Freedom Didn't Come at Midnight
1. A myth accepted as truth by the country's seculars is freedom came easy. According to this myth, the British after ruling India for 190 years, became so tired of the responsibilities of running an empire that they wound up their empire and left.
1. A myth accepted as truth by the country's seculars is freedom came easy. According to this myth, the British after ruling India for 190 years, became so tired of the responsibilities of running an empire that they wound up their empire and left.
2. Though it was invented by the British to cover their hasty retreat from India, low IQ seculars believe M.K. Gandhi used the weapon of non-violence and shamed the British colonialists into leaving India, and since then both countries have been best friends.
3. Freedom didn't come overnight. It was obtained at a great cost – the sacrifice of millions of Indian lives. Contrary to the belief the British period was a time of great stability, India was in fact roiled by uprisings and rebellions everywhere, throughout colonial rule.
4. The First War of Independence of 1857 was the biggest uprising against the British. The sweep of the war covered nearly the entire country and for months India was turned into one massive battlefield. Britain came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.
5. Ten million Indians were killed in reprisal killings. The Guardian: "It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages."
6. After the British re-conquered India, The Guardian itself wrote about the savage retribution that followed: "We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten."
7. Here's what Charles Dickens, the darling of Indian seculars, remarked: "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India ... I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race."
8. The Vellore Mutiny of 1806 predates even the war of 1857 by half a century. The revolt, which took place in the south Indian town of Vellore, was rather brief, lasting only one full day but brutal...
9. ...as mutineers broke into the Vellore fort and killed or injured 200 British troops, before they were subdued by reinforcements from nearby Arcot.
10. Again, in 1824, Rani Chennamma, the queen of the kingdom of Kittur in Karnataka, led an armed rebellion against the British. The queen, born 56 years before 1857 leader Rani Laxmi Bai, was the first woman to fight against the British.
11. From 1858 to the beginning of 1900s the British enjoyed a semblance of stability. This can well be described as the time when they undertook the task of the destruction of thriving Indian industries, including spinning, weaving and metallurgy, as well as agriculture and trade
12. Angered by the havoc being wreaked by the British, the revolutionary forces now gathered for a new phase of struggle. They derived inspiration from the cult of nationalism preached by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and others during...
13.....the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Chatterjee's soul-stirring cry of Vande Mataram or Hail to the Mother, which he penned in 1882, became the hymn of nationalism.
14. The spark for a full-fledged struggle came in 1905 with the launch of Swadeshi – the refusal to buy foreign goods and the promotion of indigenous industry. This massive pan-Indian movement aroused the spirit of nationalism.
15. It was Veer Savarkar who first lit the bonfire of foreign clothes in Pune on 7 October 1905. (MK Gandhi, who much later became the leader of the freedom struggle, criticised that action from far away South Africa although he himself did precisely that 16 years later.)
16. While the educated classes were fighting the British through Swadeshi, violent outbreaks were happening all over India. In Jharkhand, Birsa Munda led a long struggle directed against the British.
17. In 1914 Jatra Oraon started what is called the Tana Movement, which drew the participation of over 25,000 tribes people. In 1920, the Tana Movement stopped the payment of land taxes to the colonial government.
18. The fire of revolution spread even to the Indian rulers – the Raja of Darbhanga at great risk fully supported the resisting farmers.
19. In the tribal tracts of Andhra Pradesh a revolt broke out in August 1922. Led by Alluri Ramachandra Raju, the tribes people of the Andhra hills succeeded in drawing the British into a full-scale guerrilla war.
20. The Indian National Army of Subhas Bose showed the British there was no safety for them in India. The British were feeling the heat in the heart of Delhi. On 8 April, 1929, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt exploded bombs inside the Central Legislative Assembly.
21. The revolutionary Uddham Singh went to the UK and assassinated Michael O' Dwyer, the British Lt Governor of Punjab, for the murder of over 2,000 unarmed men, women and children in Jallianwallah Bagh. 92% of the dead were Hindus as Akalis ordered Sikhs to boycott the gathering
22. While General Reginald Dyer, who personally supervised the massacre of the peaceful gathering, had boasted in court he would do it again, O' Dwyer had called his action "the right thing".
23. Meanwhile, the British, addicted to the easy loot from India, even as millions of Indians were dying in manmade famines, were not prepared to leave. As Neville Chamberlain said: "The astonishing gold mine that we have discovered in India's hordes has put us in clover."
24. Winston Churchill, who engineered the Bengal Famine that killed 3-7 million Indians, was adamant. "I have not become prime minister to preside over the demise of her majesty's empire," he said.
25. But after the World War II, the momentum of the freedom movement led to growing militant actions that weakened British authority in an irreparable way. M.G. Agrawal in his 4-volume Freedom Fighters of India: "In February 1946 the Indian Navy declared an unprecedented strike.
26. "...It quickly drew support from the Indian crews of all the 20 vessels anchored in Bombay port; 20,000 naval ratings revolted." The British panicked because the single biggest factor that facilitated colonialism was the military.
27. Clement Atlee, the British PM, who decided to finally quit India, told chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of the Calcutta High Court the principal reasons why Britain decided to quit India was the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian Army and Navy personnel.
28. According to Fenner Brockway, political secretary of the Independent Labour Party of England, the two major causes of Britain's hasty exit from India were: "One, the Indian people were determined to gain independence. Two, was the revolt by the Indian Navy."
29. Indian soldiers, whose performance on the battlefields of Europe had won them grudging praise from the British and Germans, had seen firsthand the collapse of the British Army in the face of the German challenge, which exploded the myth of the invincibility of British arms.
30. US Army generals like Bradley and Eisenhower had also expressed contempt for the British Army's fighting skills.
31. Britain was also in steep decline. Cities like London and Coventry had been flattened by the German Luftwaffe and V-2 rockets. The Russians and Americans were the new superpowers, and both wanted an end to colonialism.
32. The British had no stomach for a fight with Indians and were looking for a face-saving exit from India. The handpicked Gandhi and Nehru to ensure the retreating British forces and civilian administrators wouldn't be massacred by Indian revolutionaries.
33. Freedom came through the indefatigable spirit of our revolutionaries who fought the British, French and Portuguese for centuries rather. It didn't happen because of the mere transfer of power at midnight. And true independence arrived on May 26, 2014 with Narendra Modi.
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