I am not apologetic about Nazi help for Netaji's cause at all. I rather feel we ought to give Nazi Germany and fascist imperial Japan their due credit in historical terms for the role they played to help liberate India which we, however, fail to do. I was merely responding to someone's denunciation of Nazism and exultation at Allied victory to spark off right thinking in the direction where we, who have suffered and continue to suffer from the effects of colonial oppression at the hands of so-called champions of liberty and democratic self-rule, ought to take our stand. Hypocritical double-standards will not do unless, of course, we are naive enough to believe that Nazism was an exclusive evil and colonial-imperialism the truest standard-bearer of human freedom in line with the evolution of the European Enlightenment as applied to sub-human races like us, Asiatics and Africans. The appellation 'sub-human' is not an ascription I submit to but is what the British thought us often to be.
And I am no fan of Nazism too but I neither take delight at British victory over Germany, knowing that I do, both to be unmitigated evils that have caused short-term and long-term damage to human evolution, and, perhaps, in a not-so-damaging way, advanced through destruction the cause of human evolution too. Who knows the complex ways of historical unfolding and the mysterious ways of the Mother?
I am not against anyone denouncing Nazism but how on earth may one say that the defeat of Germany in WW II was the mark of freedom? Freedom for whom? Humanity? Which humanity? They who practise colonialism, racism, imperialism and subjugation of the vast mass of humanity, they? What would have been your stance were you to be a member of the INA then? Exulting at Allied victory, that is, Germany's defeat, Japan's defeat and oblivion of Hiroshima-Nagasaki while also shedding tears for Netaji's simultaneous capitulation at that? Nay. I cannot subscribe to that. I cannot possibly rejoice at Allied victory and also rue Netaji's defeat and disappearance at the same time.
Yes, Nazism was barbaric but does that absolve British barbarism perpetrated across the colonised world for centuries? True, the Nazis represented the dark forces operative in the human spectacle but are we to believe thereby that the British were a civilising force of sorts for subjugated humanity whose very civilisation they undermined to build theirs, whose very coffers they looted to impoverishment of their flourishing societies, their bodies denuded, souls scarred by a malefic reign bent only and wholly upon exploitation without mercy for centuries on end? Is this our take on a nation that has well-nigh destroyed us? No, one may not be casting one's lot on every side to suit convenience.
I am no votary of Nazism but cannot personally bear glorification, however remote, of British barbarism euphemistically allowed credence as a lesser evil. One must read more of history and understand what the British over centuries have done to humanity. No wonder Swamiji had but once in his life cursed a race and that was the British when he had thundered against them with their future destruction at the hands of the marauding Chinese who will run over them in the days to come, throwing them into the North Sea, to use Swamiji's words, and that will serve them right, so the Prophet said. And before uttering this doom on the English, he had retold their barbaric past and their historical perfidies whence came the judgement he pronounced which he called the judgement of God, nay, the judgement of History.
Apologists for British rule in India often say that the British had come to civilise India, for the nation to emerge from its disparate principalities, but Netaji saw through the fallacy of this argument and has in his 'Indian Struggle' categorically repudiated this theory. India never required an emergence at the hands of the British. The nation (Rashtra) India was always there right from later Vedic Puranic times. Remember Dhritarashtra (holder of the nation/State) was the name given to the blind king, elder brother of Pandu, and this clearly proves that the idea and the practice of the nation State was always there in India. All of Aryavarta (North and South India) were held by the common ideal of the Veda and the civilisation thereof and that gave it national integration. Adi Shankaracharya affirmed this idea of integrated India (Akhanda Bharatvarsha) by way of setting up four key monasteries in the four zones of India --- North, South, East and West ---, each of which was entrusted with the upkeep of a Veda as the symbol and spirit of the idea of eternal, undivided India. Later, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had done a similar wanderjahre across the length and breadth of the land and last, just the other day, Swami Vivekananda gave utterance to this idea of the age-old spiritual, cultural and geographical solidarity of the Indian State as opposed to the integrated British colony in his now famous discovery of the soul of India in his wanderings across the face of this vast motherland of ours. And the Brits did not come to give us nationhood. They were looters who did their ancestral job well enough.
Himmler, Eichmann and Frank of historical infamy, true, but add to that Clive, Churchill, O'Dwyer and Truman too. We shudder to remember, true, Nazi barbarism for it was manifestly evil but have not the discerning eye to look into British barbarism perpetrated over centuries to debilitate Asia and Africa. So much for our own humanity. Button press to oblivion for the twin cities of Japan and decade long hue and cry over twin towers! No remorse there at all, for repression over weaker nations persists despite past perfidies galore.
32 million Indians molested to death due to starvation caused expressly by British policy over two centuries; the nation amputated on grant of dominion status, caused by them again; a nation divided still into separate identities, seeds sown by them again; the borders of Palestine-Israel, China-India and so forth, all mischievously drawn up by the Brits to create seeds of future disunity among nations. Swamiji was not wrong in his assessment of the English.
Netaji was a first-hand witness to both regimes, the Brits and the Germans and did not consider either relatively better than the other. And you talk of gas chambers and concentration camps of the Nazis? Well, the Brits had converted the whole of their colonies in the West Indies and in Africa into vast concentration camps of a different order, more poisonous than what manifestly the Nazis did. They were destroyers of nations and races for over centuries.
And do not blame the Nazis alone for the World War II, for France and Britain had precipitated it ever since the mischievous Versailles Treaty of 1919.
Now, my friend, when logic fails, when reason quits, you quote authority to prove a point. Let us rather learn to take a personal stand on issues and not rely on authority of dubious order to validate our point. People who have fled the scene of struggle for the motherland's liberation on the basis of high-sounding principles far lower than which they failed to practise in their lives, need not be cited as authority enough to hammer home a point, for the very absence of character in such will make the very citing an exercise in futility. A personal take is better when honesty and sincerity devoid of egotistical clouding of vision actuates one in one's convictions and express articulations thereof.
No comments:
Post a Comment