Freedom Issue 2026: Editor's Note

TALKING FREEDOM IS the trait of the times. The street sets the stage; the young provide the tension. It is not what is playing out in closed societies, or in societies where openness is a hoax. Today democracies make freedom a hot topic, which itself is a great thing because it is not a subversion—a favourite accusation of autocrats—but a reminder to the ruling class about the uses of conscience. It may at times seem idealism shaped by insufficient historical sense. It may be a rejection of the certainties with which politics-as-usual consolidates power. It may be the mobilisation of generational ennui. It certainly is the conversation today.

For a while it was “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” that set the street on fire, and the moral questions raised by cause-and-effect in the wake of Gaza didn’t matter. What mattered was a certain definition of justice, vindicated not by the original horror of October 7, 2023 but by the images of suffering from the war zone. A generation’s rage against power—which requires an enemy and a victim compatible with a sentimental reading of history—may have sharpened the ideological divide in politics. It cements the status of freedom as a permanent dispute.

Idealism made the young the natural challenger of the Establishment earlier too. The rage was more rewarding than the result even then. The legacy of a Tiananmen Square or a Tahrir Square is not what it has achieved in terms of tangible freedom but what it takes to question the gods. Travel back to the era immortalised by the poet Philip Larkin

to see the rites of liberation: Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me)—/ Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban/ And the Beatles' first LP. It was also a time when to breach the barricades was to remain sensitive. The romance was in inflating the pretences of power.

Protest is a pursuit still, the freedom song as shrill as ever. Closer home, the transformation of an idea from a judge’s inappropriate metaphor to satirical panache to an organic surge of resentment has only reemphasised how generational disaffection makes the arguments on freedom morally urgent—and turns an abstraction into an action plan. Its achievement is larger than a minister’s resignation. It is about enabling the establishment to abandon the cosy assumptions of power. It is about restoring the human content in the conversations that make democracies authentic.

This struggle for freedom is not ideology-proof. Its best example comes from America, where the politics of social justice has become proudly socialist for a generation, the mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani being the mascot. To rage against capitalism from its homeland is cool today, though a reimagined Soviet Union is not the new socialists’ destination. Increasingly it is about a Manichaean division of the world where the arms of the state only restrict freedom. Open the borders… Defund the police… Contain Israel… A dash of the anarchic completes the rejoinder.

It is not that Marx has staged a comeback. And they are not taking history lessons either. The shades of wretchedness, and the range of injustice, are a continuous sensory experience in an age where ‘social’ is the most familiar adjective for media. It is not a return journey to the hoary past of ideologies. It is the reimagination of the present of plenty by a generation for whom privileges minimise justice. And it is necessary to name the evil, for freedom needs a purpose, no matter how loose a construct it is. Some may argue that this generation is being radicalised by the insensitivity of authority. It could be something else: Politics is being normalised by the power of participation. Dissent of the streetfighter enhances democracy.

India says it again and again. On the 79th anniversary of Independence, it is more redemptive than regrettable to have freedom as the motif of our anxieties and imaginations. And it is happening in an India that has already covered a long distance in the definitions of national freedom. We are at a point in the evolutionary saga of perhaps the world’s most unforgiving democracy when the word India itself is being uttered with a new cultural confidence. That freedom is a fearless argument in this India validates how the fundamentals of democracy are not forsaken despite the sweep of change. The ultimate test of freedom is awareness of how free we are to talk about it. And we are still talking.