Our history has mark of colonial conspiracy: PM
India has many unsung heroes who were “deliberately” omitted from historical accounts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Friday, citing the example of a 17th century Ahom general to underline that the country’s history is not only about slavery but also about victory and the valour of countless fighters.
Speaking in a ceremony to mark the 400th birth anniversary of Ahom general Lachit Barphukan in the Capital, Modi also said that India’s history is about standing against tyranny with unprecedented valour and courage and hailed Barphukan for standing up to the Mughal army at the 1671 battle of Saraighat.
“Unfortunately, we were taught, even after Independence, the same history which was written as a conspiracy during the period of slavery. After Independence, it was needed to change the agenda of foreigners who made us slaves, however, that was not done,” Modi said at Vigyan Bhawan.
“The country is correcting those mistakes now. We are rectifying it. This programme today in the nation’s capital to commemorate heroes like Lachit Barphukan is part of that effort... Is Lachit Barphukan’s history not worth knowing? An agenda of slavery continued after Independence. Our real history was deliberately buried,” the PM added.
The event marked the end of a two-day ceremony organised by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Assam government to mark the Ahom general’s birth anniversary. Modi said historians had wrongly portrayed India as a land of the defeated and tortured, and emphasised that only when a nation knows its real past, can it learn from its experiences and tread the correct direction for its future. “It is our responsibility that our sense of history is not confined to a few decades and centuries,” he added.
His comments came a day after Union home minister Amit Shah called for historians and scholars to study 30 Indian empires and 300 freedom fighters, saying that no one could stop India from rewriting its history with pride to remove past distortions. He also called upon students and professors to correct history to get rid of “lies”, speaking on the first day of the two-day event in Delhi.
With the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav to mark 75 years of India’s Independence, the government aims to “bring alive stories of unsung heroes whose sacrifices have made freedom a reality” and revisit the milestones in the “journey to 15 August, 1947”.
Modi has repeatedly made clear that eradicating colonial influences is a priority for his government.