WHEN INDIA ALMOST BECAME FREE

India, Hiren Mukerjee says, would have achieved liberation during the First World War had Bagha Jatin and his comrades successfully carried out their programme of the planned armed insurrection against the British with German arms assistance, and he argues that it was a very likely outcome given the British weakness at the time and the precarious global situation in which Great Britain was heavily compromised. Remember, the British had been hit hard, so hard by the Bengal revolutionaries that, far from succeeding in partitioning Bengal which got reunited in 1911, the British were forced to shift capital from Calcutta to New Delhi and this itself proves the admission of British weakness and capitulation at the hands of the extreme revolutionaries of Bengal. How on earth could they have faced up to the might of an insurrection by Bagha Jatin and his German-armed revolutionary army if intelligence failure had not helped the British foil the revolution? The Czechs did the damage and so India's chains remained unbroken even as fresh links to it were forged by the perfidious British, this time along communal lines.

A like thing happened when Bhagat Ram Talwar, code-named 'Silver' by the British, Kirti Kisan Party member and a close associate of Netaji during his great escape from India, who was, unknown to the unsuspecting Netaji, a double agent working for the British, leaked vital information given him in complete trust by Netaji on his triumphant return with the INA to Burma, to the British who, thus, having advance knowledge of the future movements of the INA, could foil its successful invasion of British India. When a country has nationalism of so many shades and hues that differ in their intent as the affiliated parties within the Congress did at the time of the World Wars, it is small wonder that seminal souls like Netaji and Bagha Jatin face such insurmountable opposition in extricating the enemy from the motherland.

A nation united in patriotic fervour and not one divided by ideology that gains precedence over national interest, achieves its liberation the way it serves the national interest best. And when such unity of interest is not achieved and party ideology rules the roost, then a nation falls to ruins as India did. Annihilated in her hopes and aspirations, she got amputated in obtaining freedom, one for which none of her freedom fighters had fought save the betrayers in Jinnah and his cronies who had fought the alternative battle for secession from the mainland and the founding of an Islamic State.

Since the battle at Balasore where our aspirations for freedom the valorous way perished with the death of Bagha Jatin and his comrades, history meandered along a different route for India with Gandhian effeminacy supplanting the manhood of the Bengal revolutionaries.