LUCKNOW, Sept 23: A visit planned on Monday by a group of Britons to honour their ancestors who crushed an anti-colonial uprising in India in 1857 has sparked nationalist calls for protests.
The tourists intend to follow a trail across several sites associated with the revolt that shook the empire 150 years ago.
But India’s main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party vowed at the weekend to stop them.
The BJP said it would not let the visitors into Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, the state where the “mutiny” against British rule erupted.
“At no cost will our party allow the group into the city. They are after all not normal tourists but family members of the killers of our freedom-fighters,” said Lalji Tandon, a senior BJP leader in the state.
“It is shameful how the government granted them permission to enter (India) and that too in a year when our country is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the uprising,” Tandon said.
As Tandon urged Indians to join the protests, a senior Uttar Pradesh official on Sunday ruled out an outright a ban on the British group but said any celebrations or speeches planned by them would not be allowed.
“There is no problem if someone wants to pay homage to his fore fathers in a peaceful manner ... but we shall not allow any celebration,” the state’s principal secretary J N Chamber told the Press Trust of India news agency.
BJP activists have already defiled the graves of four British soldiers in Ghaziabad, who died in the fighting, The Hindu newspaper reported on Sunday.
Among the British visitors is historian Rosie Llewellyn Jones, who has written a book on the revolt that ended the East India Company’s sway in India, making way for direct rule by the London government.
India finally gained independence in 1947.
“To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the uprising of 1857-58 I am leading a group of British tourists around northern India,” Jones wrote in a letter to the state government and of which AFP has a copy.
The group was due to arrive in Lucknow on Monday, a day ahead of the 150th anniversary of the battle for Lucknow.
Sir Mark Havelock, the great-great-grandson of General Henry Havelock, who led the recapture of Lucknow from rebellious Indian sepoys, is among the visitors. They intend to present two portraits of General Havelock and a plan of the route soldiers took to recapture the city to a museum.
After four months of fighting, British troops stormed Delhi and exiled the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, to Rangoon (now the Myanmar city of Yangon) where he died in captivity five years later.—AFP
