Vivekananda was a volcanic character whose words, lava-like, erupted to inflame the nation into revolutionary activity against the British imperialists once, but even his influence has been dulled into relativity passivity overtime by lack of the courage of conviction and a broad honesty in presentation of his universal but tumultuous tenets by his followers and protagonists. Universality precludes the idea of honest representation of the teachings of the messiah and not edited versions to suit political ends. Such an attempt emasculates the firebrand message of the hero and largely renders it sterile.
Nivedita was the rightful heir to Vivekananda's political thought but even she has been sadly sidelined from the public imagination by concerted efforts to paint her overly as women's educationist while deliberately under-presenting her participation in revolutionary politics of the times where she was the linkman between Swamiji and the revolutionaries, the interpreter of his political aspirations, the continuance of his legacy, veritably, the conscience of the corrupted times.
Then followed the emergence of the Mahatma and his absolutist creed of non-violence which, because of its proponent's personal magnetism and his resonance with the masses, became the dominant mode of struggle for independence in the country. This significantly retarded the progress of the violent revolutionary movement barring sporadic cases of violent extremism and such great uprisings as the one in Chittagong (Chattogram) following the famed Armoury Raid. However, the Gandhian movement, which was very much in tune with the fundamentally non-violent spirit of the vast majority of Indians, grew in strength and gave solidarity to the freedom struggle. Gandhi became the symbol of awakening India and his satyagraha, the cornerstone round which revolved the hopes and aspirations of over 350 million people.
But the Gandhian movement, although a most effective method of mass awakening and mass participation in the freedom struggle, lacked the firepower that was necessary to uproot the British Raj from Indian soil and overthrow it. In came Subhas Chandra Bose to fill the void and herein began his ideological clash with the Mahatma although he now became the voice of the dormant extremist struggle that yet dreamt of freeing the motherland by armed insurrection.
Subsequent developments within the Indian National Congress catapulted Bose to the premiership of Congress when he was nominated President in 1938. But his advocacy of the maintenance of a disciplined non-violent army by the Congress alarmed Gandhi who now adopted every possible means to politically isolate Bose and render him impotent but for the valiant one's star which was still on the ascendant. Bose won the election for Congress presidency in 1939 defeating Gandhi's nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya by a handsome margin. The Mahatma, smarting from the defeat, took it as a personal debacle and quickly set about plotting the downfall of Bose by dubious undemocratic means which has tarnished his saintly image for good and exposed him before posterity as a man, malicious, conniving and foul in intent, an autocrat who could stoop to any level to achieve his political or ideological objective, one who masqueraded as a mahatma but in reality was a shrewd manipulator of resources human, a trait which in the end met its tragic end in the Partition of India and a plethora of her present-day problems arising out of it.
But before that the great escape of Bose, his 'Mahanishkraman' for which, my readers, you will have to wait for the next edition of this series of essays.
No comments:
Post a Comment