India Wins Freedom - Softcover

While the book is a first-person account, it is a fairly easy read and gets really interesting when Maulana talks about his impressions of his close colleagues such as Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel, Rajendra Prasad etc. Some of the comments, released 30 years after his death as per his wishes, are definitely controversial. They also provide new insights into the personal relationships as well as on Maulana's perceptions on how things could have been if some serious mistakes had not been committed by Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. He is quite harsh on Sardar Patel, MA Jinnah, Liaqat Ali, Lord Mountbatten, Krishna Menon, Dr. Syed Mahmood, and to a lesser extent on Prime Ministers Churchill, Attlee and Sir Stanford Cripps. All in all, recommended for anyone with more than a passing interest in the modern history of India and especially the politics surrounding India's freedom struggle and partition. Maulana comes through as a nationalist and pragmatist in the book, and one wonders if the course of India's history (and Pakistan and Bangladesh's as well) would have been different if he had agreed to stay on as Congress President and become India's first Prime Minister --Vimal Pannala Mar 28, 2012

This covers matter relevant to the last decade of India's Independence movement from the outbreak of WW-2. It is very simple to read, and in places gives a honest assessment of healthy difference between the leaders of the freedom struggle. --Khalil Sawant Mar 14, 2012

As suggested before, I would also recommending this book to every Indian. There are lots of truth which is untold. like:- how mistakenly Muhammad Ali Jinnah became so called Qaidey Ajam or self proclaimed Muslim voice. What happen to Khilafat movement and Khudai Khidmatgar movement. Unfortunately, to get political benefit, British tried all their dirty tricks and still we Indian are divided. --MD KHALID AHMAD Feb 6, 2012

A poignant narrative by Maulana Azad, India Wins Freedom is his take on the entire partition, his personal experiences, and his take on the concept of liberty and freedom.India Wins Freedom is an autobiographical narrative of the partition that occurred in 1947. It is marked by the direct, clear cut passages that narrate incidents that took place during the Indian Independence movement. Azad recounts, in his typically frank and forthright manner, the events that unfolded and ultimately led to the partition in a profound, yet deceptively simple manner. When India Wins Freedom was first published, it was sealed and confined at the National Library of Calcutta, with a copy placed at the National Archives in Delhi, for thirty years. In 1988, a court directive released the text, and made it accessible to the general public. The controversial and unique take on the entire freedom movement led to over thirty million copies of the book being sold worldwide. Azad discusses about how politics, more than religion, was responsible for the partition, and how India gained freedom but failed to utilize it to its maximum advantage. He writes about the predominant hypocrisy in the field of politics, and also mentions fellow contemporaries of his time like Gandhi, Nehru, and Subhash Chandra Bose and their mindsets during the entire movement.