Sardar Patel Week is set to be observed from his birth anniversary on 31 October. In this context, The Quint is republishing this story about appropriation of leaders such as Patel.
So Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen the anniversary of the 1942 Quit India movement to launch a campaign called “70 Saal Azadi: Zara Yaad Karo Qurbani”. It’s actually 74 years since that historic event, not 70, but this column isn’t a quibble about mathematics. Rather, it seeks to raise some key questions about history.
What’s going on here? The BJP which, led by the PM, has sought to drape itself in the mantle of nationalism, is now seeking to appropriate the freedom struggle for its cause. Ironically, the Quit India movement is an occasion the BJP could well have chosen to criticise rather than celebrate, since it resulted in the jailing by the British of all the leaders and thousands of workers of the nationalist movement, a resultant free hand to the Muslim League to build up a support base it had lacked in the elections of 1937, and thus, strengthened the hands of those who wanted Partition.
But the Modi government has no intention of repudiating Quit India as a Congress folly. It wants to make heroes of freedom fighters, by implication placing them on its own side in a contemporary retelling of history pegged to the 70th anniversary of our independence.