SHAHEED, SWARAJ AND NETAJI

The dreaded Cellular Jail in Shaheed (Andamans) where the most dangerous revolutionaries in British eyes were incarcerated, tortured and executed whose horrors send shivers down one's spine and fill one with pathos at the plight of the prisoners who lived and died to set us free from the hands of the barbarous British. It has been my privilege to intimately know one such prisoner as a child, our Jogi Dadu, who used to tell us stories from his days of internment in the Cellular Jail, how iron nails used to be driven into the fingernails of the prisoners to extract information from them and how the fingernails would then be taken out from the fingers. I remember I could not quite fathom then the import of the stories but I used to watch with rapt wonderment at the stoic face of Jogi Dadu as he recounted those days of old. This was in the mid-sixties of the last century when I heard these stories. I still can recall the wistful look in his eyes as he beheld his comrades in his mind's eye suffering torture and death so many years ago in the island of hell where blood flowed in equal stream with the waves of the surrounding waters and the tears of mothers and wives and daughters from the far-off mainland sent emissaries of empathy across the black waters (kalapani) to sustain the valorous ones in their hour of terrible torment.

On 29 December, 1943, Netaji visited the Andamans and headed straight for the Cellular Jail where he paid glowing tributes to the martyrs that had fallen there and the prisoners that had suffered persecution. The following day he hoisted the National Flag on this, the first territorial tract of India to be liberated form British occupancy. In the spring of the following year, Netaji, now the official administrative head of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by agreement with Imperial Japan who had handed over the islands to the Provisional Government of Free India, renamed Andaman as Shaheed in honour of the incarcerated heroes and martyrs of the freedom struggle at the Cellular Jail and Nicobar as Swaraj in celebration of the installation of the Provisional Government of Free India in the islands, the official handing over of charge taking place on 17 February, 1944.

Shaheed and Swaraj being the first territory of dependent India to be liberated from the British, became symbolic of the revolutionary fervour that now drove the INA to the mountainous terrain of Northeast India, and the fall of the Cellular Jail became likened to the fall of the Bastille in Paris, 1789, that had sparked off the French Revolution. In the days to come half of Assam, a slice of Imphal (Manipur) and a portion of Bengal were liberated and held by the INA for nearly three months but sudden reverses in the Second World War suffered by Japan and early heavy precipitation that year forced a retreat for the INA from the liberated lands leading to their re-annexation by the British.

However, Shaheed and Swaraj have passed into folklore and so has the Cellular Jail but the British restored the earlier names of the islands and the Government of free India later exhibited scant interest in upholding the legacy of Netaji there out of loyalty to the alien masters who had entered the nervous system of the Anglophile Nehru and his comrades in non-violent cooperation with the divisive British who surgically partitioned the motherland before beating a hasty retreat out of sheer fear of a violent reprisal at the hands of their Indian Armed Forces whose loyalty, now significantly eroded by the INA's wartime activities, they could no longer rely on. Netaji never showed up again since his reported air crash at Taihoku airfield on 18 August, 1945.

And what followed was heresy of an order unmatched in the annals of history when a freshly freed India, at the behest of Nehru and later his successors in the corrupt Congress, conspired with Britain, USA and USSR to suppress all information on the missing Netaji and, instead, perpetuated the myth of his death in the air crash that had been first floated by Imperial Japan on 23 August, 1945, to provide a smoke screen for Netaji to escape to the Soviet Union. This inference is being based on evidence emerging from recently declassified files on Netaji. Furthermore, the INA was disbanded, the pensions of the soldiers who freed India were denied and the soldiers themselves were refused recruitment in the Indian Armed Forces. Netaji was written off the history books, the INA Treasure was appropriated by sinister forces with a non-committal silence by the Nehru Government on the issue of an official enquiry into it and files on Netaji were kept classified for close to seventy years and two crucial ones even destroyed by Indira Gandhi's Government. Netaji has remained a 'War Criminal' in the eyes of the world even after seven decades of Indian independence which we owe principally to him, and the Government of India is still reticent to get his name cleared of all such scurrilous charge.

This much for gratitude from a benighted nation for a soul sublime, the like of whom has not visited us in recent memory barring the warrior monk, Vivekananda. Between the prophet and the patriot, Swamiji and Netaji have apportioned the burden of resurrection of the motherland and none has even remotely matched their absolute commitment to the cause, not even the Mahatma of malicious manipulation for magnificent intent. The rest pale into insignificance, despite their seminal contribution, before the splendour of the soul of the Netaji whose superb sacrifice and indomitable will saw to the eventual eviction of the British from the landmass of India as his shadow stalked the ramparts of the Red Fort during the INA Trials that set ablaze a nation long suppressed of its right to respire free of colonial roguish restraint. May Netaji be reborn in our hearts and minds as an undying source of inspiration to rebuild our motherland and career her back to her pristine glory and way beyond unto the zenith of her future progression! May the martyrs of Shaheed and Swaraj inspire in us courage of conviction to combat the corruptions in our consciousness that we may consider it our calling to correct our course! Jai Hind!