BJP Gov should not remove Tipu Sultan from Karnataka’s history books. His real story should be retold

Karnataka Minister Suresh Kumar on Monday asked officials to look into the demand of a BJP MLA that the lesson on Tipu Sultan, the controversial 18th-century ruler of erstwhile Mysore Kingdom be removed from history textbooks, and submit a report in three days. Kumar, the Primary and Secondary Education Minister has written a note to the Managing Director of Karnataka Textbook Society, asking them to invite the MLA, Appachu Ranjan and discuss the matter.“Tipu was anti-Kannada Persian administrator. By teaching history lessons about such a personality to children, it will be like distorting history of the state and the country,” read Appachu Ranjan’s letter which was being quoted by the minister Suresh Kumar. Ranjan had written to Kumar last week demanding all references to Tipu, the erstwhile ruler of Mysuru, be removed from textbooks. However, erasing him from the textbooks would only shield his atrocities from the world and the misinformation and the false narrative that has been fed to the masses through books and TV shows that glorified Tipu over the years that he was a freedom fighter would only be made seemingly strong and true. Therefore, the textbooks need to be recalibrated and the real hideous face of Tipu Sultan who was a ‘fanatic Muslim’ at best and had the sole aim of establishing an Islamic caliphate be unearthed.

One of the first things Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa did after returning to power was to scrap Tipu Jayanti that was launched by the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government. The former Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah had commenced the tradition of celebrating the Tipu Jayanti. His fall began with the celebration of Tipu Jayanti and ended up with the defeat in the 2018 Karnataka Elections. This shows the extent to which he was consumed in the hatred for Hinduism. He celebrated the Jayanti of a tyrant who had massacred hundreds of thousands of Hindus during his rule. Celebrating Tipu Sultan’s birthday cost Congress their political ground in the state. Interestingly, Vijay Mallya who bought the sword of Tipu Sultan has also gone financially bankrupt and had to do away with it as the sword was bringing him bad luck. Celebrating Tipu Jayanti was a new low by Congress at the expense of not only the state but also the native people of Karnataka who can never forget the gruesome atrocities inflicted upon them by the usurper king of Mysore.

Although Tipu’s birthday falls on November 20, his Jayanti was celebrated on November 10. The day he executed Mandyam Iyengars at the temple town of Melkote in Mandya district as Iyengars supported the then Maharaja of Mysuru. Tipu massacred more than 700 Mandyam Iyengar families in Melukote, including women and children. They had congregated at Narasimha Swamy temple on the banks of Cauvery at Srirangaptna town to celebrate Diwali when Sultan’s army massacred them. The town, to this day, does not celebrate Diwali and mourns the death and destruction that the horrendous Tipu Sultan wrecked over the holy town. Celebrating him is not only a cruel joke on the Iyengars but also on other communities like the Kodavas of Coorg, Nairs of Wayanad and Malabar, Zamorins of Calicut, the Mangalorean Catholics (Nasranis), the Jains of Dakshin Kannada, the Hindus from Dindigul and Coimbatore against whom he had committed unspeakable crimes including forced conversions; which Tipu himself mentioned in his two autobiographies: Sultan-ut-Tawarikh and Tarikh-i-Khudadadi, housed in the India Office Library, London.

In Kodagu district, the Kodavas (Coorgis), a martial race, whose thousands of men and women were seized and held captive during Tipu’s occupation were subjected to torture, death and forcible conversion to Islam. On the 13th of December 1785, Tipu Sultan conspired with General Lally (his French counterpart) at Devattparamb located on banks of the river Kaveri. He sent a message to Kodavas inviting them for negotiations unarmed with his army lurking in the forest, what then followed was a massive carnage where he butchered about 70,000 Kodavas and captured 90,000. It is said that following the bloodbath, the river Kaveri ran red from the blood oozing from the dead for 12 days. The ghoulish barbarity of Tipu Sultan has been chronicled in the widely acclaimed works of Mark Wilks, Lewis Rice, and Mir Kirmani. The spiteful elimination of indigenous Kodavas is tantamount to genocide pitting him with the likes of Hitler who also worked on similar lines.

Sultan’s lust for violence reached new heights when in 1783 during his siege of Palghat Fort, “Tipu’s soldiers daily exposed the heads of innocent Brahmins within sight from the fort for Zamorin and his Hindu followers to see. It is asserted that the Zamorin rather than witness such enormities and to avoid further killing of innocent Brahmins, chose to abandon the Palghat Fort” as documented in the works of Col. Fullarton.

The Secular’s of the country want to project that people with vested interest are opposing Tipu because Tipu Sultan was a Muslim Monarch, but the facts are clear as a day for everyone to see about the monstrous atrocities committed by him. There is ample documentation of his atrocities in Gazetteers of Mysore and Kerala.

The dishonest pop historians and Congress stooges might have the gut to show him as a secular benevolent leader and a freedom fighter but the truth is as far and away from them as their sensibilities. The claim of Tipu Sultan being a freedom fighter is a deliberate misconception of history and a mere figment of imagination. The fact remains that the second Anglo-Mysore in which Tipu Sultan went up in arms against the British took place way back in ‘1780’ itself even though the first struggle for independence had started in 1857. Thus, Tipu Sultan was not by any stretch of imagination a participant in the freedom movement for releasing India from the shackles of British rule. He was just a monarch who was interested in safeguarding his sovereignty. To believe and propagate that he fought for something which had not even materialised during his life span is to live in fool’s paradise. Even the Karnataka High Court had observed while hearing a PIL against the then Karnataka Government on the issue of birth anniversary celebrations that Tipu Sultan cannot be called a freedom fighter and he was nothing more than a monarch fighting for his self-interest. “What is the logic behind celebrating TipuJayanti? Tipu was not a freedom fighter, but a monarch who fought the opponents to safeguard his interests,” Justice Subhro Kamal Mukherjee, presiding over the division bench had observed it way back in 2016.