Basically the biggest thing is Country was not united.. There was no India or Bharat concept those days. The 1857 revolt revealed the difference.. South was decent different, North was different. So what Shaheed Chandrashekhar & shaheed Bhagat Singh did was inspire the people.. That was not visible in 1857 when it was about kingdoms not country. Both of them knew what their actions would lead do. Bhagat Singh even surrendered.
Gandhi, Patel, Nehru & other leaders had their part to play. Gandhi was like face of India which was vital in itself in international community to gain support. Keeping the country together.. Otherwise our country is just too diverse... To understand each other. Language & cultural difference were too vast. British utilized this weakness to the fullest. Previous leaders before Gandhi Patel tried hardcore approaches like Tilak but were limited to big cities.. They weren't able to take it common mass in small cities.
Everyone had their role to play basically.
Wrong.
There was very much a concept of India and bharat long long before the british came.
People often confuse the terms country, nation and a state. Country is a geographical term.
Was India a country as defined by a geography? Yes. Greeks and Persians and Arabs and Europeans used it for thousands of years.
India is also a nation as defined by common cultural norms and behaviors. Outsiders recognized common patterns & thus called the people of the nation Hindus. And the insiders too recognized common patterns and called the nation from Kashmir to Kanyakumari as a single cultural unit called the Bharat. The two ends of India - name Kashmir comes from sage Kashyapa and Kanyakumari comes from the goddess Parvati - both important elements of Hinduism. The Pandits of Kashmir chant the exact same Vedas in the exact same order of words as in any other part of India. And across India we revel in Ramayana and Mahabharata. All of these make us a nation.
Has India been a sovereign state - as defined by common political systems - all the time? No. In fact, none of the major countries of today existed as a nation state a few centuries ago. The concept of a nation state is only about 3 centuries old. There have been rise and fall of empires that have ruled a chunk of the country. Sometimes the political union was made and other times it was unmade. That was true for every other civilization. They just differ on how long they have stayed together in political terms.
While country and nation are fairly static entities, a state is a very fluid entity. Even 70 years ago, we didn’t have many parts of present day India as part of the present political union. We added Kashmir, Hyderabad, Junagadh, Manipur, Tripura, Goa and Sikkim to our political union. Just because the union increased in size since 1947, mean that our union changed in character? We added Sikkim only in the 1970s and Siachen glacier in 1980s. Does that mean our state didn’t exist before then?
For most of Indian history, the political union was not very important. The nation was united more by social systems than political systems. Whoever rules at the top has always been skating at the surface.
A good answer I have saved for people to understand the concept of bharat.
www.jagranjosh.com
m.timesofindia.com
