Why does the Government of India not celebrate massively every year the anniversary of the outbreak of India's First War of Independence? It is high time to start doing so. Raise your demand.
Enough is enough with the debilitating hyper-dose of non-violence fed into the bloodstream of the nation. It has hypnotised us into weaklings en masse for far too long. And it had to be so, for this effeminate glorification of non-violence and implicit cooperation with the enemy to prolong their hold on India, as means of resistance to them, has run contrary to the national ideal of kshatriya valour that has ever risen to the defence of the motherland in arms. An entire varna was assigned to this task of defence of the nation by the wisdom of the rishis of yore and it was the attempted destruction of this kshatriya dharma by Gandhi that has cost us dear. Imagine Abraham Lincoln making peace with the southern revolutionaries and partitioning the United States of America!
The sun of India's freedom set on the battlefield of Palashi (Plassey, by English distortion) in 1757. Gradually, the sovereigns of India, the kings of her many principalities, fell to the fell power of the English till by 1857 the conquest was complete and the whole of India lay at the feet of the British Crown that had, thus far, unofficially overseen the demise of free India under the commercial garb of the English East India Company. The Doctrine of Lapse forced on the sovereigns by Lord Dalhousie was the final act of English arrogance and they paid for it. The Mutiny began at Barrackpore and spread through the country to become an all-India Revolution that put paid to British rule in large parts of India for close to a year.
This was India' First War of Independence and it was an armed one. It failed to deliver the coup d'e'tat but the British had a close shave with an inglorious exit from India. After completing the rout of the revolutionaries, they blew them off the mouth of cannons by the thousands and deported the rest to the Andamans to work as slave labour for their citadels there. The British Crown now took over the administration of India and with the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 began their dastardly rule over the most civilised of races the world has ever seen.
The Crown's very first act was to totally disarm the Princes of India and, thus, began India's severest servitude to a regime which in terms of brutality unleashed on an innocent people --- physical torture, psychological and cultural subversion, and economic exploitation to utter ruin --- has never seen its like in the history of humankind.
But resistance began and began soon to this enslavement. The conflagration of the Revolt of 1857 had been extinguished but not quite completely. The dying embers would soon break out into a massive fire that would consume the Crown and its conspiracies within the span of the next ninety years.
But did it? If so, then why is the First War of Indian Independence not celebrated in a befitting manner that all Indians may know their history and be rightfully proud of the manliness shown by their illustrious ancestors in beating back the British and almost throwing them out of our motherland?
Who were the traitors then? Who have been the traitors thence? And who are the traitors now? I leave it to your judgement.
Written by Sugata Bose
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