Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin on Tuesday said that attempts to distort history is one of the dangers the country was facing in the present day.

He spoke after inaugurating the 81st session of the Indian History Congress (IHC) at the Madras Christian College on Tuesday.

He added, “The study of history must be based on scientific methods. Some people are attempting to pass off illusions as history. No one should accept this. The intellectuals certainly would not accept it,” he said.

Quoting from a nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court’s order delivered in 1994 that undermines secularism as the backbone of the Indian Constitution, he said, “We should all strive to create a secular society.”

“Today, the danger surrounding the country is the distortion of history. The ideals of the Indian Constitution should be protected in education, language, culture, power structures, economy, administration, among others,” he said.

Meanwhile, Higher Education Minister K Ponmudy said, “Sometime, when Indian history was written, the history of south India and that of Tamil Nadu were sidelined.” He said that should the country’s history be studied impartially, it would be understood that the history of India would not begin from Indus civilization and the Ganges but from banks of Cauvery, he contended.

Ponmudy claimed that if not for the British, education would have been underdeveloped in Tamil Nadu; and the downtrodden would not have been better off.

“Christian institutions like this would not have come up. This Congress should instill in everyone objectivity to look into all histories and maintain neutrality while writing history,” he added.

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