Port Blair, April 30: The State President, R Mohan has written a letter to the Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, Smti Sushma Swaraj, MP, Leader of opposition and to the Lt Governor, ANI to declare Viper Island as a National Memorial. He said, after Independence, it took a long way to declare the Cellular Jail, the pilgrimage of the Indians, as the National Memorial in the year 1969 by the Government of India. There is another place, waiting for a long to be declared as the National Memorial, which is having no less importance than the Cellular jail and that is Viper Island.

Viper Island is situated near Port Blair in Andaman district in the Andaman Islands, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India and was the site of the jail where the British used to imprison convicts and political prisoners. It has the ruins of a gallows atop a hillock. In any talk about Andaman and its role in the freedom struggle, it is the Cellular Jail that finds frequent mention. But, many years before the Cellular Jail was constructed, it was the jail at Viper Island that was used by the British to inflict the worst form of torture and hardship on those who strove to free the country from the British rule.

The jail was abandoned when the Cellular Jail was constructed in 1906.The conditions at the jail were such that the place got the notorious name, "Viper Chain Gang Jail." Those who had challenged the might of the British authority were chained together and confined at night by a chain running through coupling of irons around their legs. It was at this jail that members of the Chain Gang were put to hardest labour.

Brij Kishore Singh Deo, popularly known as Maharaja Jagannath of Puri, was treated like an ordinary convict and kept in the Viper Jail, where he died in 1879. The Jail has secured a permanent place in the history of the freedom struggle as it was here that Sher Ali, a Pathan from Peshawar, was hanged after he assassinated Lord Mayo, Indian Viceroy, on February 8, 1872 at Hope Town jetty, opposite Chatham Island.

Mohan thus hoped that understanding the importance of the Viper Island in the history of our freedom and freedom fighters it may be considered for declaring this historical place as National memorial. He also hoped that the A&N Administration will never raise any objection on this declaration