Students Pledge/News/Dt 01.09.2021- Vehemently condemning the ‘Evil Design’ of the BJP-led central government to turn historic Jallianwalla Bagh into a theme park, Sourav Ghosh, the General Secretary of AIDSO in a press statement has said “this ‘Disneyfication’ will erase even the last traces of the history of savage assault by British imperialists on the innocent people of India.
Jallianwalla Bagh is not a garden for enjoyment, rather it tells the history of mass agitation against the anti-people laws and the palpable violence by the British government to gag the voice of protest. That massacre of 1919 made a deep impact on Shaheed Bhagat Singh, Shaheed Udham Singh and the likes who sacrificed everything for the sake of a genuinely free and independent country. Stories about the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre are still reverberating in the air. But in the name of renovation, this historic monument is practically on the verge of destruction. School children first learn about the ‘Jallianwalla Bagh massacre’ and they are told about the narrow single entrance, by blocking which Reginald Dyer cut off escape for the crowd assembled inside, and mowed down hundreds. It has been transformed into a tunnel partially closed to the sky, complete with a new floor, and with the walls on either side crowded with a shiny mural of dozens of human figures. Similarly, ‘Shahidi Kua’ (Martyrs’ Well), where people cornered by the British soldiers had jumped in to save themselves, has now been enclosed with a variegated glass shield. The points of entry and exit to the monument have also been changed, and a lotus pond has been built around the main structure. It is also heard that the visible bullet marks have been covered with glazed ceramic tiles.
It’s noteworthy that the RSS and the predecessors & mentors of the BJP not only opposed the freedom struggle of India but also helped the British imperialists to suppress it. Now, the BJP is implementing various anti-people policies viz. agricultural laws, labour codes, National Education Policy 2020, National Monetisation Pipeline and crushing the protest movements in the interest of the monopolists. Hence, they are corporatising the monument on the one hand and erasing the history on the other. In this hour of crisis, AIDSO urges upon the people in general and students in particular to rise in protest against such disgraceful act of defiling history and destroying historical monuments under the garb of renovation.”
