PRESIDENT’S
FAREWELL ADDRESS TO THE NATION
Following is the text of the President Shri K.R.
Narayanan’s Farewell Address to the Nation :
"My fellow citizens,
On the eve of stepping down from office, my heart
is filled with emotions of gratitude and thanks to the people
of India, their elected representatives, and to the political
parties for the trust and confidence they reposed in me and the
kindness and affection they bestowed upon me during the last five
years.
And I extend to Dr. Abdul Kalam my heartiest
congratulations and warm welcome, as the next President of India,
and, wish him success and fulfilment in this highest office of
the State. I applaud him as a distinguished scientist and technologist
and as a scholar and a humanist.
I had the privilege of being the President
during the 50th anniversary of our Republic and to
participate in the celebrations of that historic anniversary and
also to see India enter the 21st century. It was exciting
for me to see our country stepping into the new century as the
largest and most vibrant democracy in the world, as an economic
and technological power of significance, and above all, as a country
of one billion people that has achieved self sufficiency in food
for the first time in its modern history. To-day the youth of
India are awake and they have brought India to the cutting edge
of technology making it possible to be a developed nation in the
near future. Swami Vivekananda used to say "give me a dozen
young people dedicated to the service of the nation and I shall
transform the world". To-day we have thousands of enthusiastic
young people in our country who are awaiting a call from the elders,
and examples set by the older generation for service to the people
and the nation. It is not an exaggeration to say that we of the
older generation has failed to set examples and role models to
our youth for social action in the service of the nation. If only
we could release and set in motion the bottled up potential and
energy of our youth we can change India, if not change the world.
Gandhiji has once remarked that true democracy
is what promotes the welfare of the people. We are proud of our
200 odd million people who are educated and belong to the entrepreneurial
and the more well off classes. But we should not forget that this
educated well off class is surrounded and almost besieged by the
majority of our people who are poor, ill-fed and illiterate. The
economic reforms through liberalization and globalization should
not ignore this weaker majority – the scheduled castes and scheduled
tribes, the women who toil day and night and make life worth living
in our homes. The provisions we have already made in our social
and economic policies and programmes must be strengthened, expanded
and implemented with sincerity in order to deal successfully with
the condition of all the marginalized sections of our society.
Above all, we should safeguard the unity
of India and the democratic order that has elicited a sense of
wonder and admiration from the world. At the base of our unity
is our tradition of tolerance, religious tolerance, and communal
and social amity. In this context I should like to recall the
words of Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions in America.
He said he was proud that he came from India, the wonderful land
of tolerance, where the Hindus built mosques for the Muslims,
and Churches for the Christians. Indeed Vivekananda entertained
a vision of India having a Vedantic brain, an Islamic body and
a Christian heart. It was in the same spirit that Mahatma Gandhi
declared that "I do not expect the India of my dream to develop
one religion i.e. wholly Hindu, wholly Christian or wholly Muslim,
but I want it to be wholly tolerant with its religions working
side by side with one another". Combining the moral and pragmatic
aspects of this tolerance Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote
to the Chief Ministers of India during the dark days of 1947 and
I wish to quote excerpts from this letter. "We have a Muslim
minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if
they want to, go anywhere else. They have got to live in India.
That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever
the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and
horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with
this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security
and the rights of citizens in a democratic State. If we fail to
do so, we shall have a festering sore which will eventually poison
the whole body politic and probably destroy it. Moreover, we are
now on a severe trial in the international forum. I have it on
the authority of our delegates to the United Nations that the
friendliness towards India which existed before the recent tragedy,
has changed and we are looked upon with distrust, and almost with
a certain degree of contempt. We cannot afford to ignore this
feeling. … … … And pure self-interest, apart from moral considerations,
demands that world opinion should be on our side in this matter
of treatment of minorities." His words are true and relevant
even to-day and we can ignore these words of wisdom at our risk.
It is important for us to-day to introspect and realize that what
makes India’s unity and democracy credible and enduring is this
precious tradition of tolerance.
My dear fellow citizens, I was born and brought
up in a village called Uzhavoor in Kerala among all religionists.
I recall how people of different religions lived together in that
village without any sort of tension among them and how the upper
class Hindus in that village as well as well-to-do Christians
encouraged and helped me in my early studies. Later in life I
had the opportunity to fight in general elections from a constituency
called Ottapalam well known for important upper caste Hindu families.
I recall how they all came out to canvass for me in the elections
with great enthusiasm. From this constituency where there were
considerable number of Muslims and Christians also, it was my
good fortune to get elected to Lok Sabha for three consecutive
terms with a sizeable majority. At Ottapalam I experienced the
essential goodness of our people, their capacity to forget all
communal, religious and social divisions of our society, when
an occasion was presented to them. It is up to our social and
political leaders to present the people with such occasions, especially
to-day when the poison of communalism has caused so much violence
and hatred in some parts of our country. We need the Hindus, who
form the majority, to speak out in the traditional spirit of the
Hindu religion.
My parting appeal to you, dear citizens of
this proud and tolerant Republic of India, is to guard our tradition
of tolerance, for, that is the soul of our culture and civilization,
that is the spirit of our Constitution, and that is also the secret
of the successful working of our democracy and the secret of the
coherence of this vast country as a united nation. May I thank
you all again when I step down from the elevated position of the
First Citizen, to be a citizen among other citizens of this great
Republic.
Jai Hind".
