SAHMAT Statement Against the Attack on Bipan Chandra's Book

SAHMAT 
Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust 
29, Feroze Shah Road,New Delhi-110001 
Telephone- 23381276/ 23070787 
e-mail-sahmat8@yahoo.com 
Date 30.4.2016 
In recent days it seems to have become a habit of some latter-day “nationalists” to raise divisive or non-substantial issues to parade their patriotism. The most recent example of this is the attack on a major history of our National Movement authored by the distinguished historian Professor Bipan Chandra and his colleagues, titled India’s Struggle for Independence, published 28 years ago in 1988. The objection is that Shaheed Bhagat Singh and his comrades have been described there as “revolutionary terrorists”. The critics, however, forget that this was really a term the martyrs had practically used for themselves. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, to which Bhagat Singh and his colleagues belonged, said in its Manifesto (1929): “We have been taken to task for our terrorist policy. No doubt, the revolutionaries think and rightly that it is only by resorting to terrorism that they can find a most effective means of retaliation… Terrorism has its international aspect also. England’s enemies, which are many, are drawn towards us by effective demonstration of our strength. That in itself is a great advantage”. To Gandhiji’s critical article ‘Cult of the Bomb’, the Association answered through a statement titled “Philosophy of the Bomb”. Here it was asserted that it was owing to British repression that “terrorism [has] been born in this country. It is a phase, a necessary and inevitable phase of the revolution. Terrorism is not the complete revolution, and the revolution is not complete without terrorism”. 

It is true that in his later phase Bhagat Singh stated: “Apparently, I have acted like a terrorist; But I am not a terrorist”. Clearly, two definitions of the word ‘terror’ were already at work, and Bhagat Singh was being influenced by his reading of Lenin’s teachings against individual terror. But the main point is that the entire movement to which Shaheed Bhagat Singh belonged, terror had till then seemed a revolutionary path that they were wholly committed to. 

Their conception of “terror” as a method of revolutionary action actually derived from a tradition that went back to the Russian revolutionaries’ struggle against Czarist tyranny. Now, however, in the last two or three decades, terror has come to mean almost all over the world the killing of innocent men, women and children. And it has thus assumed a heavily pejorative sense, not necessarily borne by it in the 1920s and 1930s. 

Clearly, today many of us would not like to call our national heroes Bhagat Singh or Surya Sen or Chandrasekhar Azad, “terrorists”. But if we claim to be nationalists we should at least know more about our National Movement and not forget that there was a time when this tag was borne with pride by people who actually died for the cause of this country. And so let us not go about demanding changes in books, or banning them altogether and so display our own ignorance to the world. The withdrawal of the translation of the book by the Delhi University and the hounding of the authors on TV shows and at law courts that has now begun is particularly odious and only too characteristic of such campaigns by the RSS and its various fronts. 

Irfan Habib 
Romila Thapar 
Amar Farooqui 
Arjun Dev 
B.P.Sahu 
Biswamoy Pati 
D N Jha 
Iqtidar Alam Khan 
K M Shrimali 
Lata Singh 
Prabhat Shukla 
R C Thakran 
Shireen Moosvi 
Suvira Jaiswal 
Vishwamohan Jha 
Gopinath 
R P Bahuguna 
K L Tuteja 
Rajesh Singh 
Kesavan Veluthat 
A K Sinha 
Santosh Rai 
Shalin Jain 
H C Satyarthi 
V Ramakrishna 
Ramakrishna Chatterjee 
Arun Bandopadhyaya 
S Z Jafri 
Vivan Sundaram 
Prabhat Patnaik 
Mushirul Hasan 
Mihir bhattacharya 
Sashi Kumar 
Ram Rahman 
Sukumar Murlidharan 
Anil Bhatti 
Anuradha Kapur 
Archana Prasad 
Badri Raina 
C P Chandrasekhar 
Geeta Kapur 
Indira Chandrasekhar 
Jayati Ghosh 
M K Raina 
Madangopal Singh 
Madhu Prasad 
Malini Bhattacharya 
Moloyshree Hashmi 
N K Sharma 
Nilima Sheikh 
Nina Rao 
Parthiv Shah 
Praveen Jha 
Rahul Verma 
S Kalidas 
Saeed MIrza 
Saif Mahmood 
Shakti Kak 
Sohail Hashmi 
Javed 
Ari Sitas 
Thierry Costanzo 
Veer Munshi 
Vikas Rawal 
Indira Arjun Dev 
S Irfan Habib 
Shireen Gandhy 
Rajat Datta 
Mukul Kesavan 
Zoya Hasan 
Tadd Fernee 
Shantha Sinha 
C P Bhambri 
Rahul Mukherji 
Krishna Ananth 
Chandi Prasad Nanda 
Shri Krishna 
Pritish Acharya 
Neerja Singh 
Najaf Haidar 
Bhupendra Yadav 
Richa Malhotra 
Alok Bajpai
Richa Raj 
Deepa Sinha 
Amit Mishra 
Rashmi 
Rizwan Qaiser 
Bodh Prakash 
Himanshu 
Rakesh Batabyal 
R Mahalakshmi 
Saurabh Bajpai 
Ranjana Das 
J V Naik 
Ajay Patnaik 
Subodh Malakar 
Girish Mishra 
Archana Hande 
Neeladri Bhattacharya 
Ania Loomba P. Bilimale 
Sujoy Ghosh G. Arunima 
Ayesha Kidwai 
Syed Ali 
Nadeem Rezavi 
Jawaid Akhtar 
Ishrat Alam 
Ruquiya K Husain 
Ramesh Rawat

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