EP ABDURAHIMAN
Founder & Chairman Care n Cure Group
President ISC (Indian Sports Center - Qatar) 

Every year on 15 August, the Indian tricolour rises across our nation and in Indian communities around the world. We celebrate with pride because Independence Day represents one of the defining achievements in our history: the moment India reclaimed the right to determine its own destiny. But independence is more than a date in our history, and surely patriotism must mean more than the celebration of that date.

The freedom we enjoy today, the one we earned in 1947, was through generations of struggle, sacrifice and extraordinary courage. People from different regions, religions, languages and communities stood together for a common purpose: the belief that India belonged to its people, and that its people had the right to live with dignity and determine the future of their homeland.

Those who first came to India for trade eventually sought control over our land, our people and our resources. Generations of Indians endured great hardship under that control before our nation finally became free. Their sacrifices should remind us that independence is not something we merely celebrate each year; it is an inheritance we have a responsibility to honour through what we contribute to our nation.

That responsibility is perhaps even more important today . We inherited an independent India, but this freedom itself can never be treated as a passive inheritance. Each generation must protect it, strengthen it and ensure that it remains meaningful in the lives of its people. Freedom should never become an excuse for division, hatred or the pursuit of individual interests at the expense of our country and its people. Nor should our love for India depend upon whether another Indian shares our politics, our beliefs, our language, our religion or our way of life.

Patriotism is bigger than any ideology . To love India is to want every Indian to be able to live peacefully and with dignity in their own homeland. It is to protect the harmony that allows an extraordinarily diverse population to call one nation home. It is to respect our differences without allowing those differences to become reasons to turn against one another. The strength of India has never come from all Indians being the same, but from our ability to belong to the same country despite being different .

Our responsibility is also to build . A nation cannot progress through sentiment alone. Every citizen has something to contribute through honest work, entrepreneurship, education, public service, innovation, compassion, or simply by carrying out one's responsibilities with integrity. We strengthen India when we create opportunities rather than merely seek them; when we build institutions that can outlive us; when businesses grow responsibly and create livelihoods; and when the progress we achieve reaches beyond ourselves and our own families.

For millions of Indians living outside India, including those of us who have made Qatar our second home , this responsibility acquires another dimension.

Being a foreigner in another country does not mean taking from that country at its expense. Qatar has welcomed generations of Indians and given us the opportunity to live, work, build businesses and raise our families here. In return, we have the privilege and responsibility of contributing positively to Qatar’s development. The relationship between India and Qatar, and the large Indian community that calls this nation home, shows how people from one nation can become meaningful contributors to the progress of another while respecting its people, laws and values.

There is no contradiction in loving the country that gave us opportunity while carrying India deeply within us. One is the home that welcomed us; the other is our homeland . We can be grateful to both, and we can contribute to both. And perhaps Indians living across the world have a particular responsibility to ensure that wherever we go, our conduct reflects well upon the country whose name and identity we carry with us .

Yet wherever life takes us, India's freedom is an inheritance entrusted to our generation . What we do with the freedom is our responsibility. We must be careful that the divisions we create among ourselves do not weaken what generations before us struggled so hard to secure. We should ask ourselves whether our words, our actions, our businesses, our institutions and the values we pass to our descendants are helping India become stronger, fairer, more peaceful and more united.. or whether they are contributing to the very divisions that diminish her.

The greatest tribute we can offer those who fought for India's independence is therefore not simply to remember them once a year. It is to ensure that their sacrifice was not in vain!

Let us leave to the next generation an India where freedom continues to mean something: where every citizen can live with dignity and without fear; where differences can coexist without becoming divisions; where opportunity is created rather than restricted; and where progress does not require us to abandon compassion, integrity or respect for one another.

On this 80th Independence Day, let us celebrate our nation with pride, but also with reflection. Let us remember what it cost to become free, and recognise what it requires of us to remain worthy of that freedom. Wherever in the world an Indian may live, let us do our part to build, contribute and protect the peace and harmony of the place we call home, while never forgetting what we owe to the homeland we proudly call India.

Jai Hind!

Follow Rehaab Online on WhatsApp (Click here to join the group)