MR. PRIME MINISTER, 'TIS TIME TO DELIVER

The day of reckoning is fast approaching. Less than 24 hours to go before Netaji comes alive in the discussions at 7, Race Course Road at the Prime Minister's residence. History will be relived. Memories will flash along the tumultuous terrain of the Second World War in those turbulent final hours when the hero disappeared in a mist of uncertainty. Where, who can tell? Prior to the vesper hour deliberations will be on, the shame of a nation unfolded, the call for resurrection sounded. ‘twill be 5 in the evening when history will seek redress for unforgivable offences perpetrated in the name of patriotism by the politicians of the day, then and now, against one of the greatest patriots this country has ever seen.

  

There is a vibrancy in the air, a deal of expectancy, a feverish excitation building up in the minds of all who care for the cause of declassification, hectic activity along the corridors of power for good or for ill and a foreboding in the minds of the culpable ones who spared no means to erase the very memory of those whose remembrance even today brings tears to the eyes, a thrill in the fabric of one’s being and a nervous current that enthuses one to once more live for the land of one’s birth and die each moment for its eternal beatitude.

I wonder how Netaji must have felt when the nation let him down, when the Mahatma, who he so admired despite the latter’s terrible idiosyncrasies, simply rejected him and got him ousted from the Congress, when Nehru, his once comrade-in-arms in the Congress, did not let him return to his homeland and perhaps let him rot in a Stalinist gulag in Siberia, I wonder how the hero, forlorn and forgotten, must have felt as his country slipped from the ideals he and his fellow revolutionaries had fought for and valiantly died for on the battlefields of Asia. It is the worst perfidy perpetrated on patriots in the annals of history, not so much by the British as by the very countrymen they liberated from the tentacles of their tyranny. History, when fully revealed, if ever such a blessed day dawns on our beloved Motherland, will bring to book these perpetrators of the most horrendous offence to the freedom movement and the national life thereafter, that of plotting to keep away India’s brightest star from the current of national life and so depriving the Motherland of the services of her greatest son. Who knows what might have happened had the Mahatma and his men not hatched this conspiracy to keep Bose at bay and so self-advance the programme of perverted politics that would partition the nation and apportion power to the plight of the people of this benighted land?

But more of these we may muse on when the parley with the PM will be over and the nation will rejoice or mourn the life or the death of democracy that remains enshrined in her representative leadership. Till then, my countrymen, hold your hearts in the highest hope that truth will triumph, that the Prime Minister will see reason to declassify the Netaji Files and so enshrine his name along with all that have loved and died for Netaji and those that have lived on to carry on the struggle for the establishment of truth, justice and the restoration of history. Jai Hind!