Netaji was arguably the greatest personality of India's struggle for freedom. He was far ahead of his times despite the fact that he was immersed in the thick of battle. His early advocacy of Purna Swaraj or complete independence was later adopted by the Congress. In the 1938 Haripura Congress Session Subhas Chandra Bose as Congress President aired his view that the Congress needed a disciplined army of workers that would carry on the struggle along non-violent lines. His idea was that sporadic movements based on impulse and the sudden need of the hour were unlikely to be effective against the disciplined might of the British empire. To combat British imperialism the freedom struggle had to be well-organised, planned and activated along lines of martial discipline even if it was a non-violent struggle. However, his views were rejected by Gandhiji who set up Pattabhi Sitaramayya as his candidate for the Congress presidency the following year against Subhas Chandra Bose. When Bose emerged a clear victor in the elections, the Mahatma admitted that Pattabhi's defeat was his own defeat. However, this meant that Gandhiji could not get his way through democratic means and had now the remaining option of ousting Subhas through unconstitutional means which he readily applied violating all norms of political civility. Expediency was the criterion and not ethical propriety and the Mahatma, ever the non-member dictatorial leader of the Congress, resorted to the vilest political maneuvering to see to it that Bose, the duly elected Congress President, was left with a non-functional executive apparatus as the Mahatma's flattering followers resigned from the Congress Working Committee to paralyse the machinery. Gandhi, surely, must have mischievously justified his political pawn-play of perverting the members of the Congress Working Committee to resign from it on the basis of his flawed spiritual philosophy of non-violence and truth in their applied mode. The Congress President was now left with an empty house and had to resign. Thus, the leonine soul who could have unified India and, perhaps, prevented Partition, was sidelined from mainstream Congress politics, a myopic move of the Mahatma whose catastrophic consequence he lived to see in his twilight years. Subhas Chandra Bose and his 'pernicious' radicalism had been got rid of, so the Mahatma must have mused.
But Bose had other ideas. He quickly organised a section of the radical wing of the Congress to build up a new party, the Forward Bloc. He carried on his campaign for organised mass struggle against the British and was imprisoned for sedition. What followed was one of the epic tales of real-life history, a single man taking on the might of the British empire against all odds, worst of all, the political indifference, even animosity of the very Congressman he admired and had worked with all his life, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and a host of others who did nothing to help his great mission of liberating India with the Indian National Army which he raised abroad and marched on to India. The hero came to the very doors of India, liberating 150 miles of Indian soil, and was then driven back by the British Indian Army owing to the INA's lack of supplies when cooperation and coordinated effort by the Indian leaders like Nehru could have turned the tide of the Indian Revolution. But Netaji's men were driven back as Indians, who had been rendered passive by the conjoined anti-Bose British propaganda and pernicious Congress policy in strong opposition to the Japanese-aided INA assault on British India, could not come to their aid at a time when they could have liberated India and prevented Partition. Thus, Netaji withdrew and has remained untraced till date. Who can tell what happened to India's greatest son? But more of that later. Jai Hind!
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