Thanks for your suggestion. Ionic has moved away from gulp and hence I wasn’t too keen to using this method. There were articles using similar method with NPM and ionic.webpack - but those work only for JS and CSS files and not html files.
Finally, I used plain old JS to check location.protocol. If it is not “file:”, I use the script embed, otherwise ignore it. I couldn’t test cordova.js for two reasons 1) it was included later in the file 2) I am using this in PWA and that would have corova.js too.
Lastly, I had to remove branch.js from cordova_plugins.js file in both www and platform_www folder of browser platform to get this working.
Thanks
Nitin