Remembering
Our Heroes of History
By Syed Osman Sher
Canada
Pakistan and India celebrate 14th
and 15th August as Independence Day. On those
dates we raise our flags, hold official functions,
arrange public festivals, President and Ministers
address the nations on television, and the newspapers
bring out special supplements eulogizing the efforts
of our leaders and the sacrifices of our people.
On this day in India special thanks is paid to
leaders like M. K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and
Subhas Chandra Bose, and in Pakistan, to Quaid-I-Azam
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan,
Maulvi Fazlul Haq, etc. At this moment of celebration
in our respective countries we forget the leaders
and people of the other side of the divide and
do not acknowledge the mutual contribution they
have made for our independence. By ignoring each
other’s sacrifices and leadership do we
really celebrate our independence and the day
of deliverance from the yoke of foreign rule?
The fact is that we have gained independence not
solely because of our own efforts as Muslims or
Hindus or Sikhs or Parsees, but due to the joint
struggle of the people of the sub-continent. We
started our fight with the British together as
a nation, and got the independence from them the
same day.
Coming for trading purposes in the seventeenth
century, the British established trading stations
in India with permission from the Mughal emperors.
These stations turned later into fortresses. After
the death of Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal
Empire went on a downslide. Finding the authority
of the Mughals as moribund, they started soon
to nurse political ambitions. Centrifugal forces
had come into operation, Taking advantage of the
situation the British plunged themselves into
political maneuverings and imperial designs, and
conquering state by state they gradually became
the ruler of this vast country. The institution
of the monarchy was retained only as a symbol.
India, which had had a shining history of its
own in respect of its cultural achievements and
political administration, was not like a country
in Africa which had not yet come out of its primitive
underpinnings and a tribal system of governance.
The Indian nation was not ready to accept the
foreign rule. The provocations were many from
the side of the alien rulers, but a matter, though
small in nature but great in view of its sensitivities,
became the immediate cause of an uprising of a
very wide scale The issue was a. religious one:
the native sepoys were to bite the bullet of their
rifles with teeth before firing. The bullets contained
animal fat, may be of cow or pig, to taste which
was an abomination in the faiths of both Hindus
and Muslims. It gave rise to a mutiny of the sepoys,
which turned into a rebellion of the people and
spread out as a war for independence. The regiments
based at Meerut rose in revolt. They killed their
British officers, released the prisoners, and
headed for Delhi, which they seized on the 11th
May 1857, and proclaimed the reigning monarch,
the eighty-two year old Bahadur Shah, as the real
Emperor of India. On August 27, the Emperor issued
a proclamation, giving due acknowledgement to
this war as a joint struggle of the Hindus and
Muslims, in which he exhorted the people of the
country to get rid of the foreign rule. The proclamation
read as follows: “It is well known to all
that in this age the people of Hindoostan, both
Hindus and Mohammedans, are being ruined under
the tyranny and oppression of the infidel and
treacherous English. It is therefore the bounden
duty of all the wealthy people of India …to
stake their lives and property for the well being
of the public. With the view of effecting this
general good, several princes belonging to the
royal family of Delhi, have dispersed themselves
in the different parts of India.”
Starting from Meerut, the army of sepoys acquired
control of most of the cantonments from Patna
to Jhansi. It turned into ‘a full-scale
Anglo-Indian war’ which flared up throughout
the northern India, The command was taken over
by civilian leaders in their respective areas,
most notable among them being the Rani of Jhansi,
Begum of Oudh, Nana Sahib who was aspirant to
the Pashwa’s gaddi, Tantia Topi at Gwaliar,
and ex-zamindar Kunwar Singh in Bihar.
The uprising did not meet with success due to
various reasons - the basic cause was its being
unorganized and unplanned. The Emperor was exiled
to Rangoon where he later died. The Queen of England
became the Empress of India. Now the issue before
the new rulers was that if they had to govern
such a vast country as India, it was imperative
that the native people were divided and enmity
towards each other be sown in them. Immediately
after the uprising was quelled, the East India
Company, the British trade agent turned political
and administrative apparatus, appointed a Commission
of inquiry to investigate why the uprising had
happened, and to recommend ways and means to preserve
the British authority in India. Lord Elphinstone,
a very senior civil servant of the Company and
the then Governor of Bombay, sent a note to the
Commission, which said, “Divide et impera
was the old Roman motto, and it should be ours.”
Accordingly, in 1862, the Secretary of State,
Sir Charles Wood, instructed the Viceroy Lord
Elgin in his letter of March 3, “We have
maintained our power by playing off one part against
the other, and we must continue to do so…
Do what you can, therefore, to prevent all having
a common feeling.” Again, on May 10, Wood
wrote: “We cannot afford in India to neglect
any means of strengthening our position. Depend
upon it, the natural antagonism of races is no
inconsiderable element of our strength. If all
India was to unite against us, how long could
we maintain ourselves?”
But the Indians tried to remain united and the
joint struggle for freedom went on for another
hundred years. Without going into a detailed discussion
on that aspect of history it may, however, suffice
to mention here some of the important landmarks.
In this regard we may look at the Lucknow Pact
of 1916; protests for the abolition of Rowlatt
Acts, 1919 which had aimed at curbing the press
and civil liberty of the Indians; the ensuing
massacre by General Dyre of innocent Indians belonging
to all religions and races at Jallianwala Bagh
in Amritsar which left 379 dead and 1,208 wounded;
demand for Home Rule; demand for the formation
of a federal government at the First Round Table
Conference in London, 1930-31, boycott of Simon
Commission and the resounding cry of “Simon,
Go Home”; Role of the Indian National Army
during the Second World War; acceptance of the
Cabinet Mission Plan; and joining of the Indian
people together in the Interim Government of 1946.
Of course, we had our differences
and failings, but we remained united in our fight
for freedom till the last moment which arrived
on June 3, 1947 when we all accepted Independence
on the condition that the country would be partitioned.
It may fairly be said that because of that fateful
decision, only then we had parted our ways. But
it was due to our joint struggle that we had found
our long lost liberty. It came two months later
on the same day for both of us, by an Act of Parliament
at London, passed on July 18, 1947, which said
“Be it enacted by the King’s most
Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and
consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and
Commons, in this present Parliament assembled,
and by the authority of the same as follows:
(1) As from the fifteenth day of August, nineteen
hundred and forty-seven, two independent Dominions
shall be set up in India, to be known respectively
as India and Pakistan”.
(2) The said Dominions are hereafter in this Act
referred to as “the new Dominions”,
and the said fifteenth day of August is hereafter
in this Act referred to as “the appointed
day”.
It is time we reconsidered our behavior and changed
our attitude. On Independence Day in August we
should remember our common heroes, icons of our
liberty, our joint struggle, and sacrifices we
made for each other, or, in other words, for ourselves.
If we do not do that we would be failing our own
history, and demeaning the noble struggle of a
century or more. We are now two countries, and
even three, but the freedom we had gained in 1947
was for the land comprising these countries. We
can go our separate ways in celebrating our Republic
Days of January 26, March 23, and March 26 (for
Bangladesh) but not the Independence Day of August.
It is a joint legacy.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
