New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday broke Indira Gandhi’s record by delivering 12 consecutive speeches from the ramparts of Red Fort to stand next only to Jawaharlal Nehru who delivered 17 Independence Day addresses in a row.
Indira Gandhi held the office between January 1966 and March 1977, and then between January 1980 till her assassination in October 1984. In total, she delivered 16 addresses as prime minister on August 15 with 11 of them being consecutive.
Nehru, India’s longest-serving prime minister (1947-63), addressed the nation 17 times from the Red Fort. India’s second prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri delivered speeches from the Red Fort ramparts for two Independence Days in 1964 and 1965.
Post-emergency, Morarji Desai delivered the prime minister’s address twice at Red Fort. Chaudhari Charan Singh gave an Independence Day speech only once in 1979.
After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi carried out the honours of the prime minister’s speech five times from Red Fort.
VP Singh addressed the nation from the rampart of Red Fort on the occasion of Independence Day only once in 1990.
PV Narasimha Rao addressed the nation for four consecutive years from the Red Fort (1991 to 1995).
HD Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral also delivered the I-day speech once in 1996 and 1997 respectively.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who served the nation as prime minister from March 1998 to May 2004, addressed the gathering on the occasion of Independence Day six times.
Manmohan Singh addressed the nation for ten years from 2004 to 2014.
Last year, PM Modi broke the record of his immediate predecessor Manmohan Singh by hoisting the national flag from the ramparts of the Red Fort for the 11th consecutive time.
He also delivered the longest ever I-day speech last year by any prime minister with a record 98-minute address.
Modi’s speeches on August 15 invariably touch on key issues of the day and the country’s growth on his watch, and he often intersperses this with announcements of policy initiatives or new schemes.
In his address on August 15 in 2024, he had made an unequivocal pitch for a “secular” civil code instead of the current framework which is “communal” and promoted “discrimination”, and also for simultaneous polls.
