Less than 24 hours are left before the Netaji Files in custody with the Government of West Bengal are declassified. There is a vibrancy of expectation among the people which is building up by the hour as their hero, long buried under the debris of falsity and fabrication, seems to be on the verge of resurrection. History will turn on its head if it is categorically proved that Netaji was the victim of an international conspiracy in which his own nation was complicit as well. A new appreciation will emerge of world events if even a fraction of what his protagonists have been claiming so long is proven true. It is now known that he was alive till at least 1949 but where was he and in what state? Did he survive beyond that? If so, where and in what capacity? A politician in hiding in foreign countries trying to muster support for the revolutionary cause? A prisoner of Stalin in a Siberian gulag? A fugitive wandering across Asia seeking harbour somewhere? A mendicant monk in North India endlessly roaming from place to place to avoid attention, or, shall we say, detection? Or was he executed by Stalin in full knowledge of the Indian Government for which even today there is so much secrecy over the Netaji Files? These are so many pertinent questions whose answers lie in the womb of these Secret Files now seeking deliverance in the fullness of gestation.
Why has there been so much secrecy about the entire episode of Netaji's supposed death to warrant the maintenance of 200 odd classified files in his name for nearly 70 years despite unilateral affirmation by the Government of India as to its date, place and mode as submitted by the Japanese authorities? Why was his 'dead body' not photographed or flown over to India to his family? Whose ashes are interred in the urn at the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo, Netaji's or Ichiro Okura's? If they are of Netaji's, then why have successive Congress Governments that ruled over India for decades never gone for its DNA test to settle all doubts about its identity and bring them over to New Delhi to give the hero his honour due? Why was the Mukherjee Commission Report unceremoniously dismissed in Parliament by the U.P.A. Government headed by Dr. Manmohan Singh as an unacceptable document without even bothering to give a sufficient reason for such a peremptory act or engaging in a civilized discourse or debate over the validity of its contents or otherwise, especially, when the subject of the Report was India's leonine patriot Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose? Why has the Congress Party been so apprehensive about divulging all the 'death' details of a person who as per their assertion had met with an accidental death in Taihoku Airport from an air-crash on 18 August, 1945, an event which, in the official view, had multiple witnesses? Why classify cartloads of documents in the 'dead' man's name who brought India independence, and that too, do so when the nation has become a sovereign power? Who does the Government fear, foreign nations or the people of India? If so, why? Is there a vast international conspiracy behind the so-called disappearance of the 'Enemy Number One' of the Allied Powers? And where did he disappear? He could not have simply vanished into thin air, or, did he? And, last but not the least, why was the Bose family snooped on for 20 long years (1948-1968), an act initiated and sustained for the darker part of 16 years (1948-1964) by the Nehru Government? A final hammer, why did the Indira Gandhi Government destroy two classified files on Netaji?
The Netaji Files are pregnant with these details for sure and successive Congress governments at the Centre have played foul with the life and legacy of our greatest national hero for reasons we all suspect but have no documentary evidence to legally substantiate. But their hour is come and Friday, 18 September, 2015 will have irreversibly set the ball rolling the other way and the sequel to the Crucifixion of Netaji will have begun, his Resurrection. Now there can be no turning back for the Government of India from declassifying all classified files on Netaji as it will have to face the people's wrath and no government in a democracy can go against overwhelming public opinion. We all hope that the Modi Government will live up to its promise made to the nation and to the Bose family about revealing the truth hidden behind these documents and so make good, even if partially, the badly tarnished image of the Indian politician who has been fabled for pulling the strings the wrong way right from the days of the Mahatma when in most uncivil a manner he had conspired with his Congress cronies to bring down the duly elected Congress President, Subhas Chandra Bose, at Tripuri on the eve of the Second World War, a machination that only a 'Mahatma' may succeed in executing but which robbed the character of the Indian politician for good through its dubious setting up of precedent for posterity. Thus was one man laid aside by the collective conspiracy of the rest led by a person priding himself on principles but shorn of all scruples when confronted by a superior soul who called him the Father of the Nation only to be dubbed the Robin Hood of India in return. What magnanimity of spirit the hero had to yet name the brigades of the Indian National Army in the names of these very political adversaries who had spared no means to ruin him! The Gandhi Brigade and the Nehru Brigade bear testimony not only to Netaji's undiluted love for the nation and for all those forces that were at work for its liberation but also to a rare capacity to be able to rise above personal considerations in the pursuit of the larger national objective of the achievement of freedom. This indeed is Karma Yoga, the ability to detach self from the work equation which Netaji eminently did in the thick of battle with all his political adversaries, never once stooping low to secure an undue gain even as the Mahatma and his entourage dipped their non-violent hands in the blood of the Bengal boy who was way ahead of them in political sagacity, statesmanship and vision, not to mention, strength of character and nobility of being.
This then is the narrative one must bear in mind when one sits in judgement over the bygone days of the freedom struggle gluttonously appropriated by the Gandhi-Nehru brigade, not of the Azad Hind Fauj though. The seed was rotten to begin with, the soil depleted of nutrients and the elements hostile for healthy growth of the national tree. The conspiracy of the Mahatma at Tripuri and the spineless capitulation of the envious members of the Congress Working Committee who resigned in abject surrender to the dictates of the Mahatma and their own personal vendetta against the brighter Bose sealed the fate of future India resulting in the untold misery of Partition from whose horrors we are still recovering. The Mahatma was an astute politician masquerading as a saint and Bose was the one nationalist leader who not only measured up to him in every way but actually outdid him in intellectuality, moral integrity, political sagacity, patriotic purpose and, above all, vision of the future nationhood of India. So many embellishments in a non-Gandhian in the Age of Gandhi? No, it was impossible to digest and Bose's wings had to be clipped for sure, else how could the Gandhians rest in non-violent peace? The rest of the story is for another day, but right now, the hour cometh, and hark, cometh the man with it.
Jai Hind!
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