To give life to India Swamiji died. To free India from her
colonial shackles Netaji suffered. Did he die as well in Russian hands or by
British assassin? I do not know. But these two leonine souls, utterly
masculine, robust to the core with character incorruptible, stand head and
shoulders above the rest of the leaders who have led India to her downfall in
the wake of divisive and debilitating politics perpetrated by them.
When the Mahatma vouched in the name of Rama his creed of non-violence and denounced the doctrine of violence as a means of gaining freedom from British imperialism, he was giving expression to a strange version of his Master’s own struggle to extricate his beloved wife from the clutches of the demons of Lanka. When did Ramachandra practice non-violence to subdue Ravana? We do not have any historical or mythical account of Rama having waged passive resistance against the demons in order to eliminate evil. But the disciple would stubbornly give his strange interpretation to epic events and dogmatically refuse to lend his ears to saner voices either of political adversaries like Bose or political philosophers like Nivedita. His academic mediocrity of boyhood, he carried into his adult life and then to old age to give debilitated India her dose of future decadence despite his seminal contributions towards mass awakening for which we are all grateful.
But our gratitude to Gandhi for breaking the stupor notwithstanding, the Mahatma remains answerable for the enormous damage he has done to India’s cause by eliminating Bose from the Indian national scene at a time when his presence was of vital moment and would surely have avoided the catastrophes that followed in the forties leading to Partition of the Motherland. To put up Nehru as his protege and pursue passivity of approach towards the tyrannical British was to inadvertently help perpetuate British imperialism in India. Bose saw through this weakness of approach so convenient for the British to exploit and tried to extricate the Congress out of it but came to face the impasse called the Mahatma whose personal agenda of dogmatic non-violence ran contrary to the stream of Bose’s thoughts intent on freedom at any reasonable cost.
The Second World War offered a unique opportunity to India, Bose felt, to free herself from bondage. The Bolsheviks had successfully staged the Russian Revolution at the height of the First World War and in India Bagha Jatin and his revolutionaries had failed to pull off the coup d’etat on the shores of Balasore. Now history offered a unique second chance and Bose read the international situation well in advance to prepare his countrymen for the forthcoming struggle.
When the Mahatma vouched in the name of Rama his creed of non-violence and denounced the doctrine of violence as a means of gaining freedom from British imperialism, he was giving expression to a strange version of his Master’s own struggle to extricate his beloved wife from the clutches of the demons of Lanka. When did Ramachandra practice non-violence to subdue Ravana? We do not have any historical or mythical account of Rama having waged passive resistance against the demons in order to eliminate evil. But the disciple would stubbornly give his strange interpretation to epic events and dogmatically refuse to lend his ears to saner voices either of political adversaries like Bose or political philosophers like Nivedita. His academic mediocrity of boyhood, he carried into his adult life and then to old age to give debilitated India her dose of future decadence despite his seminal contributions towards mass awakening for which we are all grateful.
But our gratitude to Gandhi for breaking the stupor notwithstanding, the Mahatma remains answerable for the enormous damage he has done to India’s cause by eliminating Bose from the Indian national scene at a time when his presence was of vital moment and would surely have avoided the catastrophes that followed in the forties leading to Partition of the Motherland. To put up Nehru as his protege and pursue passivity of approach towards the tyrannical British was to inadvertently help perpetuate British imperialism in India. Bose saw through this weakness of approach so convenient for the British to exploit and tried to extricate the Congress out of it but came to face the impasse called the Mahatma whose personal agenda of dogmatic non-violence ran contrary to the stream of Bose’s thoughts intent on freedom at any reasonable cost.
The Second World War offered a unique opportunity to India, Bose felt, to free herself from bondage. The Bolsheviks had successfully staged the Russian Revolution at the height of the First World War and in India Bagha Jatin and his revolutionaries had failed to pull off the coup d’etat on the shores of Balasore. Now history offered a unique second chance and Bose read the international situation well in advance to prepare his countrymen for the forthcoming struggle.
No comments:
Post a Comment