Congress president Sonia Gandhi has said that the 75th anniversary of independence should have been an opportunity to strengthen unity, but diversities that defined India for centuries were now being used to divide the society.

In a special Independence Day issue of the National Herald, Sonia wrote that India at 75 should have been an opportunity to “renew our pledge to bring our people together. Instead, we find the many diversities that have defined us for centuries are being used to divide us.”

She referred to systematic attacks on institutions and the designs to curb individual freedoms despite maintaining the facade of democracy.

The Congress president wrote: “Slogans have become a substitute for real governance. Projection and publicity have become a substitute for performance. Distraction has taken the place of discussion. Nationalism instead of building pride is being used to propagate prejudice.”

She added: “The room for meaningful debate is vanishingly small, and the space for disagreement is practically non-existent.”

Sonia said: “Parliament is being bypassed all the time and scrutiny of legislation has become a rarity. The Indian citizen, supposedly at the centre of all this, is paying the price of increasing intolerance, growing bigotry and hatred and disappearing freedoms.”

Pointing to the false and malicious propaganda that India achieved nothing in 70 years and real progress started only after 2014, she said: “That sentiment (that nothing happened in 70 years) and the new direction our country is being forced towards, sadly ensures that while we celebrate our journey, this is also a moment for considerable anguish and concern that no amount of ‘event management’, no ‘Amrit Mahotsav’ can whitewash.”

Explaining how constitutional principles were being violated, Sonia said: “There is a growing atmosphere of fear and insecurity amongst large sections of our society. The independence of all institutions that are the pillars of our political and administrative system is being visibly eroded and the institutions themselves are being browbeaten into submission. The bonds of social harmony are being deliberately frayed to keep the country polarised for electoral gains. Investigative agencies are being (mis)used as instruments of personal vendetta and to silence political opponents.”

She said the immediate and most grievous outcome was the growing sense of loss of individual rights and freedoms, “which harms us all, our society, our communities, our diversities”.

“What is sought is obedience. Dissent is intolerable. The right to differ is portrayed as anti-national. The populace is expected to conform. Norms of behaviour are sought to be enforced, especially where minorities, the weaker sections, civil society and the intelligentsia are concerned. The harsh reality is a severely diminished and constantly shrinking space for individual rights and freedoms, hard fought for and won over 75 years.”

Analysing the modus operandi, Sonia said: “Our Constitution gives us the freedom of speech, yet as the (AltNews fact-checker and journalist Mohammed) Zubair case and countless others unambiguously demonstrate, if we do, we are likely to be hounded and persecuted. We believe that we have a free press, yet in well-established international rankings our position has been eroding year after year and has taken a hard knock in the past eight years.

“We inherited or built institutions of democratic governance that are supposed to act independently of the government of the day, to ensure the freedom and rights of our people. The reality is very different as these institutions are sought to be subverted, some even converted into the strong-arm of authority, ready to do its bidding in partisan and heavy-handed ways.”