HOMECOMING OF THE HERO

The 64 classified files on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose that lay in the custody of the West Bengal Government are out there for public scrutiny. This is a historic moment whose significance will best be understood in the coming months and years. Right now the euphoria may blur vision and things may not be seen in the right perspective for a historical attitude is not a common human trait but needs cultivation through the pursuit of academic rigour. Yet, it is the common man who is the architect of history and it is his emotion that carves out great episodes in the annals of history. The subject of our discussion is the hero, the leader, the path-finder of these mute millions whose hopes and aspirations were once pinned upon this valorous soul as he circuited the world in fever-stricken Europe and Asia to deliver his people from subjection. The sledgehammer blow that he struck British imperialism ruined its citadels in India and paved the way for its colossal collapse across the world. Liberator of India that he was, he, in effect, demolished the very foundation of the British Empire and so altered world history for good. Like a bolt from the blue he arrived on the very shore of captive India with his legions and sent through the Motherland a mighty thrill which quickened the pulse of a million souls and instilled fear in the hearts of her captors. In the Battle of Imphal that followed, in a protracted struggle redolent of valour nonpareil by the I.N.A. that shook the very foundation of the British Empire, the heroes lost as Japan, devastated by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Powers on 15 August, 1945. Three days later on 18 August, 1945, Netaji, the Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army, reportedly boarded an aeroplane at Taihoku Airport in erstwhile Formosa and crash-landed to death. No official records were found to substantiate the story, no photographs were taken of the dying man in the local hospital, only verbal testimony given by Habibur Rahman, Netaji's lieutenant and, supposedly, co-passenger in the fateful flight was accepted as sufficient evidence by the Indian authorities to substantiate the Japanese narrative of the death of Netaji by accident. Netaji was no more, or so it was given to all to believe, but Netaji's closest kith and kin refused to buy this narrative. Knowing Subhas as they did, they understood that it was another of Subhas' great escapes under the cover of the air-crash tale. No trace of Netaji could be found. He had just melted into thin air. The Anglo-American intelligence refused to believe that he had died, neither did the Soviet Union. Only Japan maintained the air-crash storyline and the Government of India post-independence led by Jawaharlal Nehru fell for it.

Then what followed was perfidy. Nehru and the Congress plotted to obliterate the very existence of this valiant son of the soil. Text-books taught children historical distortions where Netaji and his I.N.A. were sidelined as one of those many events that had happened leading to independence. The Air-crash Theory of the hero's death was drilled into the subconscious of the people by a systematic form of misinformation, clever manipulation of facts, employment of professional historians to serve the vested interests of the Government and the suppression of evidence and its destruction by successive Congress Governments at the Centre. Thus was Netaji allowed to gradually sink into oblivion as the dismembered nation ever engaged in fratricidal struggle lost character. Netaji was hushed into silence for good. Or so it seemed till the Justice Mukherjee Commission Report laid before the world some startling facts that sent the Central Government scurrying for cover. And as is so often the case with weakness, the Government in a most unceremonious manner dismissed the Mukherjee Commission Report as unacceptable without citing any sufficient reason, and there the case of Netaji remained in animated suspension, suppressed but never quite erased from public memory. What a massive cover-up of the crime of generations of Congressmen beginning with their patriarch Jawaharlal Nehru and what an unfolding to be!

The day of reckoning has come. The secret files on Netaji lying with the Government of West Bengal have all been declassified. What will be revealed in the final analysis is a matter of conjecture, hope, delight and the shame of a nation that chooses to forget its tallest figure of the freedom struggle but for whom its very nationhood would have had a different connotation today. And I do not lay the charge against the masses whose object of adoration Netaji is and has always been, the countless commoners who prayed and hoped and wept in silence for the return of the hero, the naval soldiers who had gone berserk against their oppressive British masters and the millions and millions of mute Indians who had upon the arrival of their leader found an utterance to their unspelt aspirations. They were the ones that sustained and moved the revolution that ejected the British from the Indian soil. They laboured to see glorious India rise but they were given a partitioned Motherland by the machinations of their Congress and Muslim League leaders while their great Netaji was betrayed by these when there was time enough to put up a united front against the merciless mercenaries, the British, and thwart their malicious designs. But the perfidious deed was done citing communal violence as justification, much against the Mahatma's wishes who gradually lost control of the political forces unleashed in the wake of the frenetic demand for Partition on the basis of religion. Curiously, he chose to fast indefinitely in his bid to stop communal violence which reportedly he succeeded in doing in specific cases but the pragmatist in him was careful not to indulge in the misadventure of fasting unto death to prevent Partition, for surely, for once he would have to carry out his resolve and lose his life in the bargain. No Mahatma of appellation or his spineless followers could have withstood the force of communal divide that had been carefully orchestrated and unleashed by the Machiavellian British and the 'Apostle of Non-violence' had to witness the most terrible carnage of his countrymen as the price of his feeble policies towards these malicious mercenaries who had throughout their evil reign only one objective, the economic drainage of India and her ultimate ruin if it came to that. The only one who had the necessary personality, political sagacity and patriotic zeal, who could have united a divided house and thwarted British aims of breaking India was twice betrayed by the Mahatma and his Congressmen, first at Tripuri in 1939 and then on the borders of India in 1945. History always exacts its price for misdeeds done and avenges all injustice meted out to its heroes and this was the price we paid---India partitioned, the Mahatma shot, tens of millions butchered by communal violence across the borders and fratricidal  fight over the last 68 years between India and Pakistan costing millions of lives, not to mention the terrible loss of life and liberty of the annexed Arunachal and Aksai Chin following the Chinese aggression in 1962 and earlier, shortly after India's independence. A non-violent revolution indeed!

But even now there is hope of recovery if we have learnt our lessons from the retribution received at the hands of history for mischief done to our foremost son, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Let us then rededicate ourselves to the Cause of the Motherland and welcome the hero back amidst us at this deferred date, a homecoming befitting his stature as the premier personality of the freedom movement in its final phase even as the Mahatma was in its formative years. The Secret Files at New Delhi, London, Washington DC, Moscow, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Hanoi, Singapore, Beijing and Yangon hold the keys to the sensational disclosure about the life and times of the most enigmatic political personality of the 20th century, the greatest patriot the world has seen and a figure so robust and charismatic and such an intense enemy of British imperialism that history will take a U-turn and rerecord facts once the secret documents stand declassified and reveal the malicious machinations of the Allied Powers in their bid to destroy their Enemy Number One, India's brightest hope, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Let us then actively participate in this grand project of building up public opinion on such a scale that popular sovereignty will enforce declassification and the truth will be out. It has to be a sustained campaign and not an isolated effort of the hour. Followers of Netaji must exhibit a strength of purpose and character that will quicken the latent love for Netaji in the masses and make the movement for declassification mass-based. Only then will the Central Government be under considerable pressure to unveil the truth. The will of the masses no government can resist and in a democracy it also provides the ultimate legitimacy to the movement. Hence, all efforts must be geared towards propagation of the Word and awakening the people of this great country to a sense of urgency in unravelling the truth of the freedom struggle and with it the truth hidden in the secret files in the exclusive possession of the Governments of India and a host of other foreign powers as cited above.

The hour draws near when the Bose family along with a few researchers and a legal luminary will meet the Prime Minister of India to place their demand for a time-bound declassification of the Netaji Files. What transpires will be interesting to see for it will be an eye-opener to the benign or toxic nature of the contents in either case of its being declassified or not being so. It will also determine the future course of the movement for the struggle to arrive at the final truth about Netaji is not entirely dependent upon the present government's attitude but is a historical process that will unfold over the decades to come till the truth is eventually revealed. No government can stop the evolution of a movement founded in truth for the Declassification Movement is based indeed on the people's perception that the truth about Netaji is lying under governmental cover and this popular attitude stems from the enormous secrecy that has been maintained about the Netaji Files till date. Not only that, this movement is not a fleeting phenomenon founded in ephemeral effusions about a great hero but is the expression of a long-standing struggle of many individuals and organizations who have spent their lives and resources in unearthing the truth about the leader they love and adore, the Netaji who lives in them as an undying flame flickering through the smoke-cover of deception and denial of the powers that have thwarted the Indian nation and rendered its historical development sterile. But the momentum is on and we must set sail on this voyage of discovery, the true discovery of India, to pilfer a term from the literary arsenal of the arch adversary of our hero. May Modiji be quickened to the Cause! May the Truth reveal! May Netaji and his INA stand resplendent before the nation in their homecoming at last, in their final march onto the citadels of Delhi! And may our Motherland feel rejuvenated in the return of her valorous sons as she meanders in her course towards a glorious future that beckons her on!

To such a day when O you heroes rise,
I send these lines tonight.
They'll waft through the dark, the starry skies,
To welcome you with the light.