THE NATION REJOICES, TRUTH WILL TRIUMPH, NETAJI LIVES ON

What a day it has been! It felt like 15 August, 1947 when the news broke out that the Netaji files will be declassified at last. There was euphoria all over as the feeling sank in and one resonated to the vibrant descriptions of the first night of independence by one's mother long, long back when the whole nation was out there in the streets hugging each other, suffused with the emotion of redemption from slavery. 14 October, 2015 has been such a historic day. Memories of the midnight-hour, the first time over, will have flashed through the minds of old-timers who had witnessed it all. Verily, verily has this day been hailed as the true day of independence for our country by Netaji's grand-nephew Chandra Kumar Bose who in passionate terms spelt out the significance of this day whose import will only dawn on all with the passage of time as the day of final reckoning when history stood perplexed at the crossroads of its meandering course and then took a radical turn to seek its restoration. It is life to the nation, death to untruth and the resurrection of a billion souls who, like the phoenix from the ashes of the past, will yet arise, like the springing tiger, yet awake to take their destiny into their own hands and re-write the true history of their benighted motherland. It is a historic day, indeed. Netaji and his INA will be accorded their rightful place in the history of the freedom of this land. No more slighting, no more slandering, no more belittling their epic contribution to securing the freedom of hoary India long subjected to imperial tyranny. Today, the Prime Minister has won the hearts of a billion Indians and has aligned himself with the great revolutionaries of India that had bled for the freedom of their motherland. From the highest heavens are being showered on him graces by the martyrs who had given manhood to our movement before they spilled the blood of their veins to secure the release of their motherland from bondage. Glory unto all that had fought for the cause! Glory to Anuj Dhar, that leonine lone struggler in the formative years of the movement for declassification! Glory to his associates, one and all of that valiant enterprise, Mission Netaji! And glory to the countless millions of our sisters and brothers, our uncles and aunts, our departed ones, the deprived and the deceived, who have shed silent tears for the resurrection of their beloved Netaji, hoped against hope for his return as the government of the day spared no means to deny them access to these files that could have yet raised a revolution then and rescued the hero from his captivity unto death! Or perhaps, who knows, in what state he was? These files will tell.

And what a telling blow 'twill be for the perpetrators of this perfidy against the pre-eminent personality of the freedom struggle, its brightest star that had guided the course of the Indian revolution in distant land before assaulting itself in mighty vehemence against the tottering citadels of British imperialism to plant the Indian tricolour at Moirang in the summer of 1944! Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party have done a deal of duplicity in complicity with the British against Netaji and his men. Shame on the founding fathers of our nation! Passing intelligence details on 'dead' Netaji and his family to MI5 even after Independence? Was that not treason? Indira Gandhi ordered the destruction of two Netaji documents. Was that not treason? What was the content of those papers, the nation demands to know? Nehru sat on the information of Netaji's being in captivity in Stalinist Russia, keeping it from Indians while passing it on to the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, addressing Bose in his letter to Attlee as 'your war criminal' who ought to be dealt with by the British in any manner that suited them. Was this not perfidy of the most pernicious kind, the most malicious treachery to a comrade-in-arms who had sacrificed his all for the nation in the making? Was this not high treason? Ought Nehru not have used his Prime Ministerial powers vested in him by the people of this country to have brought Netaji back from Soviet confinement? But he did not do so. The country's first Prime Minister has much to answer for as history gets rewritten in the days to come post-declassification of the Netaji files.

The list of perfidious personalities is not yet over. The petty politicking of Gandhi in 1939, his tacit support of the pernicious Pant Resolution passed at Tripuri with the aim of crippling the duly elected Congress President and relegating him, thereby, to be a puppet in the hands of the great puppeteer, the Mahatma, his malicious manoeuvring of the members of the Congress Working Committee to the effect that Bose had eventually to resign from his Presidency and was thereafter expelled from Congress itself, all these proved to be disastrous for the country as it inexorably sank into the divisive bait of the British and suffered the horror of Partition. Does a Mahatma cling to temporal power in this mean fashion and betray the trust of a nation to bring about its terrible ruin when a brighter soul, 'young in age but ages in civilization', legitimately empowered by the Congress, seeks to unite the disparate forces within the polity at a moment of critical historical significance on the eve of the Second World War when a single sledgehammer blow by a united front could have sounded the death-knell for British imperialism and liberated the land these rapacious rogues had sought to desecrate and denude of wealth, culture and civilization? How perfidious does it seem in hindsight, even more now than when the hero of the nation, the 'Deshanayak' in the poet's peerless ascription, was betrayed by Congressmen at the behest of Gandhi and was, so, ousted from the Congress by the most malicious manoeuvring of the Mahatma that would put to shame the malevolent machinations of the British as well! And so were sown the seeds of dissension of a vicious kind in Indian politics to maintain a stranglehold over power that wrecked the life of this glorious nation for good, truncating it in freedom causing catastrophic communal carnage and ruining its run as a free nation fraught with hideous power-mongers who followed in the factious footsteps of the founding fathers of the nation. Hail Mahatma! Unto thee lies thy legacy from Tripuri!

But now, let us rejoice. History is being rewritten. The INA emerges from the forests of Burma, across the Chindwin, up the hills of Manipur on to Moirang once more to hoist this day the tri-colour of India's liberation from the tyranny of her own people at the helm of affairs. Once more the clarion call sounds, 'Chalo Dilli'. Netaji's shadow looms large on the perpetrators of perfidy, the ghost of history tracks down its suppressors. But for us, this is the hour of celebration, the moment of reckoning when the curtain on truth is being finally lifted and the sunshine of hope and light beginning to gleam through the dense dark of obscurity, of oblivion of our beloved Netaji and his children, the valiant soldiers of the INA. Let us rejoice even as we shed tears in pride and pain as we remember the triumphs and tribulations of the marching INA with the merriment of sacrifice writ large on their youthful faces. Who will forget thee, valiant martyrs for the cause? Not us, not us, we who have dedicated our body and soul to carry on the struggle started and sustained by you. Every drop of your blood will be avenged as we surge ahead to build the beloved motherland of your dreams, O heroic ones. Unto thee lies the future of India in us, the carriers of thy charge. We pledge to fulfil, we seek thy blessings, we prostrate at thy feet, Netaji.