150th Anniversary of India's First War Against British Colonialismby Ramtanu Maitra
May 10 (EIRNS)--On May 11, India will celebrate the 150th anniversary of India's first war of independence against the British colonialists, fought by the Indian soldiers serving the British East India Company. On May 11, thousands of Indians will retrace the steps that those soldiers took when they laid a siege on Delhi, the capital of the British Raj, swarming in from army cantonments located all over India's northern plains. Prime Minister Manmmohan Singh addressed the Parliament on May 10 reminding the lawmakers of those who fought and died, but are not forgotten. A concert was also held at the Parliament enclave in honor of those fallen soldiers.
The British historians, and their Indian counterparts, have long tried to bury the 1857 war as a Sepoy (lowest-ranking soldiers) Mutiny against the use of a particular type of cartridge which was laced with pork lard. The reason this canard was propagated was because the soldiers--Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others -- had come out together and went to the Red Fort in Delhi, where the last Moghul ruler, the poet Bahadur Shah Zafar, with almost no power, was residing. They brought him out, put him astride a horse and proclaimed him as the ruler, and liberator of the British rule.
The defeat of the Indian soldiers in 1857, led to the shifting of official power from the East Indian Company to the British crown. In other words, the East India Company's indirect rule over India on behalf of the British crown ended in 1857.
The war also made the British realize that the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious adherents in India still possessed the zeal to stand up together against the Colonial rule and rally behind a decrepit Moghul ruler. At that point in time, London began formulating a policy to separate Hindus and Muslims. The policy bore the poison fruit, reaching maturity in the 1940s when Hindus and Muslims killed each other, and eventually in 1947, the nation was divided into India and Pakistan.
