ITANAGAR, 24 Dec: Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein urged the union government to declare the Tai Khamti-British war of 1839 as the nation’s first war of independence.
Mein said that 80 British soldiers along with Col Adam White were killed by the Tai Khamtis in the war.
“It is high time we must rewrite our history in our own perspective. We have been reading the history written by the British in their own perspective. What they viewed as traitors and punished were actually our freedom fighters and our war heroes,” Mein said during the Sadin Pratidin Group’s Achiever’s Award (2021) function at Srimanata Sankardeva Kalashetra in Guwahati (Assam) on Friday.
Speaking about the four Anglo-Abor wars fought by the Adis in 1858, 1859, 1894 and 1911 and the Wancho-British war, known as the ‘Ninu massacre’, at Ninu in Tirap district in 1875, Mein requested the Centre through Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who was also present at the award ceremony, to include these histories of freedom struggles of Northeast India in the NCERT books.
The DCM said that the tribal people of Northeast India also revolted and fought against the British during the colonial rule, “but it is nowhere reflected in the books of Indian history.”
He also spoke of Chowpha Planglu alias Ronua Gohain, “who ruled Sadiya once in 1826, which has been mentioned in the first Assamese magazine Orunodoi, which was first published from Assam’s Sivasagar in 1846 by the British missionary couple Nathan Brown and Eliza Brown.”
Mein highlighted the efforts of the Arunachal Pradesh government to identify and recognize the unsung heroes of the state, and said that books will be published after thorough research and documentation are done.
He thanked the union government “for giving an opportunity to recognize the unsung war heroes or the freedom fighters during the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav celebration, commemorating the 75 years of the nation’s independence.”
The DCM lauded the Assam government’s initiative titled the Assam Ethnic Cultural Harmony and Exchange Mission to promote cultural exchange among different communities, and requested Assam to “extend it to Arunachal, which will help further strengthen the cordial relations and brotherhood among the people of the two states.”
During the programme, personalities from the region who have excelled in diverse fields like sports, art and culture, science, journalism, media, corporate, business, public service, etc, were felicitated.
Besides the Lok Sabha speaker, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, Pratidin Group chairman Jayanta Baruah and many prominent personalities of Assam attended the function. (DCM’s PR Cell)
