In the years leading to Independence and during Partition, the Indian state's experience of trying—and failing—to control publication of communal and inflammatory news and views had important ramifications for the future of free speech in independent India. After the easing in of Indian leaders into positions of power in the year before Independence, their ideological commitment to the idea of free speech was severely tested when faced with communal violence. The manifesto of the Indian National Congress for the central and provincial elections of 1945–1946 listed—as the very first fundamental right—the right of ‘free expression of opinion’. As the Congress assumed state power in the midst of communal carnage, several qualifications and restrictions hemmed in this right, and several experiments (with their roots in the Second World War period) in organizing state–press relations were carried out, with varying degrees of success. The ‘long’ 1950s (from Independence in 1947 up to the Indo-China war in 1962) has been conceptualized by a recent chronicler, Gyanesh Kudaisya, as a period both ‘transformative’ and ‘definitive’ for India, and for our understanding of India's contemporary history. The three chapters in this part illustrate and discuss the experiments with free speech legislation and lived experience of this decade, and their legacy for India today.