Noted historian Ramchandra Guha once again landed himself into trouble after one of his posts on micro-blogging website "Twitter" snowballed into a major controversy.
Guha tweeted a quote of a British author which read, "Gujarat, though economically advanced, is culturally a backward province.... Bengal, in contrast, is economically backward but culturally advanced". Philip Spratt, writing in 1939."
The content prompted Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani to shoot back on Twitter where he wrote while tagging Guha's post, "Earlier it was the British who tried to divide and rule. Now it is a group of elites who want to divide Indians. Indians won’t fall for such tricks." Rupani's tweet adds, "Gujarat is great, Bengal is great...India is united. Our cultural foundations are strong, our economic aspirations are high."
Soon after, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also tweeted, "In 1939, when Philip Spratt, from Britain, belonging to the Communist International wrote, (who @Ram_Guha quotes) this was what was happening in Gujarat: Jamnagar...Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji Jadeja...saved 1000 Polish children #Culture ." She had shared a link to a news report on how Jamnagar king had sheltered Polish children who had taken refuge from Germany during World War-2.
Spratt was a Britisher who came to India and is said to have assisted in building Communist movement in British India in the 1920s. In fact, Guha has described Spratt, in one of his tweets last year, that Spratt was "an Englishman who became an Indian, as well as a Communist who became a free-market liberal."
Guha responded to Gujarat CM saying, "If the Gujarat Chief Minister is, at this moment in history, (a) so keenly following the tweets of a humdrum historian and (b) so easily confusing the historian with a dead writer being quoted, the State of Gujarat must indeed be in safe hands. " He also reacted to Sitharaman's tweet to say, "I thought it was only the Gujarat CM, but now it seems even the FM is obsessing about a humdrum historian's tweets. The economy is surely in safe hands."
In his another tweet, the historian wrote, "I have been trying without success for thirty years to make the writer Philip Spratt better known; thank you to the Troll Army for accomplishing this in a day."