BOSE, AN INDIAN SAMURAI --- JUST HOURS FROM THE BOOK LAUNCH

Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi's book, BOSE, AN INDIAN SAMURAI, is just hours from its release. With it will be launched the true history of the military offensive of the INA against the Anglo-American forces during World War II leading to India's independence. Maj Gen Bakshi has done painstaking research into unravelling a fresh military perspective on the subject. At last the true picture of the INA's seminal contribution towards India's freedom will be there in the public domain and some of the cobwebs in the brains of the namby-pamby liberals of the Indian intelligentsia will be removed. A virile narrative of India's greatest hero since Chhatrapati Shivaji as can only be expected from the robust pen of India's prime patriot, the venerable septuagenarian Major General, will set aflame the imagination, dormant but not extinct, in the minds of patriotic Indians.

In this age of decadent culture when all around there is an utter lack of character in men, when superficiality and foppishness clamour for centre-stage in life, when rampant corruption has so eaten into the vitals of the nation that people have resigned themselves to the degenerate order of the day, it is then that BOSE, AN INDIAN SAMURAI surfaces like an isle in a turbulent sea whose freshness of flora reinforces one's faltering faith in life and ushers one to a brighter morrow, a renascent future and a renewed hope of living. These are not poetic fancies, hyperbolic expressions divorced from truth but are the truest aspirations of the Indian mind that cling to the form of the foremost of men who breathed life into the Indian nation even before she bled to her birth in this cataclysmic age of her trials and tribulations.

Netaji lives on in the hearts and minds of a billion Indians despite the perfidious attempts to erase his very memory, to banish him into oblivion through falsities and fabrications of his disappearance and death, to set him up as a villain, tainted and tarnished by fascism and foibles, while the hero bore it all who knows where, in a Siberian gulag or an Indian hideout? Where was he post 18 August, 1945? Did he survive his internment in Soviet Russia or did he become a martyr to Stalin's madness? Or, perhaps, he escaped into his homeland in as dramatic a way as he had exited it? These are so many questions whose answers lie shrouded in mystery that seemingly never lifts. Yet, the hour comes when fresher narratives will be written and illusions will be dispelled as truth surfaces bringing the hero home. Such a narrative is waiting in the wings, friends, culled from the research of years by a prominent citizen of India, a patriot to the core, an ex-military man, Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi who needs no introduction to his countrymen, suffused as he is with love for his motherland and that great love he bears to the subject of his research and writing, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. I exhort all to celebrate the occasion of the launch of this wonderful work of heart and perhaps, also of art, for considerable are the literary attainments of the author and abiding the force of his love for India and her heroic daughters and sons who lived and died for her freedom. And may I take it upon myself to make a personal request? Please read this book and for once behold Netaji and the INA in the true light of their Kshatriya valour, never forgetting that you owe your free breath to these fallen heroes, 26,000 of them in the dense jungles of Burma and on the hill-tops of Imphal and Kohima.

The Indian National Army had waged war against the British and liberated the motherland. But for them we would never have been able to look into our own eyes with any sense of self-dignity, for other than their valiant effort, we merely put up a sham of non-violent resistance, effeminate and ineffective in evicting the mighty British who only understood the language of force which they applied to rule their colonies and to which they capitulated when they were at its ruthless receiving end. The INA's exploits inflamed India. The INA War Trials at the Red Fort set ablaze the fire of revolution across the ranks of the British Indian Army, Navy and Air Force. Every department of the Imperial Government in India revolted as the Royal Indian Navy led the way in 1946 and forced the British into a hasty retreat to their northern habitat. Despite such valorous attainments of Netaji and the INA, how is it that we got our freedom in August 1947, a truncated land amidst the cataclysm of civil war? And where did Netaji disappear? What happened to the INA? How did the Government of Free India treat these supremely patriotic and self-sacrificing soldiers? Like you, I also do not know so many of these answers clearly. Let us wait a few more hours and Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshi will tell us in his own thundering way. Dr. Subramanian Swamy, Honourable Member of Rajya Sabha, will release the book at Gulmohar Hall, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003 at or around 18:30 hours this day, 6 May, 2016. Jai Hind!