NEW DELHI: India will celebrate on Friday the 150-year anniversary of its “First War of Independence” against British colonial rule with a rich display of pomp -- and a strong message of Hindu-Muslim unity.
The government is trying to use the bloody revolt against the world's then mightiest empire as a springboard to promote religious harmony in India, where communal tensions flare regularly, often with deadly results.
“The First War of Independence” showed that Indians are “all one people despite their religious diversity,” said Youth Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, who flagged off on Monday a march of thousands of young Indians to mark the event.
The 10,000 marchers, belting out patriotic songs, set off in sweltering summer heat on a five-day, 80-kilometer trek from Meerut, where the insurrection began, to the Indian capital New Delhi.
The marchers will wind through several towns before arriving at Delhi's Red Fort on Friday -- 150 years after the rebellious foot soldiers stormed the walled city and attacked British officers.
The uprising, the largest the British Empire had ever faced, made “Indians feel for the first time they belonged to one nation,” Aiyar said.
Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will deliver a speech underlining religious and national unity from the high ramparts of the sandstone Red Fort.
The past couple of decades have seen a rise in religious tensions with the ascent to political centre-stage of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
It lost office nationally in 2004 and now is the largest opposition party in the country of 1.1 billion people of which about 13 per cent are Muslim.
The government is planning year-long celebrations to mark the revolt, long known as the Indian Mutiny.
But many Indian historians now say the term mutiny belittles what they see as India's first war of independence.
The insurrection, in which Indian soldiers rose up against the British East India Company, was spurred by rumours that the British were introducing bullets greased with cow and pig fat -- considered unclean by Hindus and Muslims respectively.
“The freedom fighters who revolted against the British in 1857 were mostly Hindus in Meerut,” said Aiyar.
They went straight to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the frail 82-year-old Muslim emperor, and proclaimed him ruler, Aiyar said, who declared it showed the soldiers' “secular bonding.” The British crushed the revolt after a bloody four months, captured Delhi and exiled Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, to Rangoon, now the Myanmar city of Yangon, where he died in captivity five years later.
The revolt in the “jewel” in Britain's imperial crown transformed the great Mughal capital into a battleground with “unimaginable casualties on both sides,” says British historian William Dalrymple, who wrote about the revolt in his book “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty.” Tens of thousands were slaughtered.
But it ended the British East India Company's rule in India, making way for the British Raj -- direct rule by the British government.
The uprising also lit a fuse of nationalism that ultimately led to India's independence in 1947.
India's communist parties, which prop up the government in parliament, have also been at the forefront to make the celebrations not just a nationalist celebration but a billboard for Hindu-Muslim harmony.
“There is a message for present day India from the nationalist revolt and that is that in 1857 Hindus and Muslims fought together,” said D. Raja, Communist Party of India national secretary.
“We have to fight the communal forces that divide us and strive for a secular, democratic India.”—AFP
