Venkaiah Naidu wants more Rani Jhansi, less Clive

Vellore: College students across the country, including those studying engineering, medical, law, arts and science, may soon have lessons on Indian freedom fighters Veerapandiya Kattabomman and Jhansi Rani as part of their course. “In the name of history, we have been learning only about the British and what the British wrote about us. I learnt about Robert Clive being a great man in my college days, but, in reality, he was a big ‘looter’. He looted India. ‘Indiani-sation’ of history is the need of the hour and we have to do it now,” Union minister for urban development and parliamentary affairs M. Venkaiah Naidu said in his convocation address at VIT University here on Saturday.

Mr Naidu was confident that he could convince Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Cabinet colleagues to make Indian history compulsory for all college students irrespective of their stream of study. “You (students) should know about the country and those who fought for its freedom and worked for its development, such as Veerapandiya Kattabo-mman, Kamaraj Nadar, C.V. Rajagopa-lachari and several others,” he said. Reiterating that Hinduism is India’s identity, Mr Naidu said, “Hindustan is nothing but our national identity: is it that Muslims or Christians don’t work in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited or Hindustan Machine Tools? I request people not to politicise the term Hindu or Hindustan. It is not the question of saffronisation of the country; saffron is India’s colour. Look at the sun’s colour it is saffron.”