VIVEKANANDA AND NETAJI ... 1

Both were brilliant in their respective fields. While Subhas Chandra Bose was academically a topper throughout his life, Narendranath Dutta was more of an academic outlaw, excelling in self-study, and, ironically enough, doing the study of the Self as well to which Subhas Chandra was also no stranger for he frequented the Himalayas in his very early youth in search of God. Not out of context will be to state the fact that Subhas had in his nascent quest for God not found a Paramahamsa like Narendranath was fortunate in finding but did land up in the precincts of Belur Math, the seat of worship of the peerless prophet founded by his leonine protege. Swami Brahmananda, the spiritual son of Sri Ramakrishna, was then the abbot of the monastery and advised the yearning youth to concentrate his energy on service to the nation instead and, so, channelised his aspirations towards the direction which it took which is all common knowledge.

Brahmananda was Vivekananda's brother-disciple and Vivekananda was the spiritual mentor at a distance for Subhas Chandra. Well, there were so many national leaders who were inspired by Swamiji but none more than Gandhiji's political adversaries (in his mind), the 'terrorists' and the 'extremists', the ones that vouched to free the motherland through the use of violence so very repugnant to the Mahatma but so much in line with some of Vivekananda's thinking, were such ardent followers of the precepts of virility preached by Swamiji. Netaji was the last one in this long line of illustrious leaders of the freedom movement who made Swamiji the pole star of his life and his spiritual preceptor in absentia.

After having read Vivekananda, Gandhiji too was inspired to love his motherland a thousandfold more, so he said from the balcony of Vivekananda's house in Belur Math on the occasion of the latter's birth anniversary in 1921, but he could never quite align himself wholeheartedly to the prophet's radical views on the overthrow of the vicious British Indian Government. This was later amply borne out by the altercation between the Mahatma and that veritable lioness of a woman, Sister Nivedita, the foremost and formidable disciple of Vivekananda. In a half-hour deliberation with her, Gandhiji was literally whitewashed by the Irishwoman who demolished his every philosophical argument in defence of non-violence as the sole political tool worthy of employment to achieve independence from the British. An exasperated Gandhi had met his adversary in verbal combat and was thoroughly pulverised by the experience. One wonders what his state would have been had he succeeded in meeting the mighty monarch --- whose sovereign power had barely been reflected in the audacious disciple --- and had inadvertently broached the selfsame subject before the prophet of patriotism. Gandhiji had in fact twice tried to meet Swamiji but had failed on both occasions. What a study in contrast might have been the encounter between the lion and the lamb one may now only conjecture but may not quite construe for history throws up strange surprises and this might have been one such occasion. But what if it had turned out to be a verbal duel? One feels sorry for the outcome in every sense of the term. Perhaps, India was not yet deserving of a better fate than the one she eventually received at the hands of the Mahatma and his perfidious protege, Nehru, and, thus, this epic encounter between the prophet and the pacifist was avoided by the machinations of Mahamaya.

So, the thesis is this : the Mahatma could in no way fully accept the Swami for the latter had amidst his catholic formulations even formulated the bomb-theory which he had articulated to Tilak in Belur Math as the one thing then necessary to evict the British from India. Herein lay the fundamental difference between the catholic approach of the political pragmatists like Netaji, Bagha Jatin, Hem Chandra Ghosh, Surya Sen and the like --- all of whom were deeply influenced in their political convictions after having either personally met or having read Swamiji and adopted an attitude that embraced all possible political tools to be employed in the eviction of the British including terrorist activity and wholesale war which of course was reprehensible to the muddled mediocrity of the Mahatma --- and the Mahatma's own torn technique of easing away from the British in as gentlemanly a manner as possible which decreed disaster on the populace. While the former followed the virile philosophy of the Swami, the latter, for all his supposed saintliness, shied away from the masculinity of confronting the enemy in its own terrain in the battlefield and hid his inadequacy under the cover of false philosophy, outlandish ideology uncorroborated by any Indian scripture, especially, the Bhagavad Geeta which was text-tortured by the Mahatma to suit his fanciful dispositions about freedom. Thus, on all counts the Mahatma was far removed from Vivekananda's virility and Netaji and his kindred spirits were the true proteges of the Swami. What the former lacked on account of personality deficiency, the latter exuded in abundance and fetched the freedom the Mahatma enjoyed for the brief flicker of life left to him before his catastrophic demise.

But we live on to enjoy the fruits of freedom kept in safekeeping with us by our Netaji who was truly the spiritual son of Swamiji. What more can be said than that Netaji was, like Nivedita, the true heir to Swamiji's principles and philosophy, the heir-apparent of the mighty monarch who came to reshape the landscape of the human mind, reinvent man after his manner, reorient human evolution towards its destiny divine? Vivekananda initiated the human renaissance, Netaji fulfilled it. The preceptor propounded the philosophy of freedom from the pulpit of the world ; the pupil executed it to perfection and liberated the peoples of the world by striking the death-knell of British imperialism. They encompassed the wide world between them and left their impress on humanity for good. Jai Hind!