HM Amit Shah to inaugurate Martyrs’ Memorial in Ambala on Nov 5

Chandigarh, Oct 28 (IANS) Haryana’s Transport Minister Anil Vij on Wednesday said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah will inaugurate the Aazadi ki Pehli Ladai ka Shaheed Smarak in Ambala Cantonment on November 5.  

It has been built at a cost of approximately Rs 800 crore. After the inauguration, he will address a public meeting in Gandhi Ground.

“It is significant to attend the rally as people will be participating in an event honouring a martyrs’ memorial,” said the minister.

The Martyrs’ Memorial will be opened to the public from November 6.

Vij said the government has issued instructions for the visit of students from schools and educational institutions across the state to the memorial to educate them that the freedom struggle began in Ambala before Meerut in 1857. He urged people to attend the rally at Gandhi Ground in Ambala Cantonment in large numbers as it will mark the inauguration of a national-level memorial.

Vij was addressing BJP office-bearers at Ambala Club in Ambala at a meeting chaired by state party President Archana Gupta to review preparations for the Martyrs’ Memorial programme.

Minister Vij said he had been working for the construction of the Martyrs’ Memorial for the past 25-30 years. He said books taught that the Congress fought the Independence struggle, but when he read, he found that in 1857, before the Congress was even founded, an armed struggle for Independence was fought across India and it began in Ambala.

He said documents showed that in 1857 at 9 a.m., 10 hours before the uprising in Meerut, the 60th and 5th Native Infantry regiments sounded the bugle of the freedom struggle in Ambala Cantonment. “Yet history never remembered those heroes who were tied to trees and shot, or those upon whom oil mills were operated; the nation never paid tribute to those martyrs, which is painful. The martyrs of 1857 were also sons of the motherland who joined the struggle for Independence.”

The minister said anyone who took even one step out of their home for Independence deserves homage, whether they were a Congress member or not.

Vij, who also holds the Energy portfolio, said the First War of Independence took place across the country in 1857, but no one remembered it, and no memorial existed anywhere to showcase that struggle.

The minister said he stood in the Assembly several times to demand the memorial’s construction and that there is an official record of this. At one point, he said he even compelled the Congress government, but it did not build the memorial. However, when the BJP government came to power in 2014, it approved the construction of a national-level memorial.

Vij said the complete history will be displayed in the memorial. The places where battles were fought in 1857, in Haryana, Bihar, Punjab, and elsewhere, will be presented through modern technology, showing the history of the war.

--IANS

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