History Archive

While India celebrates its Navy Day today, let’s do a remembrance of The Royal Indian Navy (RIN) Mutiny of 1946 which left colonial masters Britain with no choice but to leave India.

On September 11, 1942, our National Anthem’ Jana Gana Mana’ was performed for the first time as National Anthem. It was played at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg.

Let us start with an anecdote. In 2019, a video went viral, which showed a man wearing a T-shirt with the face of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. The person in question was one Saikat Chakrabarti, then chief of staff for democratic socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

799 years ago, in the year 1221, the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan¹ stood victorious at the western bank of the Indus river with 50,000 soldiers, having just defeated Jalal-ad-Din², the Shah of Khwarazm. Jalal-ad-Din’s army was completely destroyed in this battle³, which took place near the town of Kalabagh in Punjab.

A lot of noise is being made over criticism of MK Gandhi after Kalicharan Maharaj’s recent speech at the Raipur Dharma Sansad. The Chhattisgarh government headed by Congress’ Bhupesh Baghel has now arrested Kalicharan and many people are asking an important question. Is MK Gandhi beyond criticism? Why are some political leaders so touchy and indignant about Gandhi being criticized?

MK Gandhi has been deified in Bharat to such an extent that any attempt to critically analyze his follies, for which the Hindu society continues to pay a price to date, is seen as an insult to the ‘father of the nation’. While Kalicharan Maharaj has stated that he stands by his comments even as he faces multiple cases in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh where the Shiv Sena-led MVA and Congress are in power respectively, it is time to take a look at the history of the ‘mahatma’ tag.

While Mahatma Gandhi is known worldwide for his non-violence movement for independence of India, his simple lifestyle, and other such aspects that make him a ‘Mahatma’, there are several other aspects in his that raise curiosity in the minds of people. Apart from the extreme pacifism that Gandhi practiced which was questioned by many of his contemporaries, the one weird aspect, widely known but little discussed in public discourse, is his experiments with his celibacy.

At a time when historical revisionists want to portray Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a ‘tolerant, secular individual’ who envisioned a Pakistan-for-all, the signs of religious bigotry were visible from the very start. One of the immediate aftermaths of the Partition of India was the sidelining of non-Muslims who contributed to the Pakistani cause. They were misled by Jinnah into believing that a society, based on the principles of ‘Islamic equality’, was waiting for them.

Mahatma Gandhi’s unqualified capitulationism has apparently triumphed in post-independence Bharat over Bhagwan Krishna’s unyielding terse realism in the Bhagavad Gita. Not only that Bharat has zealously sacrificed the narrative of its own bloody travails, in which its courageous men and women laid down their lives.