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