FORGET NOT THEY WHO NEVER FORGOT YOU

But for him we would not have been free and despite he being well alive beyond the concoction of the air-crash, we were betrayed into the belief that he was dead and gone. Such perfidy is unpardonable and history seeks retribution in the form of its rectification today and the true narration of the story of the freedom struggle of India by her valiant souls who took up the virile step of waging war against the British Raj. The Indian National Army and its leader, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, did what they did for the sake of the motherland, selflessly, like only the brave can do and not the so-called votaries of passive resistance to active villainy which led to the transfer of power to a people despoiled of all that they cherished, their homeland reduced to a truncated landmass bearing no resemblance to the ancient motherland. Bagha Jatin, Masterda (Surja Sen), Kshudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Harnam Singh Saini, Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Batukeshwar Dutta, Jatin Das, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Sukhdev Thapar, Shivaram Rajguru, Benoy, Badal, Dinesh, Harigopal Bal (Tegra), Pritilata Waddedar and countless others, they who had shed their life's blood for future fools to desecrate the freedom they had won for us, their sacrifices for once shone sublime in the radiance of the assault Netaji and his I.N.A. launched against the Machiavellian British, those perpetrators of colonial crime the world over whose parallel is hard to find in the annals of history. But in the war waged by the I.N.A. we hear the echoes of the gun battle on the shore of Balasore three decades earlier when Bagha Jatin and his revolutionaries valiantly attempted to overthrow the alien usurper from the soil and the soul of India.

Those battles seem now like distant dreams as the people, fed on falsities and fabrications of an emasculate effeminacy masquerading as non-violence and winning independence from the mighty British, have lost their manhood in turn and with it national self-respect. Weakness is manifesting everywhere as corruption even as intermittent scams keep evolving to the incessant form. Now, it is a continuous drainage of the resources of the nation to fill the coffers of the very people one reposes faith in, every time one casts the ballot. The nation bleeds today like no independent nation ought to and the genesis of this may be traced to the distortion of history the people of India have been subjected to by Nehru and his cronies down the decades. Gandhi is no less culpable for he was the mastermind behind Subhas Chandra Bose's resignation from presidency of the Congress in 1939 and his subsequent expulsion from the party which led to the movement for independence irrevocably weakening and the country undergoing the horror of Partition whose malefic effect we are still absorbing in the form of the nefarious presence in our neighbourhood of rogue Pakistan, the hub of global terror for all of Gandhi's benedictory lessons of non-violence once preached to them.

Gandhi misread the British, so has Netaji spoken of the Mahatma in his political classic, 'The Indian Struggle', perhaps, out of residual reverence or political expediency while articulating his estimate of the leader's assessment of the political masters of dependent India. 'An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind'---this thesis of the Mahatma is simplistic and goes against the tenets of his spiritual hero, Shree Ramchandra, who had rightly waged war against Ravan to eliminate evil and establish righteousness on earth. In a like manner, it goes against the thunderous exhortations of Shree Krishna who expounded the Geeta to Arjun to impel him into war against the wicked Kauravas. The gullibility of Gandhi, however, is a naive assumption on our part, for in all probability, a contriver so shrewd as he was who spared no means to destroy opposition to his dictates by any means, fair or foul, Gandhi must have well assessed the then political situation in India and, sagacious as he was, he must have well understood that an unarmed population had no chance of successfully waging violent revolution against the superior military might of the British Indian Government of the day and that, non-violent struggle, which also temperamentally suited the mild Mahatma, was the one feasible option left to combat the evil that was British imperialism. The conditions were right for Gandhi with his own familial background of extreme Jain non-violence sanctioning him the moral justification for his non-violent struggle and providing the psychological basis for his abhorrence of violence as a valid, nay, indispensable means for attaining freedom from a barbarous people who understood the language of the pistol better than they did that of piety. History throws up its heroes in its hour of trial and Gandhi may have been right for the hour but ruinous when the shadows lengthened on his career and he refused to budge and let the young blood take over. Thus was the fate of a nation sealed in gestation as personality overrode principle while all the while principle was propounded to establish personality.

Those days are gone, destroyed are the dreams of generations of freedom-fighters, disillusionment is their reward for the blood they had spilled on the battlefields of Burma, Imphal and Kohima, yet, their eyes shine even today at the very mention of their heroic leader, Netaji, who remains their god and idol, their anchor and their all, despite the erosion of the times and the sinking of values into the morass of materialism. Netaji awakes in the declassified files by the hour but will the truth surface ever? Will history be re-written after all? Oh, then the world will shift from its axis as the treachery of the times will implicate England no less than India and from Churchill to Nehru, none will be spared. Do the powers that be at the Centre today, despite tall promises and taller protestations, have the teeth to press on with the pursuit of truth in conformity with their oft-repeated aphorism, 'satyameva jayatey' (victory unto truth), and bring to light that which is the foremost national need, the knowledge of what happened to Netaji? The world awaits and so does the hero, wherever he be, amused, perhaps, that it took his countrymen so long to wake up to the fact that in 'death' he had outlived all his perfidious peers both temporally and in the order of the Spirit that knows not the bounds of time. Or, perhaps, these are my musings after all; the hero could not care less, for his was a boundless giving, careless of return.

Jai Hind! Jai Azad Hind Fauj! Jai Netaji!