HEAR YE, O HIRED HISTORIANS!

It is a well-known fact that ‘history is a host of lies agreed upon’ for it is ever the victor in a battle or a war who commissions his hired historians to chronicle history from his vantage point to suit his ends and to perpetuate his name and glory. Yet, history emerges through the passage of time in its truer colour when regimes change, dynasties fall, an age ends and another unfolds with newer visions, fresher aspirations and a discerning generation that cares to see through the cover-ups of earlier ages. In such a time zone we are. Our independence is well nigh seven decades old, yet, we are entrapped in the colonial hangover, the Nehruvian legacy of Commonwealth and British belonging, Macaulay’s children, deluded and devoid of national self-identity and self-respect, self-besmirched through self-oblivion, ‘skeletons of the past’ without substance or source of sustenance. Time, indeed, it is that we veer around and take a fresher stance to alter the course of our national life and march ahead in true national colour without the blemish of foreign contamination.

And for this, we need historians bred at home who are fired by national zeal and not fuelled by foreign adulation or hired by perfidious parties plotting perdition of patriots. Then only will the nation awake when its true history is recounted to its people replete with the saga of the sacrifice of its martyrs and redolent of the narratives of fearlessness and fortitude in fighting for the national cause of freedom from the foreign yoke. Such a day has come. History is at the crossroads and a departure that will radically shift the focus from established falsities to truths buried in the tomb of hidden files is about to take place. Now is the hour of reckoning when our nation’s history will have to be rewritten in the light of declassified material on Netaji and his men. Historians, wake up!

We are a queer people who do not know how to honour our heroes and settle for our information and estimate about them from the very adversaries they had fought to release us into freedom. Necessarily, their accounts are coloured by their biased judgement, their prejudiced views founded on their national self-interest and their narrative flawed and partial. Such is the predicament in which the Indian child finds itself when it comes to learning about the history of its forefathers, the history of the freedom movement no less. The Indian student grows up with a bizarre narrative of the freedom struggle where omission of vital historical happenings is routine and interpretation of the mentioned fact distorted. Crucial events such as Bose’s great escape to the West, his sojourn in the Far East and his epic armed struggle that led to the eviction of the British from India are either marginalized in their mention or are denigrated as sort of seditious to the nation in their ultimate connotation. These are the machinations of the Anglo-American consortium with seditious support by substantial sections of the Indian government in the days gone by.

The poison injected in the minds of generations of free Indians through calculated indoctrination of falsified history has bred a nation of unpatriotic people who care more for their petty self-interest than for the larger cause of the nation and this is evident in the rampant corruption that plagues the Indian polity. The people, having been denied access to the entire narrative of the freedom struggle---the sacrifices of the extremist martyrs, the gallantry of the INA and their victorious march into Indian terrain before beating retreat into the jungles of Burma, the titanic effort of Netaji to liberate India against all odds, these and so many other episodes fraught with the virility of patriotic fervour and life-giving love---, have lost contact with their heritage and have been shorn of the vitality that sustains a nation.

If this nation wants to rise again, its people will have to be given back their rightful inheritance, the true history of their land written in bold words full of flowing love for the martyrs who bled, for the heroes who fought and for the countless millions that sacrificed their all for the cause of freedom. There must no more be pandering to the vanities of our erstwhile British masters in scripting our history. Our business is done with them and our sovereignty shall shine in our independence of thought and expression in so far as the chronicling of our nation’s life-story is concerned.

So, historians of free India, wake up, take the call of the hour and set about writing the narrative of the nation in colours truly Indian that may unbiased shine as the beacon for the furtherance of the career of this country. Declassification of the Netaji files in the offing, this is the right moment to set things right. Many of you, in alliance with the principal political party that ruled India over five decades, have betrayed the nation with falsities and fabrications that you have dished out as so much historical truth, your analyses coloured by political compulsions, your omission of facts glaring in their ingloriousness and your propensity to marginalize the contribution of whosoever fell on the wrong side of the powers that you so traitorously served. Time it is to rectify your stance as hired historians of the hierarchy and heroically veer around to hearken to the truth hideously hidden in these secret files that will see the light of day soon. Shame on your credentials as credible historians when you so serve anti-national interests and hinder the flow of free information, subvert the people’s power through misinformation and denial of an understanding of the nation’s history as it is and not as you fashion it to be under the auspices of the premier party post-independence. And salutations to those heroic historians who could thwart the malicious designs of the powers that be to write the glorious account of the freedom struggle in all its phases including valiant extremism which culminated in the INA march to freedom, despite opposition and opprobrium from the votaries of Gandhian non-violence and denial of access to classified information on such critical movements as brought India freedom in the final phase of her protracted struggle against her oppressive British masters.

We must conjointly build our motherland on the foundation of the true history of India. Declassification of all Netaji files the world over is the call of the hour as the nation rises up as a man with the vibrancy that animated it during the final hours of the Second World War when Netaji and his INA stormed the bastilles of British India. With fresh news coming in that the Russian Government is considering opening up the Netaji files in their custody, we once again send out the clarion call for the declaration of the true history of the freedom struggle, of Netaji and the INA on this, the 72^nd anniversary of the formation of the Provisional Government of Free India, an event so epochal but which so shamefully lies in utter neglect by the Government of Independent India that the nation is well-nigh oblivious of it. On this day in Singapore in 1943 did Netaji declare India’s independence from British colonial rule and form his Provisional Government of Free India before launching his final offensive, his armed onslaught on imperial Britain. We must honour this historic happening and seek inspiration from it to refresh our struggle for achieving true national independence in the form of making our nation militarily strong, eradicating poverty and bringing about cent percent literacy for our population, the three objectives Netaji had in mind to achieving post-independence. May we be full of the patriotic fervour that had animated our freedom fighters to sacrifice their all for the motherland and may we carry on with unmitigated vigour their unfinished struggle to build our nation!

Hired historians, polluted politicians, corrupt collaborators of concoctions, hear ye not the footsteps of the future? Upon ye they advance should thou not mend thy ways yet. Netaji arrives from everywhere, India, Russia, Britain, France, USA, Germany, Japan, Italy, Vietnam, China, Myanmar, from all corners of the world. A day there was when he had not a foothold in this wide world, when Japan had been bombed into submission, when his comrades in the Congress, having betrayed him, reaped the fruits of his liberation labour but disallowed him a hero’s entry into the motherland, dubbing him fascist aggressor and perpetuating the myth of his air-crash death, when the Allies hunted him the world over as Enemy Number One, when this leonine soul had no land of his own to stand on save his conviction about the impending freedom of his country which carried him on to a Siberian gulag to suffer torture, then to emerge in Red China, Vietnam, India, who knows where? Or, did he die in Stalinist Siberia of suffocation in a plastic bag? What happened to Netaji? These files will tell. This much for now, lest the vesper hour passes by and the hero goes abegging yet again. Jai Hind!