NEW DELHI, India, Aug, 15, Reuter: Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi celebrated the country’s 40th anniversary today with a Call for an end to corruption and Communal violence and a promise that nobody would starve in independent India.

“Our forefathers handed down to. Us a free India. It is now for us to defend’ this hard-won freedom”, said Gandhi, speaking from the Ramparts of Delhi’s Red Fort, the Bastion of the Moghul emperors who preceded the British as rulers of India.

His 70minute speech delivered in Hindi to a smaller crowd than expected referred repeatedly to the threat posed by political and religious extremism.

Evidently alluding to violence in Punjab where Sikhs are fighting for a separate state and Hindu Moslem riots in northern India, the Prime Minister said India was not going to be cowed by the threats of those who were trying to create an atmosphere of hatred.

“We will not allow them to succeed nor rest until such forces are wiped out and extremism eliminated or those responsible for violence have surrendered,” he declared2 sans

“Communalism has no place in India”, said Gandhi, urging people not to retaliate against violence but to recall the example of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Independent

India, who led the country to freedom with a policy of meeting violence with nonviolence. Gandhi’s speech ranged over India’s achievements since Independence — notably those under the leadership of his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his mother, Indira Gandhi and his hopes for a future free of the “corruption, nepotism, laziness and inefficiency that are impeding the growth of our society”. Gandhi spoke of his government’s efforts to better the lot of the poor, reduce urban and rural unemployment and raise agricultural and industrial productivity.

He devoted a large section of his speech to the drought affecting large areas of central and northern India.

“India has never witnessed drought of this magnitude”, Gandhi said, calling for national cooperation to combat its effects, but saying India would face it without outside help.

“This is the time when the well-off people should come to the help of their less fortunate brethren”, he said.

Recalling that the “Green Revolution” under his mother’s rule had transformed India’s food prospects Gandhi said nobody would be allowed to starve.

“We have sufficient buffer stocks of food grains to feed the people in every corner of the country”, he said. “India can take in its stride droughts like the one currently stalking the country”.

Turing to last month’s accord between India and Sri Lanka aimed at ending the Tamil rebellion, Gandhi described it as “one of the major achievements of the past 40 years, and a measure of the success of India’s foreign policy”.

He said it had brought peace not only to Sri Lanka but also to the entire region, strengthened the nonaligned movement and saved South Asia from superpower rivaIry.

Article extracted from this publication >>  August 21, 1987