Every 15th August, the prime minister stands on the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, unfurls the Tricolour and addresses the nation. The ceremony has become so synonymous with Independence Day that it is easy to assume this is where independent India first raised its national flag.
The answer lies not in a government order that suddenly declared it the venue, but in the extraordinary history of the fort itself. Over nearly a century, the Red Fort had become a place where political authority, rebellion, colonial power and the struggle for freedom collided. The scene was powerful. The man who would soon become independent India’s first prime minister was defending soldiers accused of fighting the British Empire inside the very fort where the British had once tried the last Mughal emperor. A day after unfurling the first flag at Princess Park, Nehru repeated the same at the Red Fort and delivered his historic speech there. The government later made the Red Fort the enduring setting for the prime minister’s Independence Day address. The flag that flew from the Red Fort was no longer the symbol of an empire controlling India. It was the flag of a free country being raised by its first prime minister. That is why the Red Fort eventually became much more than the backdrop for an annual speech. It became a place where the symbolism of British power was reversed. The same site that had witnessed the British attempt to crush Indian resistance became the place from which independent India began publicly asserting its sovereignty.
The Press Information Bureau records August 16, 1947, as the first occasion on which Nehru unfurled the national flag from the Red Fort. The journey from 1857 to 1945 and finally to 1947 gave the fort a meaning that no government memo could have created overnight.
