India’s northern Punjab state is readying legislation to ‘erase’ all remnants of ‘cruel and humiliating’ British colonial rule in the province through a Historical Memory Law, similar to the one enacted by Spain in 2007.

“It (the law) will make Punjab the first state in the country to formally condemn British rule and destroy its remains” state finance minister Manpreet Badal from the newly elected Congress Party, who is spearheading the anti-Colonial campaign told the Indian Express yesterday.

Ironically, the 54-year old minister is an alumni of India’s renowned Doon School, modeled on British public school lines and whose first two of three English headmasters were from Eton and Harrow.

Badal declared that the Colonial era that ended with independence and the creation of Pakistan in 1947 ‘has to be formally condemned as the single most unfortunate phase of Punjab’s history’.

Badal proposes to do this by readying legislation that duplicates the Spanish Memory Law condemning General Francisco Franco’s 36-year dictatorial rule over that country till 1975.

It would be tabled in the state assembly’s forthcoming monsoon session in July, and considering the comfortable majority the Congress Party enjoys in the assembly, its passage would be a fait accompli, local legislators said.