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Faleiro says Sangh Parivar is
trying to rewrite history

The Union Home Ministry has been accused of violating rules relating to pension for freedom fighters, in an attempt to rewrite history and project the Sangh Parivar as the organisation that participated in India's freedom struggle.

A recent example cited to justify the accusation is the felicitation of 82 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh workers in Pune by Union Home Minister L K Advani for their 'heroic participation' in the liberation of Dadra and Nagar-Haveli in 1954.

"There was no struggle of any kind during the liberation of Dadra and Nagar-Haveli. Still they felicitated only RSS workers, going against real history and declared a pension scheme for them," alleged Eduardo Faleiro, former Union minister and Goa's Rajya Sabha member.

Dadra and Nagar-Haveli, two small Portuguese-controlled enclaves near Daman, were near the then Bombay state. While the Portuguese controlled Daman from Goa with access via the Arabian sea, they had to pass through Bombay to these two colonies.

Taking advantage of the geographical situation, then Bombay chief minister Morarji Desai responded positively to the request made by Goa's freedom fighters and sent Indian Reserve Police to help liberate Dadra and Nagar-Haveli, after consulting the Centre.

"The police and other Portuguese officials... must have mistaken our Reserve Police for a military force. For, soon after spotting them, they ran away to an adjacent forest and hid. This enabled the satyagrahis to take possession of these enclaves without difficulty," stated Desai in his book The Story of My Life.

According to Faleiro, granting pension to any freedom fighter for Dadra and Nagar-Haveli does not arise as the Swatantrata Sainik Samman Pension Scheme was formulated to acknowledge exceptional sacrifices like imprisonment for minimum six months, grievous physical injury and loss of property or employment.

Madhav Pandit, the Goa-based general secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Swatantrata Sangram Sainik Sangh, has also expressed surprise over the manner in which the Pune function on December 10, 2000 projected a picture that the struggle was made successful only by RSS workers.

He had attended the function.

"Is it not injustice made to around 10,000 freedom fighters from Kashmir to Kanyakumari who participated in the satyagraha in Goa in 1953-54 and even faced Portuguese bullets but are still awaiting pension when only RSS people are granted it?" he asks.

Even in Dadra and Nagar-Haveli, he says, the Azad Gomantak Dal and United Front of Goans were active organisations.

Prabhakar Vaidya, who had actually in the liberation struggle, recalls that an armed battle had taken place in Silvasa on August 10, 1954 but the RSS participation in it was less than half of 82 persons. It was led by the Azad Gomantak Dal, he adds.

Stating that 4,53,048 pension cases were pending before the Centre, as per home ministry figures, Faleiro feels that Advani's action to please his political constituency may open the floodgates. He plans to raise the issue in the forthcoming parliamentary session.

Faleiro is equally worried about the 'sinister designs' of the Sangh Parivar to rewrite the history of India to suite their convenience. "The RSS was opposed to Mahatma Gandhi's Indian nationalism and did not even participate in the Quit India movement," he recalls.

He also alleges that the Sangh Parivar is trying to distort the history of India, including the Aryan invasion by projecting Aryans are original settlers and all minorities as outsiders.

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