Prominent intellectuals today called upon Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal Government to correct flaws on history text books, which shockingly depicts revolutionary freedom fighters as "terrorists".
Former Vice-Chairman, West Bengal State Council for Higher Education, Pabitro Sarkar, told ANI, "I don't know, if this reflects the government's attitude towards dead people. The fault may lie with the authors themselves. The authors with a kind of wrong direction and attitude. Ultimately the government should be held responsible because they chose the wrong kind of authors for these text books, including the language."
"This is very wrong to kind of attribute negative things on these people. They were by no means terrorists to us, they might have been regarded as terrorists to British people, but to us they are revolutionaries. The government should seriously reconsider who they entrust with writing these text books. The government must have serious rethinking on these policies," he added.
Historian, S. Irfan Habib also cautioned the West Bengal government suggesting it to correct the anomaly.
"These are all issues which have been raised couple of times earlier also. West Bengal government should not have committed the same blunder. Times have changed. We know that these terms were used by the British against our nationalists. The British government tried to weaken them using these terms, which is alright for those times. Now we should look for alternative expressions, do not categorise them. Call them Nationalist Revolutionaries instead of calling them terrorists, there is no harm, we can do it, but somehow we are so insensitive that we don't realise what we are writing," Habib told ANI.
When asked if this was a big mistake committed by the government of West Bengal, Habib said, "It can be an oversight, or it can be a mistake, I don't know, but whatever it is, the government should come forward to correct the mistake and find someway to categorise them."
A hue and cry has been generated, reportedly over a history chapter of class 8 titled "revolutionary terrorism" in West Bengal describing the activities of freedom fighters like Shahid Khudiram Bose, Jatindranath Mukherjee and Prafulla Chaki as "extremism and terrorism".
