NEW DELHI: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday took a dig at the previous governments, saying “India’s independence is the collective result of efforts, but one-sided narratives were imposed on the masses through education, legends and writing of history”.
Shah’s remarks came at the book launch event of ‘Revolutionaries, The other story of how India won its freedom’ by Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council of the Prime Minister, in the national capital. “In India, one-sided narrative were imposed on the masses through education, legends and writing of history. If the country’s independence is analyzed, it will be seen that many people and organizations tried to achieve the same goal and the country’s independence is the collective result of those efforts,” Shah said after launching the book at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
After independence, Shah said, who had the responsibility of writing our history from our point of view and evaluating our freedom movement from the Indian point of view and placing it in front of the young children, there has been a “mistake somewhere”.
“History was written by reading from the prism of the British, due to which confusion happened. Through this book, the task of clearing this mist is going to be done.” People say that history has been distorted till date due to various reasons but now no one can stop us from writing it correctly, asserted Shah.
The Home Minister called upon the students and teachers of history to interpret the country’s pride without distorting it and create real history through their hard work and research and search for 300 such persons who made India a great country.
Shah said there were many people who fought in the revolution of 1857 even in the event of not getting anything. “And this revolution tried to inculcate the rites of Swaraj in the minds of the people of the country for the first time after Shivaji Maharaj, from where our freedom struggle started.” “Whether it is a non-violent movement or an armed revolution, the foundation of all is in the revolution of 1857 and it is the responsibility of the government as well as the historians to keep the true historical facts in front of the new generation of the country by including all this information.”
The Home Minister stressed that “we have to extract history from the stream of extremists vs moderates and make it realistic”. “The penance and sacrifice of thousands of people cannot be denied to glorify any one movement. We have to understand that we have not got freedom in grant, this freedom has been achieved after the sacrifice and bloodshed of lakhs of people,” said the Home Minister
“Today, when the statue of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose is installed on the Kartavyapath, then the mind gets a lot of satisfaction.” Netaji is not in competition with anyone and how can his works and great efforts be devalued with the spirit of competition, said Shah, adding “Netaji is that ‘Tejpunj’ (light) who will inspire thousands of youths to become patriots for generations”.
“History is very cruel and it shines like lightning in dark night and it has to be accepted, no one can suppress, vanish and hide the history of the freedom struggle of our country,” said Shah. (ANI)
