As a Delhiite and now an MP of New Delhi, I often pass through the Press Area at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg and the Mandi House Circle in the heart of the city. As for thousands of residents, it used to be a casual walk for me until a journalist friend told me something shocking.
The huge display boards at ITO metro station have pictures of almost all famous dignitaries, but there is no mention of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who served as editor of Veer Arjun, a Hindi daily, in the 1950s. There is a brief about the newspaper on the display board, but neither a mention nor a picture of Vajpayee, who was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2015. But, former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was the founder of National Herald, has a place with his iconic picture on the board. Also, Vajpayee’s name is missing from the history of government buildings or the landmark buildings constructed during his reign.
I then proceeded to inspect Mandi House metro station. Here, the boards clearly mention Sikandra Road (Agra), the king of Mandi, who later stayed at the Mandi House, and playwright and poet Safdar Hashmi with his pictures and poems. There was no mention of the iconic Bhagwan Das Road, which I would often pass by while visiting institutes and government offices and sometimes use to access the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court.
But who was Bhagwan Das? He was conferred the Bharat Ratna along with Nehru and M. Visvesvaraya in 1955. His picture is not available in the list of Bharat Ratna awardees; there is one on Wikipedia though. Visvesvaraya, a civil engineer, was a non-political person while Nehru and Bhagwan Das represented diagonally opposite ideologies. Interestingly, the first president of India Rajendra Prasad was conferred the Bharat Ratna only in 1962, whereas the first vice president S. Radhakrishnan received the award the year it was instituted—1954—along with C. Rajagopalachari and C.V. Raman.
Illustration: Job P.K.
A further reading explains Bhagwan Das as a theosophist and a great scholar who worked with Annie Besant and authored about 30 books in Sanskrit and Hindi. He worked with Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, founder of Banaras Hindu University, and proved to be a true ideological successor of Malaviya in India. He was the cofounder of Kashi Vidyapith, which has the Bharat Mata Mandir in its campus—the only temple in the world that does not have any idol of a god or goddess but a marble map of undivided India. The website of the university, however, mentions Das only once, and neither has his photograph or biography.
Bhagwan Das strongly opposed Max Muller’s Aryan theory and proved through literacy evidences that Aryans were Indians. On this, he was on the same page with the architect of the Constitution of India, B.R. Ambedkar, who was conferred the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1990. Das has rubbished all the theories Max Muller propagated at the instance of the British government to demean Indian culture. The DNA mapping has proved true the views of Das and rubbished Max Muller’s theory, but so-called ‘scientific historians’ are hesitant to accept the truth. Whether it is nescience or conspiracy could be a matter of debate, but neither is expected from a body like the Indian Council of Historical Research, which is writing the history of landmarks at metro stations on behalf of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.
I strongly recommend including the history of Bhagwan Das at the Mandi House metro station, besides installing his statue at the Mandi House Circle. Also, his works must be included in the ICHR library to decolonise the mindset of successors of Max Muller, who died 20 years before the first site of Indus Valley civilisation was discovered at Mohenjo-Daro. The true tribute to this great scholar could be renaming Max Muller Bhawan in New Delhi as Bhagwan Das Bhawan.
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