Chandra Babu, your great-uncle sacrificed everything for the nation and succeeded in eliciting the same response from 60,000 INA soldiers as well, not counting the countless patriotic expatriate Indians who gave their health, wealth and life to serve the cause of freedom at their Netaji's call. How can we rest in peace and allow this perfidy of distortion of history even after seven decades of independence and the attempt by eminent historians to tone down Netaji's contribution to the cause of freedom? Gandhi and his brigade humiliated the Tripuri Congress President which Subhas Bose was, forced him to resign, then expelled him from Congress and finally, when the hero, indomitable as he was, armed in Vivekananda's undying mantra of self-reliance and uninhibited patriotism devoid of self-interest, essayed his course through the continents of Europe and Asia to knock upon the doors of his motherland with a mighty array of freedom-loving revolutionaries, the British quaked in fear to behold their loyal Indian soldiers turning upon them. Gandhi then derided Subhas as a modern-day Robin Hood who had caught the imagination of a section of the youth and the womenfolk and, thus, downplayed his movement in a clever and calculated way, quite not in keeping with the truth he so espoused, for it was a deliberate and blatant lie that the Mahatma yet resorted to, to gain a political end. Gandhi taught future generations of Indian politicians deceit in defeat and machination to muster support, a lesson which Congressmen learnt from him first-hand to bring about the future degradation of the country while ever clamouring in the name of their illustrious preceptor. And what Nehru did is a blasphemy I cannot recount here in response to your impassioned articulation but which I, for sure, will in future publish to let people know the brutal truth of the perfidies he perpetrated against his comrade-in-arms in the freedom struggle.
Mahatma Gandhi was never equipped with the refined intelligence one needs to be a statesman. He was a mediocre student throughout his academic career right from his school days, never excelling or showing any promise whatsoever that would mark him out as an outstanding public figure, especially one who would be the helmsman of an entire nation gone dry of kshatriya valour as is enjoined upon in our scriptures as the necessary condition for national well-being. The British had disarmed India entirely after the terrible losses of the so-called 1857 Sepoy Mutiny as the British mischievously dubbed it but which, in effect, was the First War of Indian Independence. Thereafter, the Indian National Congress was founded by a retired British civil servant by the name Alan Octavian Hume in 1885 to provide a safety-valve for brewing revolutionary fervour and allowing it a manageable constitutional channel to seek redress. This was a calculated British ploy and the disarmed Indians, having no other means of expressing their grievances, fell for it. The British had put in a lot of research into the Indian psyche and the workings of Indian society before employing this stratagem to contain revolutionary activity in India. The understanding they gained from their study was that Indians were an extremely spiritual people who could be well-relied upon to serve them loyally once they were sworn into the vow of loyalty to the British Crown. In especial, the Sikhs and the Gurkhas were unflinching in their loyalty to the master and these the British sought to enlist in their armed forces to expand and defend their Empire. Added to this was the divided Indian society on the grounds of religion and caste. Hindus and Muslims they sought to separate and to achieve this malicious end the British patronised the All India Muslim League whenever it was expedient to rule the land by instituting divisions in the body politic of India. To top it all came the Dalit Movement of Ambedkar and the creation of separate electorates for the provincial legislatures. In this delicate and dangerous mix of circumstances, Gandhi carried on with his non-violent passive resistance impulsively without plan or detailed programme, starting his movements as abruptly as he did end them, subject to his sudden fits of ideological compulsions and political misgivings, while holding on doggedly to his facile conceptions of humanity and the befriended enemy in the world of realpolitik which deceived him time and again to seal the doom for India that followed him blindly.
But not all. Not all were as gullible or as intransigent in ignorance as Gandhi was and there were wiser souls who widely differed with him but had not the mass-base to counter him effectively, but who, nonetheless, played a seminal role in the eventual emergence of the true liberator of India, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. We are reminded of C.R. Das of hallowed memory who was Bose's political preceptor and whose untimely death cost the fledgling hero the loss of a mentor he banked on in those early days of his political tutelage. The revolutionaries of Anushilan Samity, Jugantar, Hindustan Socialist Republican Association and the Ghadar Party who followed the masculine brand of revolutionary extremism, flood the patriot's vision when he looks back on those heady days of fervent political activity, those fearless soldiers of the soul who laid down their everything at the altar of the motherland to secure her freedom from the hands of the barbarous British but who were vilified as murderers and fringe lunatics by Gandhi in his moments of messianic madness and, otherwise, during saner hours were derided by the Mahatma as misguided idealists sinking into the abyss of corrupting violence. These then sporadically formed the alternative front which advanced the cause of freedom and struck terror into the heart of the British Raj such that in 1911 they shifted capital from calamitous Calcutta to the relatively docile New Delhi. But even here the British became the targets of North Indian revolutionary violence and it remained their only hope to parley with the mild Mahatma and give him prominence as the face of freedom-seeking India to prolong their rule in India even as they did their utmost to foil Gandhi through the likes of Ambedkar and Jinnah in their bid to keep the Indian struggle weak and divided.
Such was the state of Indian politics over which Gandhi never had any real control, as future events were to testify, and which, despite not having the resourcefulness or power to grapple with any measure of success in terms of real political achievement of winning freedom for an undivided India, the Mahatma experimented with as his means of attaining personal spiritual freedom. Facile though his political postulates were and naive his political programmes thereof, the Mahatma struck a chord with rural India in a measure unprecedented in history and led India to her eventual partitioned doom. En route he was manipulating to the core when it came to political adversaries like Bose and spared no means, fair or foul, to achieve their political demise, albeit in a Machiavellian though non-violent way. He used every trick of the lawyer's trade to conduct his dubious dealings with his perceived threats and he followed no ethical principles when it came to a head-on clash with a political opponent within the Congress. His much-vaunted truthfulness of intent then took to flight and what remained of him was his true self, the scheming politician and not the saint which ever was a facade on a much-compromised man masquerading as a mahatma. Where was the simplicity, the innocence in Gandhi whose every move was calculated to suit his own ideological ends irrespective of whether such a singular stance in a complex national situation would conduce to the eventual well-being of the motherland or not?
Admittedly, Gandhi faced a colossal task in awakening India to revolutionary non-violence, building a mass-base unparalleled in world history and, that too, without the use of violent propaganda or the use of force, and in this he was a phenomenal success. The point is not about his success as a mass leader. The point is as to where it eventually led India. It led to Partition and not to the freedom which was his dream and the lifelong dream of all revolutionaries, violent or non-violent, save of those that fought to fill up portfolios and fill their coffers on India achieving independence, whole-bodied or truncated, it mattered not to them. The chronicling of history has to be factual and its analysis has to be dispassionate and not founded on emotional attachment to personality. Here, Indian historians have failed miserably in being objective on account of their political affiliations and professional tie-ups with interested parties. Gandhi and Nehru have been unduly given the lion's share of space in the history of dependent and independent India while marginalising the seminal contribution of a political stalwart like Subhas Chandra Bose who, in point of fact, was the real liberator of India from British hands at the end of the Second World War. The INA thrust in Imphal and the subsequent INA Trials at the Red Fort set the country ablaze leading to the Royal Indian Navy Revolt in 1946, the Jabalpur British Indian Army uprising and the Royal Indian Air force rebellion. The country was in a fit of revolutionary fervour with the British Indian Armed Forces changing loyalty from the British Crown to the nationalists fighting for freedom. The British realised that the days of the Raj were over and it was time to quit the country. All these developments took place under the shadow of Netaji who had been reported to have been killed in an air-crash the previous year, 18 August, 1945, to be precise. Netaji in absentia wielded power over the masses like Caesar's ghost. His shadow loomed large on the entire landmass which had been ignited by his legendary exploits across East Asia. India became free, not because of Gandhi but in spite of Gandhi and the architect of this liberation was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Then followed the worst perfidy of all time. In the absence of Netaji and with a weakening Gandhi whose political sagacity was now being severely put to the test, Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten made common cause to partition India, ostensibly to avoid civil war, but in reality for the fulfilment of far more sinister designs for which millions died during the subsequent riots and during the transfer of populations across the borders of the newly born Pakistan on both sides of India. The holocaust that was sought to be avoided did take place and India stood on independence an amputated land with both arms severed as Pakistan claimed her territory on either side of India. Gandhi had fasted on unnumbered occasions in his life to achieve his political ends but now he was prudent enough not to resort to any such means to prevent Partition for he felt it would prove futile to the cause, and the deed of non-violence he finally signed with the murder of his motherland in which he inadvertently played no mean part. The political situation had precipitated to perdition, exactly as Netaji had forsworn it would in the case of a negotiated settlement of independence with the British. He had in conference with his trusted INA lieutenants articulated his fervent desire to seize independence form the British before the World War was over. Else, he had said, the British would for certain partition and permanently debilitate India.
Netaji was supposedly dead and was purportedly in peace at the Renkoji Temple of Tokyo. Gandhi fell to the assassin's bullet within five months of freedom. Patel died in 1950 after integrating the landmass of India. Now there was none to compete with for the coveted seat of the Prime Minister and Nehru reigned free of fear for the next 14 years till his death in 1964. But before that he suffered brutal humiliation at the hands of the Chinese in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. One more threat, they say, haunted him always. Was it the possible return of his old comrade, Subhas Chandra Bose, whom he had betrayed at every count throughout the latter's political career in India and whose eventual incarceration and possible death in a Siberian labour camp, many suspect, he had the power to prevent by reinstating the hero home but did not care to do in his bid to secure his own position politically as the Prime Minister of India? Was Netaji dead or was he alive and a witness to the high drama of India's independence and subsequent severe toil?
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