The Central government’s claim that the “sengol” (sceptre) handed over to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru by the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam (mutt) from Tamil Nadu on the night of August 14, 1947, signified a transfer of power is nothing but a piece of “fiction based on manufactured lies”, according to N. Ram, former Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu and Frontline and currently Director of The Hindu Group Publishing Private Limited.
Speaking to mediapersons in Chennai on May 31, Ram said that the transfer of power was an official swearing-in ceremony held under the provisions of the Indian Independence Act, 1947, of the British Parliament. He added: “It needed no symbolism nor required any sanctity.”
He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s act of receiving the “sengol” at the inaugural ceremony of the new Parliament building on May 28 was nothing but a part of the pure Hindutva agenda of the BJP, through which it was attempting to gain political leverage in Tamil Nadu. Quoting from documents, books and biographies, Ram chronicled the events that unfolded on the night of August 14/15, 1947.
He said that according to the claims of the BJP government at the Centre, Mountbatten, the then Viceroy, asked Nehru, Prime Minister-to-be of the new nation, whether there was a ceremony to symbolise the transfer of power. Nehru, according to the government’s narrative, asked C. Rajagoapalachari (Rajaji), the first Indian Governor General-to-be, who told him about the ancient Chola practice of handing over a sceptre to the new king, which symbolised the transfer of power. Nehru agreed to follow the ritual and Rajaji approached the head of the Thiruvavaduthurai Adheenam, who took a 5-feet-tall gold-plated “sengol” to New Delhi and first gave it to Mountbatten symbolically. It was then handed over to Nehru to suggest the transfer of power. Ram debunked these claims as pure fiction.
Tracing the sequence of events on August 14, mainly from documents and other recorded evidence, Ram said Mountbatten was not available until late at night on August 14 since he had gone to Karachi on August 13 to take part in the function that marked the birth of Pakistan.
Ram said: “He returned just before 11 p.m. on August 14 to Delhi to take part in the official ceremony of handing over the reins of power to Nehru, which was followed by Nehru’s famous ‘tryst with destiny’ Independence Day speech at the Constituent Assembly on August 14/15 of 1947,” he pointed out. It became a Dominion State then.
Ram also said that the claim that a team from the mutt was taken to Delhi in a special flight was not true. An advertisement given in The Hindu on August 29, 1947, by the mutt, mentioned that mutt representatives went by train from Madras Central Railway Station. They too could not have met Mountbatten.
“Like many mementoes that were received by Nehru, the “sengol” also was one among them,” he said.
Rajaji’s supposed role in the “sengol” story was also denied by Rajmohan Gandhi, his biographer and historian and grandson of both Mahatma Gandhi and Rajaji. “He has written on the NDTV website that he had never heard of Rajaji’s purported role in the “sengol” story,” he said. Historian Madhavan K. Palat, Editor of Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, had mentioned that Nehru would not have accepted the sengol as transfer of power.
There was no link between the government’s narrative on the transfer of power and a “sengol”. Neither was there any link to Mountbatten in this tale. “It has no constitutional sense,” Ram said, and drew attention to former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai’s satirical piece in Tamil on the “sengol” in Dravida Nadu, a Tamil newspaper, dated August 24, 1947. “Annadurai’s was a brilliant piece of literary criticism,” he added.
The press conference, organised by National Thinkers Forum, was also attended by Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president K.S. Alagiri, Congress spokesperson A. Gopanna, and veteran CPI (M) leader G. Ramakrishnan.
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