This Land is My Land

On landing at Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport at Guwahati, I was welcomed by a smiling young man called Khan. He would be driving my colleague and me as we went evaluating some primary schools in the interiors of Bongaigaon District as part of the official CSR program. I often enjoy talking to the locals and drivers wherever I travel and soon I discovered that Khan Bhai’s real name was Ghulam Mustafa Khan Mohammad and his forefathers were from Bihar but they had settled down in Assam. My inevitable next question was whether he had faced any issue with NRC or National Register of Citizens where the government wanted to identify the genuine citizens from the illegal immigrants. He smiled and said when he got his papers like driving license and Aadhaar, he had given his shortened name of Khan Mohammad even though his school records showed his full regal name of Ghulam Mustafa Khan Mohammad Khan. Khan Bhai said that the NRC official checking the documents was a good man and accepted his school certificate and cleared his as well as the papers of his other family members. Today all their names figure in the list of citizens. Just then our car reached Kamrup district and Khan Bhai said one of the local sons from this district wasn’t as lucky. 
I knew who he was talking about….Mohammad Sanaullah.

Mohammad Sanaullah had just been released on bail after spending many days in prison including the auspicious day of Eid. Sanaullah had joined the Indian Army in 1987 and served for thirty long years. He was posted twice in J&K and once in Imphal. He was a Kargil War hero and a decorated man. He retired in 2017 as Honorary Lieutenant in the Indian Army and was conferred a medal by the President of India. Sanaullah produced a large number of documents to prove his true identity including voters' list, school leaving certificate and village certificate before the NRC officials but the tribunal was not in a mood to listen and categorized him as an illegal immigrant and was put behind bars. After sometime, his appeal was heard and investigations revealed that the earlier investigating officer in 2008 had made a mistake by mixing the fauji Sanaullah with that of a labourer with the same name who had ‘come into India through a secret route for a better living’.  

Sanaullah suffered ignominy like no one should have, his name tarnished beyond words which no ordinary citizen should have faced leave alone a man who has served the country for thirty years. Despite all this, the man so far has not said one bad word about the establishment nor has he given up his medals of honour received for bravery and service to the nation. He still says with pride, “ I am an Indian and will always remain one.”

Rewinding the Time Machine

Exactly a century ago on 13th April 1919, in the holy city of Amritsar, the British forces led by General Dyer opened fire recklessly on a peaceful crowd gathering at Jalianwala Bagh  after blocking the only exit route from the garden. Hundreds of men, women and children died from the bullet wounds, many more jumped into a well and died, not many survived the barbarism the like of which can only be compared to the holocaust two decades later. The inglorious general returned home to a hero’s welcome. One Indian stood up and wrote a letter giving up his decoration of Knighthood bestowed on him by His Majesty King George-V of England in 1915. The transcript of the letter dated 31^st May 1919 given to Lord Chemsford, the Viceroy of India, is quoted below:

Your Excellency,

The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India. The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments, barring some conspicuous exceptions, recent and remote. Considering that such treatment has been meted out to a population, disarmed and resourceless, by a power which has the most terribly efficient organisation for destruction of human lives, we must strongly assert that it can claim no political expediency, far less moral justification. The accounts of the insults and sufferings by our brothers in Punjab have trickled through the gagged silence, reaching every corner of India, and the universal agony of indignation roused in the hearts of our people has been ignored by our rulers—possibly congratulating themselves for what they imagine as salutary lessons. This callousness has been praised by most of the Anglo-Indian papers, which have in some cases gone to the brutal length of making fun of our sufferings, without receiving the least check from the same authority—relentlessly careful in smothering every cry of pain and expression of judgement from the organs representing the sufferers. Knowing that our appeals have been in vain and that the passion of vengeance is blinding the nobler vision of statesmanship in our Government, which could so easily afford to be magnanimous as befitting its physical strength and moral tradition, the very least that I can do for my country is to take all consequences upon myself in giving voice to the protest of the millions of my countrymen, surprised into a dumb anguish of terror. The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of those of my countrymen, who, for their so-called insignificance, are liable to suffer degradation not fit for human beings.

These are the reasons which have painfully compelled me to ask Your Excellency, with due reference and regret, to relieve me of my title of Knighthood, which I had the honour to accept from His Majesty the King at the hands of your predecessor, for whose nobleness of heart I still entertain great admiration.

Yours faithfully,

Rabindranath Tagore

31 May 1919

Tracing Roots

Masterda

Bengal was at the forefront of the Indian independence movement. There was a vast majority who followed Gandhiji’s path of non-violence and non-cooperation, there was also another stream of violent and revolutionary freedom fighters. One such firebrand leader was Surya Sen or popularly called Masterda by his students in the Sripur Village of Chittagong, now in Bangladesh. Masterda and his band of young men planned and executed the most daring raid on Chittagong Armoury and fled with the arms of the British Army in April 1930. After a bitter battle most of these revolutionaries died fighting the colonial forces and some escaped. While the elders were part of the armed revolution, there were many youngsters in their teens who had been initiated into the revolutionary fold by the teachings of Masterda. Among them was a young lad Gopal Krishna who had lost his father when he was no more than five and lived with his mother in Sripur Village. These youngsters were used by the revolutionaries for many an errand including sending small messages from one home to another, carrying stolen weapons hidden in jute wrappings from one place to another. In one such incident, the police caught Gopal and his accomplice carrying two guns and both were arrested. Being a juvenile, he was deported to far-off Burdwan Prison for six months in another part of undivided Bengal.

After release, Gopal returned home. His maternal uncles were well educated and some of them had already moved to Calcutta. They asked him to come over and start life afresh. In  Calcutta with due help from his well-connected uncles, he got himself a new identity and became Gopal Chandra. The uncles knew that Gopal’s past would haunt him in future when he would go out looking for work. The police records would be checked and surely he would not get any job whether in British India or even later in Independent India which was still a distant dream. Years passed and Gopal Chandra completed his college education and moved northwards and got himself a job in Delhi and settled down there. Later, he got married and had three children.

The past was almost forgotten and he would never speak about himself to his children. However, in the mid-1970s, when the Government of India decided to honour freedom fighters, Gopal never stepped forward to claim the award and the pension. He was still in touch with some of his mates from Chittagong, some of whom were now in Calcutta and had claimed both the tamrapatra and the pension. They tried hard to push him to accept the same but he wouldn’t budge. Some years later, the government once again asked the living freedom fighters to claim their pension, his wife nagged him and pushed him to go to the government office where after much scrutiny of all his papers and an affidavit signed by two of his freedom fighter friends from Chittagong before the court, that Gopal Chandra alias Gopal Krishna finally got his freedom fighter’s pension. For the family, more than the pension,  the invitations to Rashtrapati Bhavan for high tea with the President on the eve of Independence Day every year, felicitations at Chattogram Parishad and elsewhere, were a matter of pride. Though he himself would hardly ever go to any of these functions and would peacefully spend the days reading about the same in the newspapers and watching the events on the television set. That was my father, Gopal Chandra Sen.

You don’t need to thump your chest always to prove your love for the country. It is not always that war, freedom struggle and ‘award wapasi’ which prove your nationalism. You can do it in your own way quietly and peacefully as well. Love for the nation must be instilled in all but it need not be forced down the gullet. We can all do our bit for the nation by saving that drop of water which gets wasted every day from a leaking tap, switching off the electricity that goes waste when we leave the room, ensuring we don’t leave behind any muck after a picnic in a park or even by stopping at red lights.

Never said it when you were alive but am saying it now, I am so proud of you Baba.

Happy Father’s Day.

SS