History can't be structured on foreign accounts of a country: Swamy

The history of no free country can be structured on foreign accounts of it and the time has come for the people of India to take Puranic sources seriously and imbibe a de-falsified and well-founded history written by Indians about Indians, says BJP leader Subramanian Swamy.

According to him, a correct, de-falsified history would record that "Hindustan was conceptually one in the art of governance, in the style of royal courts, in the methods of warfare, in the maintenance of its agrarian base, and in the dissemination of information". Otherwise, he says, it was "decentralised for autonomy of villages in self-administration" and the panchayat system is a manifestation of that. Swamy says the history of no free country can be structured on foreign accounts of it.

"The time has come for us to take seriously our Puranic sources and to imbibe a de-falsified and well-founded history of ancient India, a history written by Indians about Indians," he writes in his new book "Ayodhya Ram Temple and Hindu Renaissance".

"Such a re-written history would bring out the amazing continuity of a nation, which nation asserted its identity again and again at times of war and political crises," he says.

The Aryan-Dravidian divide in the history taught in schools and universities is purely a conception of foreign historians like Max Mueller and has no basis in India’s historical records, Swamy claims.

"... It is becoming more and more clear that there never was an Aryan invasion in India, a theory which was imposed upon the subcontinent by its colonisers and is today kept alive by Nehruvian historians such as Romila Thapar, missionaries and the Communists," he goes on to write.

"But as long as India will not rewrite its history books and teach its children to be proud of its ancient and indigenous civilisation, there will be others who will come and exploit India," he claims.

The book, co-written with Satya Paul Sabharwal, a member of Swamy's legal team, and brought out by Har-Anand Publications, focuses on re-building the Ram Temple at Ayodhya.

"The places of worship of adorable figures of any community can be constructed at many places, statues of great men can be put up at many places, but the places of manifestation/birth of great men/deities would be at one place, and that can never be changed," it says.

"The birthplace cannot be displaced, cannot be relocated. It is non-exchangeable. It cannot be swapped, bartered, sold or donated… Ayodhya is to Hindus what Mecca is to Muslims. So, no new structure, establishment, institution, Centre, that that could take Hindus back to the outrageous memories of history must be built in Ayodhya," the authors say.

Swamy is of the view that the present "dysfunctional perceptional mismatch in the understanding of who are we as a people, is behind most of the communal tensions and inter-community distrust in the country".