Opinion | Why ‘Seva Teerth’ Marks The Most Decisive Move To End India’s Colonial Hangover |
Opinion | Why ‘Seva Teerth’ Marks The Most Decisive Move To End India’s Colonial Hangover
Tuhin A Sinha & Nishant Kumar Hota
Through ‘Seva Teerth’, the Modi government seeks to align the physical seat of governance with a civilisational self-image rooted in service rather than subordination
On the midnight of 15 August 1947, as the tricolour rose over Delhi and a new nation took its first breath, millions of Indians felt the burden of nearly two centuries lifted from their shoulders. Freedom was not an abstraction. It was the right to speak without fear, to govern without foreign masters, to imagine a future without subjugation. Yet history rarely changes in a single stroke. Political power may transfer overnight, but institutions, habits, laws and symbols often linger far longer.
In the decades after Independence, however, India retained much of the administrative and legal scaffolding designed by the British Empire. The Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1898 continued to shape criminal justice. The architecture of governance remained centred in imposing colonial-era buildings such as North Block and South Block. The steel frame of the bureaucracy, once crafted to serve imperial priorities, evolved but did not entirely shed its inherited mindset. The phrase “brown sahibs" captured a certain discomfort, the sense that while rulers had changed, the style and symbolism of rule sometimes had not.
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