Articles
An Appreciation
Dt: 17/1/124
An Appreciation
Dr T H Chowdary*
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– George Santayana (1863-1952)
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past."
- George Orwell (1903-1950)
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India’s aspiration for eventual freedom from British imperial rule found expression with the founding of the Indian National Congress (INC ) in Dec 1885 and was realized on the 15 Aug 1947. From petitions, memoranda and resolutions in the annual gatherings in the formative years by English -educated gentleman (mostly lawyers and learned persons through non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements and mass jail going through mutinies in Royal Indian Navy, Royal Indian Air Force and most impressively, the emergence of the Indian National Army (INA) raised and led by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose which fought the British Indian Army in alliance with the Japanese Army at Bharat’s north-eastern gateway towns Imphal and Kohima and the exhaustion of Great Britain by the end of the Second World War (1939-45) led to the transfer of power by England on 14 Aug 1947 to Pakistan comprising the Muslim majority areas in the north-west and the east of the country and to India of Hindu majority on the 15 Aug 1947 .
2. Undivided India’s struggle for freedom from British rule was marked by communal strife between Muslims, (90% of whom are the progeny of Hindus converted to Islam by Muslim invader – settler -rulers from Islamised West and Central Asia) and Bharat’s Hindus. Allah’s messages to Prophet Mohammad as recorded in the Koran , the Sunna and Hadiths of the Prophet enjoin jihad by Muslims everywhere to convert people of other faiths or enslave or finish them off. Therefore Hindu-Muslim unity to get rid of Britain’s rule in India was impossible . It was amply clear by the pronouncements of Sir Sayyed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898); Sri Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938); Maulana Mohammad Ali (1878-1931) ; Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948); the most influential and revered and commemorated leaders of Muslims . Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (given name : Gulam Muhiuddin Ahmed born in Mecca - 1888-1958) was merely a Muslim leader of Congress of predominantly Hindus . He had little following among Muslims .
3. Narratives of India’s freedom movement by professional historians , especially by the mutually- styled “eminent” Marxist historians[(Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, S.Gopal, R.S.Sharma, Bipan Chandra, Sumit Sarkar - prominent captors of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) ] are mainly ideology- based and agenda-promotive. Professional historians of integrity and reputation like Sir Jadunath Sarkar and Dr R C Majumdar whose researches included Indian sources besides Persian , Arabic, British and other European sources, were relegated by the “secular” Nehruvian power-wielders and captors of the ICHR. The histories written and taught and patronized since independence till a few years ago have thus been and so far are “secular” ; that is, Islamic rule rationalizing, Bharateeya nationalism - undermining and Hinduism - trivializing. All of these including the contents of Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India” and his letters to his daughter Priyadarshini Indira are all Bharat and Hindu - trivializing , Islamic -rule and temple destruction rationalizing.
4. Kulapati K M Munshi , statesman, scholar, eminent lawyer, founder of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, visionary and the Sardar Patel-inspired and initiated reconstructor of the famed Somnath temple in 1951 has written the two-volume “Pilgrimage to Freedom” book dealing mainly with the proximate events especially with India’s constitution making .
5. Dr Raja Bhaumik’s two-Volume, 846 pages book “ Journey to India’s Freedom: 1858-1948: An Untold Story” is an extraordinary book because the author is not a professional historian but practising medical doctor who influenced by the phenomenon of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and the INA and inquisitive ( credulous) about the officially propagated fable about his death in an aircraft crash undertook to study the prominent persons and their roles in India’s journey to freedom from the British colonial rule based on documents related to and emanating from the prominent persons - Vice Roy cum Governors General , leaders of the INC and its offshoots like Swaraj Party; Muslim League and other Muslim parties ; Hindu Mahasabha; Akali Dal . While professional historians, especially the Marxists of JNU and their cohorts in the Alighar Muslim University (AMU) presented events and interpreted them in the light of their ideologies and agendas. Dr Bhaumik wrote the facts, leaving interpretation and conclusions to the reader. That shows intellectual honesty and independent study .
6. The contents of Dr Raja Bhaumik’s two volumes are authenticated by extensive bibliography covering 102 books , 23 PDF sources and 103 articles on the Internet. I have an extensive collection of books referring to India’s struggle for freedom, especially the three-volume “ the History of the Indian National Congress “ by one of its great leaders and once President of the Congress , Dr B Pattabhi Sitaramaiah; who like Dr K M Munshi with his two-volume “Pilgrimage to Freedom” was also an important participant in the pilgrimage. Dr Raja Bhaumik’s book will be a valuable addition to my as well as anybody’s collection of books on history.
7. I congratulate Dr Raja Bhaumik for his extensive study and excellent presentation of India’s historic and turbulent journey to freedom involving Muslim separatism , Gandhiji’s irrational and fruitless appeasement of Muslims in the misplaced hope of forging Hindu-Muslim unity and avoiding partition of India. The mainly one-way transfer , rather expulsion of minority Hindu and Sikh populations from Pakistan and Bangladesh has left the Muslim problem in Inda as it was , in fact, more acute than before partition. The prophetic expression of Dr B R Ambedkar that India may be “ independent but not free “ because Muslims have increased from under 10% in 1951 to 17.5% ( or even more), if the millions of Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators and their cousins, the Rohingyas are also included ) . I will end this long appraisal of Dr Raja Bhaumik’s excellent book with Dr Ambedkar’s cautious warning about Muslim problem in India in his 1945 book , “Pakistan or Partition of India”.
Pakistaniat as DNA
“I do not think the demand for Pakistan is the result of mere political distemper, which will pass away with the efflux of time. As I read the situation, it seems to me that it is a characteristic in the biological sense of the term which the Muslim body politic has developed in the same manner as an organism develops a characteristic. Whether it will survive or not, in the process of natural selection, must depend upon the forces that may become operative in the struggle for existence between Hindus and Musalmans
- Dr. Ambedkar in the book, “Pakistan or the Partition of India ”
8. I also look forward to another book in writing from Dr Raja Bhaumik that deals with the myth of Netaji’s death in an air crash. I guess it will be a veritable mine of facts. Readers of Dr Bhaumik’s books will , I hope see the web of lies propagated so far about Hindu-Muslim unity, “composite” culture , “socialism”, “sarava dharma samabhava” and Netaji Subhash Bose’s death in an aircraft crash in 1945. (1,189 words)
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