituent assemblies of the new countries. The Act received royal assent on 18 July 1947. .