New Delhi, Jan 27 (IANS): With just days to go for the Union Budget on Saturday, a senior adviser in the Finance Ministry has been criticised by a former Union Secretary who told him to focus on his job and stop talking about history.

Former Coal Secretary Anil Swarup has slammed Principal Economic Adviser Sanjeev Sanyal for his remarks on rewriting history and suggested that Sanyal should focus on reviving the economy.

Sanyal, Principal Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, had said on Thursday that Indian history needs to be rewritten so that future generations can appreciate the true history of India.

At the 14th Netaji Subhas Memorial Lecture at FICCI, Sanyal said India needs to "begin to revisit its own history. And, what better place to start than by starting with the story of India's freedom struggle".

In a tweet, Swarup, a former high profile bureaucrat who served as HRD Secretary and Coal Secretary in the Modi government said: "The guy should focus on job at hand, reviving the economy and stop talking about what needs to be done to Indian history. How long will we hang on to the past. We should certainly learn from history but not get stuck in the past."

Sanyal said in the lecture that on reading the conventional, official history books, one will get the impression that India's freedom struggle was a uniquely peaceful one. "Basically, we gently suggested to the British that they should leave, and they politely left," he said.

However, he said that there is a completely different story to be told about an armed resistance to the British going back over a long period of time.

"This is not to suggest that the non-violence movement did not play a role, it did. But there was an armed resistance too. And, that story was just as important but unfortunately, sadly rubbed out of the usual narrative," he added.