We got our freedom in midnight. It has taken seven long decades for the dawn to arrive. All along we had been kept in the dark on many vital events in our history. We had been fed with cock and bull stories in our books and were ineluctably tutored to treat them as true! One such incident is the most important event that occurred in the midnight of 15th August 1947.
What Our Books Say
Our textbooks are designed to make us believe that we got freedom without a single drop of blood, through the unique weapon of ‘Ahimsa’ of Mahatma Gandhi and that the British gracefully left our land with lot of benefits like transport, communication, administrative structure, everything in tact with full of bonhomie feelings, analogous to some Chandamama story. Nehru made his famous speech, ‘Tryst with destiny’. Constituent Assembly was formed. A brief mention will be made about partition. The student will be under the impression that Mahatma Gandhi and Chacha Nehru were the main architects who got us freedom and some passing mention will also be made about Patel, Rajaji and a few other leaders as minor characters.
But is it so? Let us look deeper and find out the real face of the British, how we actually got our freedom and who were the forgotten heroes deserving major portion of credit.
The True Face Of The British
It is an elementary fact that, in history, no country would voluntarily cede control of another one, especially when it is looting our entire wealth in broad daylight without any limit. And, looking into bitter past experience, to credit that notorious British aggressor with any modicum of magnanimity in abnegating power and pulling out will be absolutely farcical.
Here are a few exegetical facts exposing their true colours:
The primary purpose of their onslaught was plunder and pillage of prodigious precious resources, making the natives poorer by the day as also to destroy our hoary heritage and surreptitiously spread their Abrahamic faith on the innocent masses. Historical data reveal that India was the richest nation two millennia ago. During 1st CE, it was peaking around 30% of world GDP with China as the second and the western nations at the extreme bottom. Even after the advent of the Moghuls, it continued to be an economic giant with as high as 25% till 1700 CE. But, the British wiped out the entire riches of our nation, as a result of which, when they left, it drastically dropped to a dismal, decimal percentage in a span of 200 years. They literally killed all our indigenous industries, took raw materials from us free of cost and forced their inferior finished products on us at extremely exorbitant prices.
A grisly gruesome instance indelibly imprinted in history was their creation and mishandling of the Bengal famine in 1943.
It is said that during the Second World War, Hitler killed as many as seven million Jews and he is regarded as the most devilish person of the twentieth century. But the ghastly genocide by the British government in India due to hunger and starvation claiming about thirty million lives is no match for Hitler in barbarism and brutality. The British always adopted a ruthless economic policy towards India. Under the British Raj, India suffered countless famines. The first of these famines started in 1770, followed by severe ones in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly, the biggest in 1943-44. Instead of taking efforts to alleviate the distress, they aggravated it further by diverting food grains to Britain’s war front and preventing supply from outside through their ‘Boat denial policy’.
A specious argument put forth by their protagonists is that they built infrastructure like railways, communication, administrative machinery etc. and left them in tact for our benefit. Also, they modernised our education system, taught us English language and sciences. The plain fact is that the infrastructure built by them was essentially and exclusively for facilitating their brazen loot and dumping their inferior products on us.
As regards education, it is nothing else than a myth, an outright lie. The existence of a splendid system of our native education, catering to all sections of the society, prior to the advent of colonial rule has been, after thorough research, discovered and recorded in the book, ‘The Beautiful Tree’ by the great Gandhian thinker, historian and political philosopher, Dharampal. That system was demolished by Macaulay, with the connivance of his native coteries, to hasten the process of imposing their language and culture on us and instill in us a lifelong inferiority feeling.
Now, comes the crucial moment. They had decided to give freedom. Or, to put it in the right perspective, they were forced to flee from the fury of the entire nation. But, they did not want us to live peacefully after their exit. Their sinister idea was to create chaos, conflict, confrontation, creating several tiny dominions which will always be fighting with each other, stifling progress, resulting in stagnation and starvation. What a crooked, crafty, criminal mentality! Accordingly, in May 1947, Mountbatten proposed one ‘Dickie Bird Plan’, which envisaged in effect balkanisation of the country into many independent successor states, providing them a choice to join the constituent assembly or remain a separate sovereign unit. Since it was vehemently objected to ab initio, he modified it in June, with the creation of two nations, India and Pakistan. Before leaving our soil, as a Parthian shot, they planted their stooges in every field of governance who continued their abominable agenda for several decades, a few remnants of which are still lingering even today, stifling our progress and putting spokes at every step of development. This had been their regular loathsome pattern in history wherever they have ruled.
How Bharat Was Partitioned Into India and Pakistan
In fact, the seeds of partition were sown by the British, immediately after the 1857 revolt itself, when, to their shock and dismay, they discovered the solid rock-like unity between the Hindus and Muslims during that crucial time. They vowed that this would not happen again. “Divide et impera” [Divide and Rule] was an old Roman maxim, and it shall be ours”, wrote Lord Elphinstone. A systematic policy of fomenting separate consciousness among the two communities was launched, with overt British sponsorship. When restricted franchise was grudgingly granted to Indians, the British created separate communal electorates, so that Muslim voters could vote for Muslim candidates for Muslim seats. The seeds of division were thus sown quite early which grew into a tumultuous behemoth in 1947.
The climax of the tragedy was that, Mountbatten, got the assistance of one Radcliffe who has never set foot in India earlier, to prepare the map of demarcation of Bengal and Punjab. Worse still, the map was deliberately kept secret till two days before partition, as a result of which, there was a mayhem of hindus and muslims crossing the border in a frantic, frenzied fashion, with furious masses from each side pouncing brutally on each other like beasts of prey killing around twenty lacs of people on both sides. The bloodbath of partition also left the two nations deeply scarred by anguish, angst, alienation and animus.
Historian Stanley Wolpert writes in “Shameful Flight,” Mountbatten kept the partition maps a closely guarded secret, as he did not want the festivities of British transfer of power to be marred or distracted.
“What a glorious charade of British Imperial largesse and power ‘peacefully’ transferred,” laments Wolpert as he commented the possible implications of Mountbatten’s hubris. By botching the administration of partition in 1947 and leaving critical elements unfinished, including, most disastrously, the still unfinished resolution to Jammu and Kashmir, Mountbatten’s partition plan left the fate of Kashmir undecided.
He thus bestowed a legacy of acrimony on India and Pakistan.
What Made The British Withdraw
Before the World War II, they had no idea of granting independence even in their dreams, since they had all along been liberally looting us and were able to suppress any sporadic struggle in many parts of the country by various chieftains. The first war of independence in1857 was on a larger scale which was also managed by them successfully. The 1942 Quit India Movement did not result in any significant impact, necessitating their exit. But, after the Second World War, the situation changed drastically.
The British were exhausted at the sheer cost and energy expended during the six years of war, when they were terrorised by German bombings, with sporadic defeats at various fronts and large number of their soldiers taken as prisoners. Britain was crippled by power cuts and factory closures and their economy was broken. They were no longer the indomitable giants, capable of dictating the world.
The mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy on 18th February 1946 was a momentous event. It spread rapidly and could not be contained easily. The INA trials, the stories of Subhas Chandra Bose as well as the stories of INA’s fight during the Siege of Imphal and in Burma were seeping into the glaring public-eye at the time. These, received through the wireless sets and the media, fed discontent and ultimately inspired the sailors to strike. The aggressor learnt the bitterest truth that they can no longer continue to enforce their authority over us. They were waiting for the earliest opportunity to leave the country with some semblance of dignity.
The Forgotten Heroes
Here are a few random names. We can find out how many of them and how much of each of them are known to us when juxtaposed with the familiar frequent names that our history books repeatedly force on us:
Puli Thevar, Alagumuthukone, Maruthu Pandiyar, Rani Velu Nachiar, Vennikkaladi, Ondiveeran, Pazhassi Raja, Matangini Hazra, Aruna Asaf Ali, Bhikaji Cama, Peer Ali Khan, Master Da’ Surya Sen, The Trio Of Benoy, Badal & Dinesh, Tirupur Kumaran, Subramania Siva, Vanchinathan, Tirot Sing, Parbati Giri, Surendra Sai, MNR Subbaraman, Khudiram Bose, Madanlal Dhinghra, Baji Rout.
The above are only a few names. If we scan through this link, we can see hundreds and hundreds of unsung heroes, most of them hailing from the lower strata of the society, who have rendered selfless sacrifices, losing in the holy pursuit, their livelihood, life and limb.
Many of them are youngsters, bread-winners for their respective families. Most of their episodes will be awesome, astonishing to the extent of being unbelievable.
For instance, here are a few facts about the last two in the list. Madanlal Dhinghra had the guts to go to Britain and shoot dead Curzon Wyllie an anti-Indian officer of the British regime. Madanlal said, “I wish that English people should sentence me to death, for in that case the vengeance of my countrymen will be all the more keen.” While he was being removed from the court, he said to the Chief Justice, “Thank you, my Lord. I don’t care. I am proud to have the honour of laying down my life for the cause of my motherland.”
The last mentioned Baji Rout was the youngest freedom fighter. He was shot by the Britishers when he was only 12 years old. And the crime he committed was that, believe it or not, he refused to ferry boats for British police across the Brahmani River back in 1938! What barbarous, brutal beasts!
Our Duty
Is it not our bounden duty to remember and pay our respects to all those martyrs? The most fitting way to honour them is only to dedicate ourselves and strive for restoring the glory and grandeur of our motherland for which goal they relentlessly toiled and sacrificed everything in their life. In fact, earlier, we had only one enemy but today, we are burdened with number of anti-national elements, locally and abroad, in different hues, manifest as well as masked. They are dispersed in multifarious fields like politics, media, administration, charity, social service, public activism, arts etc. Now, when we are trying to correct the past errors and proceed towards progress, they block every step and create bottlenecks, by spreading false propaganda and inciting people to fight. Our earnest efforts, therefore should be to expose their sinister designs, enlighten the masses, erase their influence and eliminate them from entering into public domain so that our nation marches forward towards eminence and excellence.
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