DAY
TO CELEBRATE OR MOURN?
In the columns of this journal,
dismay was often expressed at selecting and celebrating 15 August as the Indian
Independence Day whereas the real celebrations should be to mark 26 January
which was, ever since 1930, the fighting day for freedom of India from the
British clutches. Also attention of the readers was drawn to the enormous
genocides and destruction of ‘stuff and soul’ perpetrated on and subsequent to
that day in the Indian subcontinent due to the criminal negligence of the
British imperialists coupled with the crafty and selfish greed of the Indian (including
Pakistani)
political leaders at the helm in those days. The villain of the piece was of
course Lord Mountbatten, actively assisted by Nehru and Patel whose hankering
for power was incredible. Having ‘deputed’ the ‘one-man army of Mahatma Gandhi’
to look after the law and order situation in the Eastern part, which
fortunately remained relatively quite calm, the cruel imperialists and their
Indian vassals did not even arrange for adequate military protection to the
people of the West who were divided into conflicting communities that were
already seething with rage and revenge mentality against each other. Interestingly,
while the then British Premier Clement Atlee had in his historic declaration to
‘Quit India’ gave time till June 1948, it was the last Viceroy and first
Governor-General of India who advanced the date very arbitrarily, instinctively
at a press conference, as he later confessed to the authors of ‘Freedom at
Midnight’, just because it was the D-Day of Japanese surrender in World War II
that followed the biggest genocidal acts in history by the American
imperialists dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki quite wantonly and
inhumanly. Incidentally, it was to be the first independence day for both India
and Pakistan as per the Indian Independence Act 1947 and in fact the first two
independence days were celebrated on 15 August only in Pakistan too. Hindu
astrologers denounced it as an inauspicious day and so it seems the time was
advanced to the midnight of 14 August, but all the same their ‘prognoses came
true’! Well, anyway, this editor treats 15 August tantamount to a Mourning Day,
which may at the best be marked as a Day for communal harmony. §§§
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