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New Delhi, June 22 2025 (ANI): Union Minister Jitendra Singh unveiled a book dedicated to untold facts of India’s independence struggle on June 22. The book titled ‘History that India Ignored’ has been written by ANI Chairman and veteran journalist Prem Prakash
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NewsTranscript
00:00and unveil the book, History that India Ignored.
00:30Good evening everybody, our very revered Prem Prakashji, Sanjeevji,
00:59and Kirwai bhai, Distribution Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen.
01:07In fact, I think a week or so back when I received a message that Prem Prakashji wanted me to
01:15be there for the book release, I asked them to check.
01:19I said they may be mistaken because I am too small to perform that task for him because
01:25he has been such a tall figure and a source of inspiration for almost three generations
01:33of Indians, including me.
01:35But nevertheless, I think more than being an honor, it is also going to be a learning experience
01:41for a lot of us.
01:42And I am sure everybody over here sitting in this room would agree with that.
01:47Now this book, History that India Ignored, in fact, to tell you honestly, being a voracious
01:53reader, I have read hundreds and hundreds of books and I still have with me, which are dedicated
01:57to the independence of India, to the partition of India, and also dedicated exclusively to
02:04the 20th century history of India.
02:06And author books by different authors, by Indian authors, by Pakistani authors, by British authors,
02:15by victims of partition, victims of partition who got uprooted from that side and came down
02:20to settle here, including the city of Delhi because it was just about 7 lakh population in
02:251947, suddenly overnight it's up to 11 lakh, such an influx.
02:31Also books written by the victims who had to move out from this part and there in the newly
02:38established Pakistan.
02:42Also books written by some of those partition displaced persons who chose to settle neither
02:53in India nor in Pakistan.
02:54In fact, only about a year back, a young journalist, a lady journalist based out of London came out
03:01with a collection of annexed doors after having done some research among the families settled
03:07over there in the UK, most of them from the Australian Punjab.
03:13But why I'm saying so is that having said that, Prem Prakash Ji had a unique advantage and he
03:20was also blessed with a unique privilege in that he had lived history, he had witnessed history,
03:29he had reported history and he had recorded history.
03:34So I think more ways than one he was qualified to perform this task.
03:39And I wonder why it didn't occur to his mind earlier.
03:44But I'm glad that he's done this now.
03:46And he has decided to benefit us with the first hand evidence account supported by documents,
03:53data, dates.
03:56And this 253 page book is going to be useful in more than one ways.
04:04I always carry two books with me, even on the air flight.
04:08And that's because I pick up any new book which is available in the market and then after
04:12a couple of pages I decide whether to read on or not and just abandon it and take up the
04:17new one, next one.
04:19So I'm glad that day four and yesterday, in two of my flights this was a very comfortable
04:29and a very educative companion for me.
04:35At the same time this book would also be useful for all those who wish to gain themselves with
04:40the chronology of events that led on or that shaved the face of the 21st and the 20th century
04:47primary, the 20th century India.
04:50But also shaved the destiny of India leading up to the midnight of freedom.
05:00And particularly so for the new generation which may still not have been touched with the,
05:07all that that went through those who were part of that time when the partition happened.
05:14And thirdly this is also going to be useful reference book for all the scholars of history.
05:18And I'm sure that is going to give it a timeless value.
05:23Now the book also has certain facts reported with, of course, evidence which have often
05:34not been written because most of the authors have tended to look at this entire sequence
05:40of events from their perspective.
05:43It was also from the experiences of the kind of experiences, varied experience they went
05:48through, which may have determined their perspective, which of course can't guide them for being
05:54biased, but each one of had to go through a different kind of a nightmare.
05:58In fact, I got my Urdu lessons informally from Professor Jagannath Azad, who is no more,
06:05and who always used to tell me fondly that the first national anthem of Pakistan was written
06:10by him.
06:11And on the, in the midnight of 14th August when the anthem was playing, some of his Muslim
06:17neighbors came over and said, now this is high time, you should move out of Lahore, otherwise
06:21we will not be able to protect you.
06:24And then of course, the next anthem was written by Hadith, by Hafiz Al-Andri and so on and
06:29so forth.
06:30So those who have not been able to be in contact with either those who had gone through that
06:37or have themselves been, I think would also be, and many of us, of some of the facts which
06:43were lesser reported.
06:44For example, in the preface of the book itself, on page number 19, Prem Prakashji writes, Till
06:541930, the demand of the Congress party was only for home rule, under the status of a dominion
07:02of British Empire with the British monarch appointing a governor general, unquote.
07:09Now, this is something which is going to trigger quite a few heads.
07:16In other words, means that however much the Congress party might claim to be the torch bearer
07:22of India's freedom struggle, its freedom struggle, if at all, on record, began only after 1930.
07:33And if you put it another way, because I'm also a scientist and a researcher, the entire
07:37span leading up to independence is only 17 years, out of which four years is the Second War.
07:46The high point was the Quit India Movement 1942.
07:50And that means only for one decade, the Congress party was apparently active as freedom fighters.
07:59But the drum beating has successfully carried on for almost a century now.
08:04And that is where the title of the book finds its justification, History that India ignored.
08:14And when I was reading this, the first thought that occurred to my mind was that 1930 was exactly
08:20the year when Bhagat Singh and his colleagues were being tried in Lahore court.
08:26And they were hanged in 1931.
08:28And they were precisely agitating for this reason that it has not to be a dominion state, it
08:35has to be an independent state.
08:37So see the entire contradiction happening.
08:42I don't know how much we celebrate Bhagat Singh and others as we do others.
08:49And 1930 was this year when two dichotomies were simultaneously happening in this country.
08:58And Bhagat Singh and his colleagues found no support from the Congress party, which was founded
09:07by W.O. Hume and, in fact, when he founded it, his main idea was to – he was, of course, a retired British civil servant.
09:25And his idea was to have India being ruled by some of the civil servants who had chosen to stay back in India along with the new emerging English-speaking elite so that he could keep the officers coming from outside – away from the reins of power.
09:47And there was a different kind of an agent and intention over that, which was far, far away from the concept, idea or desire for independence.
10:00And Prem Prakashji uses a very fascinating sentence describing this newly-found Congress party of those times, he writes, as I quote,
10:15it was indeed a club of retiring civil servants and emerging India elite, end quote.
10:25So that's how he has looked at it.
10:28And he wishes us to understand what it's all about.
10:33On the same page, there's another interesting anecdote, which is, of course, known to many of us.
10:38What may not be known to many across the country and across the length and breadth of this peninsula is that when soon after, independently, then Prime Minister on a visit was in Calcutta,
10:49Chief Justice P. N. Chakravarti of the Calcutta High Court, who was at that point in time also officiating as the governor of Bengal,
10:57asked him what finally triggered the decision of the British Empire to quit India or to leave India.
11:05Was it that they could not handle Gandhi and the Congress?
11:10And the at-least reply is an eye-opener.
11:15And this has been quoted in the book.
11:19At-least reply was, and I quote,
11:22the role of Gandhi and Congress was minimal as there was no agitation by them of the horizon.
11:32And therefore, the conclusion drawn by Prem Rekas is that what spurred the British to leave was possibly, as I understand,
11:42and he is trying to put out as A, the decision by Sebastian Drabos to put up the Indian National Army,
11:51B, the mutiny by the Royal Indian Navy in Bombay.
11:56Now, of course, fancibly all the names have been changed except Delhi still surviving, Mumbai.
12:03And the third was the massive public protest that was being witnessed across the country for these three officers of the INA,
12:13namely Shah Nawaz Khan, P.S. Segal, and G.S. Dillow.
12:19So what is being sought to be made out that what was creating ripples in the foundations of the British Empire
12:30was all that was being done outside the realms of what was being made out by a small coterie of the more projected ones.
12:42Then another myth which is sought to be exploded by the book is on page number 23 of the freeways.
12:52The First War of Independence is very popularly referred to as the 1857 War.
12:59But Praveen Prakash Ji has, with evidence, sought to prove that it was not so.
13:03The First War of Independence could actually be designated as the one that happened in 1806
13:10at the South Indian town of Villaur, now a part of Tamil Nadu.
13:15And that was a protest against the British Empire for not allowing the Indian cops to use the pooja signs, the tilak, etc.
13:25And in the rebellion that happened, almost 200 British officials got killed.
13:32There's not much of record in the history, not much written about it.
13:36Another mutiny also before 1857 was that of the 1824 in Baragpur, which of course is now a part of the West Bengal.
13:45Many of us have gone there.
13:46We still have those symbols and the monuments of that rebellion over there,
13:50where the protest was against, again, the British rulers about the discrimination and the negligence in the supplies
13:56which were made available to the Indian soldiers.
14:00Then Prakash Ji has also introduced us to some of the names never, never, never mentioned in the annals of history
14:08and who actually gave up their lives and sacrificed themselves at the altar of freedom struggle.
14:15And some of those names, and I'm sure many in this room would be hitting them for the first time.
14:20Sohan Singh Bakhna, Bhagwan Singh, Hardayal, Kartar Singh Saroba, and also Surya Singh from Bengal, Ganesh Ghosh from Bengal, Ambika Chakravirti, Trupura Singh, Sardar Ajit Singh.
14:39Not many would be knowing he was the uncle of Sardar Bhagat Singh.
14:43And even before 1857, he also had, of course, which is better known, the Mangal Pande episode of 1849,
14:50who again was a part of the Bengal Regiment in Baragpur.
14:55Then he's also mentioned about Basant Baswas, who was hanged in Umbala in 1914, Raj Bihari books.
15:04I think the most telling revolution or a lesser known fact right sought to be brought to light by the author Prakash is that of Mother Lal Dhingra,
15:18who killed Karzan on July 1, 1909 in London.
15:28There was a program going on there. He was there with his spouse and Mohan Lal Dhingra from close quarters shot at him and then surrendered himself.
15:42And during the trial, he refused to hire an advocate for himself.
15:48He was sentenced to death to hang.
15:52And when he was asked to make the last statement of what he wrote, and it's been quoted very beautifully by the author and the court, Dhingra said,
16:00no English law or no English law court has the authority to arrest me.
16:10And he qualifies what he says by saying, if it is patriotic for an English,
16:17if it is patriotic for an English man to fight against the German, if they were to occupy his country, then it is much, much more justifiable and patriotic, in my case, to fight against the English.
16:34So he was actually pointing out a contradiction in the British law itself.
16:39The British law did not hold to trial those of the English men who were at that point in time agitating against the German,
16:47if at all Germans had to invade them or made them a colony.
16:52But it was treating an Indian under trial differently, in spite of the fact that he was, at that point of time, a citizen of the British Empire.
17:05And the most important fact, Congress Party passes a resolution condemning Dhingra's Act, dissociating itself from Dhingra.
17:18Gandhiji also unfortunately does. And for their convenience, Mohler Dhingra's family refuses to have any contact with him.
17:28None of the family members visits him in the prison till he gets hanged and does not even claim his dead body.
17:39And then, and this is more important, and this is called the jail manual.
17:48In the entire period of time, there was only one person who had the courage and conviction to visit him in the jail and meet him.
18:02And his name, ladies and gentlemen, was Veer Saravarkar.
18:09I think after this, what has been mentioned by very, with a huge amount of responsibility by Prem Prakashji,
18:17I don't have to say anything more in response to all that is being said about Veer Saravarkar by the Congress and the ilk.
18:25In fact, Prakashji himself sums up very beautifully on page number 117.
18:33While mentioning Sabarkar, he writes, and I quote,
18:36He passed away on 26 February 1966, unsung for his fight for freedom, but maligned for his petitions for release.
18:50And in fact, petitions were done strategically to come out of the prison because he was of the belief that it was only Netaji's course of action or the option which was going to help in achieving the goal of freedom.
19:06And therefore, they could not just waste themselves away in the prison.
19:10And he was not in agreement with this, the other course adopted by Gandhi and the followers.
19:16Another quote by Prem Prakashji on page number 164, which I think is applicable even today.
19:25And I hope it is not tomorrow, but doesn't seem to be coming irrelevant tomorrow.
19:31And he says that I quote, from time immemorial, India has never lacked in providing its enemies from within collaborators and traitors.
19:45I said, I hope it's not true tomorrow, but I'm not sure.
19:50Then he also devotes a considerable number of account to the hanging of Bhagat Singh on the 24th of March 1931, to Subhash Ghosh.
19:59And therefore, I think, if you go on like this, you can go on and on.
20:05But to sum up, the question after having gone through the book that needs to be addressed is,
20:12if the history that India ignored was indeed ignored, why was so?
20:19Was there a vested interest? Was there a political interest?
20:24Was there a dynastism motivating it?
20:29Was it a betrayal of the declarations made by the self-strived freedom fighters
20:36who decided to not to live up to their commitment to the nation?
20:45And finally, he's also given us a handout with the ten events that changed the course of the history of South Asia.
20:55But I would like to, from my side, because otherwise Prakash would not forgive me.
21:00He would say, I just read my book and read out the phrases from there.
21:05What did you do?
21:07So, ladies and gentlemen, from my side, I would just end up saying that after reading the book,
21:12the question that arises is, why, after all, partition?
21:20And while India went through a single partition, the state of Germany went through a double partition.
21:29And why the two-nation theory? And who asked for partition?
21:36There was a forum of Muslim intellectuals and Muslim writers who actually opposed it.
21:40The progressive writers were thrown.
21:43And both sides, in India as well as Pakistan.
21:48Sahir was one of the most vociferous opponents.
21:53Then for a while, though being the communist-leaning, he chose to go to Pakistan.
21:59And then there's a famous anecdote that his companions would keep an eye on him
22:03because every day he said, I want to go back to Delhi, go back to Mumbai.
22:08And suddenly, when other companions had gone to Karachi, he quietly sneaked out of Lahore and came back to Bombay.
22:16And giving relief to his disgust, he wrote,
22:18He said, good riddance.
22:28And a few years later,
22:30Faiz, of course, who was Professor Faiz in Government College Lahore, also he quoted the similar sentiments.
22:36So the two-nation theory, carved out as a separate Islamic nation, was not approved even by the common Muslim walking in the streets.
22:51So it was mostly the ambition of two individuals.
22:54You couldn't have two prime ministers, so one chose one for himself here, one that's it.
23:00And the partition too, done in haste.
23:04Redcliffe was an attorney, was called by Lord Mountbatten, came down to London from Delhi.
23:10Sorry, from London to Delhi, stayed in just about 30 days.
23:14Was supposed to be a very intelligent attorney, got the map, got the demographic, never travelled out of Delhi.
23:19He said, it's not required.
23:20And I think rightly so, because he couldn't have travelled in Edinburgh.
23:22But he couldn't know the population.
23:24So he drew a line, depending on which community lived where, and created all this ruckus.
23:31And then, of course, he knew.
23:33And immediately after he handed over this document to Lord Mountbatten,
23:37he wrote a letter to his stepson saying that,
23:40I am now coming back and I need to leave before at least one million uprooted people come looking for my blood.
23:50And Jammu Kashmir, as I said, had a double partition.
23:53Of course, it was a victim of the partition which was drawn by Redcliffe, near Firozpur.
23:58That side went to that side.
24:00And this side, near Firozpur, Pathanpur.
24:03That was the partition which divided Punjab and Jammu Kashmir.
24:08And later, of course, when the war happened, Panditji went and announced a unilateral ceasefire.
24:14And half of the state went, which is known as now the peak, Park-occupied Jammu Kashmir.
24:21And that also, in the immediate aftermath, in the next two or three years,
24:24followed by a series of misguided attempts to appease Pakistan.
24:29First was, of course, declaring this unilateral ceasefire,
24:32just when India was on the verge of retrieving back all those areas which have been occupied by the Pakistan invaders.
24:40If they had not been made to accept the ceasefire, our forces would have retrieved that in just another 24 hours, 36 hours.
24:51The second, of course, is what is being these days discussed very widely in the media,
24:55again to appease Pakistan, the Indus Water Treaty of 1960.
24:59All the major rivers which had histories written around them, civilizations living around them, were handed over to Pakistan.
25:08The Indus River, the Jailam, the Chanhap.
25:12And what you were left were Sattaluj Bias and Ravi, the lesser rivers.
25:19There was so much of keenness on the part of the political dispensation of that time
25:25to keep Pakistan in good humor and by peace, which, of course, again didn't happen.
25:29And same was the case with Article 3 severity.
25:32I don't have to go into detail of that.
25:34But I think in the end I would just suffice saying that if indeed all this did not happen,
25:42we had not allowed the nation to be held to ransom by the ambition of a handful of you.
25:49And if the partition could have been avoided, we would have been saved of this perpetual India-Pakistan conflict,
25:59which continues and doesn't seem to show a sign of coming to an end.
26:05We would have also been saved of this so-called paaq-occupied Jammu-Kishmir.
26:10And finally, ladies and gentlemen, we might have also been saved of the Pahal Gaam of 22 April 2025.
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