ON 1 July 1997, Hong Kong returned to China. The peaceful, bloodless' end of British colonialism in Asia made for a spectacular television show. Was the dawn of Indian independence fifty years ago an equally amicable affair? A non-violent, bloodless wonder, as the describe it in history books?

Indeed, official propagandists take great pains to market the myth that Indian independence is the greatest victory that has been achieved anywhere in the world through the path of non-violence. But the fact is that no violent revolution in the world has perhaps paid the kind of price that we have had to pay for our fragmented freedom. The colossal loss of lives in communal riots leading up to India's eventual Partition remains the most telling testimony to the utter hypocrisy of the non-violence myth. This cruel and cowardly vivisection of the erstwhile undivided country left tens of thousands of men, women and children dead and many more uprooted from their hearth and home and history. The great martyrs of our freedom struggle had certainty not shed their blood for such a disgraceful end.

But there is more to the mythology of India's struggle for independence than this dichotomy between violence and non-violence. Official history virtually reduces this massive churning in the world's biggest colony to an account of successive sessions of the Indian National Congress and then how Gandhi with his magic wand woke up the helpless Indian people from their slumber and ignorance. We are told how through three major countrywide campaigns – Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India — spaced over three decades the “Father of the Nation” groomed his children for gradually taking over power from the British masters.

If the ordinary people, workers and peasants, figure in this story of how India won her freedom, they do so only as numbers. Faceless, nameless numbers. As the tens of thousands routinely responding to the calls given by Gandhi and his Congress. At times maybe even overstepping the limits set for them, forcing Gandhi to pull them up. But they are never shown in action as men and women fighting their own battle with their own vision, dynamism and initiative and trying to become arbiters of their own collective destiny.

The working people are thus not only denied their due in the present. They are also denied their role in the past. They are sought to be delinked from their own past and turned into permanent refugees relegated to the margins of history. It is therefore extremely important to break through the shackles of official history and reclaim our glorious legacy. The legacy that lights up our existence today and gives us justified sense of pride in our own identity'.