TO BE OR NOT TO BE A NATION

Caught in the cauldron of the Second World War, yet, emerging triumphant in defeat to liberate his motherland from the barbarous hold of the British, the hero remains unheralded in the history of the times save in fascist terms, having been forgotten by a nation that has betrayed him before the wide world and failed to resurrect his memory in shining apparel, in the very resplendence that he lent his countrymen through his lifelong ardour and unprecedented sacrifice climaxing in that ultimate thrust on the borders of British India that in real terms and in its aftermath ejected the colonists for good. If ever there was a patriot, this was it. Like Rashbehari Bose before him, he traversed the path of revolution alone, against insurmountable odds, and came so perilously close to victory that in his very defeat was sealed the fate of the British Raj and, with the jewel in the Crown gone, the Empire, that never saw the setting sun, was itself eclipsed and came to a crashing collapse that altered the contours of the world for good.

And such a one who had walked through hell to bring us the pearl of paradise, the cherished fruit of freedom, O such a one we have in our somnolence relegated to the backyard of the brain as we perish in perpetuity for such perfidy. From the hell-fire the hero emerged to attain to the heaven of spiritual freedom which in his motherland's breaking of British bondage he saw it manifest from wherever he may have been. But when shall we emerge from this hell-fire of ingratitude, amnesia and sheer oblivion that now threatens to annihilate our very existence as a nation held in truth? It is not proper that we trumpet in international fora like the United Nations and in like multilateral meets as a nation steeped in the hoary tradition of truth while we practise the most dastardly variant of untruth in regard to our mightiest prophet of nationalism, our premier patriot, our liberator from the abyss of servitude.

Politicians of the past may have found it convenient to sidetrack Netaji and vainly imagine thereby that they may relegate him to the waste bin of history but ground reality changes not. History has her own elephantine memory and plants in her fabric the seeds of the present flow, formulations pregnant with future possibilities, encapsulations denoting the entire episodic range whence arise the edifice of futurity. The ocean en masse is infinitely stronger than the wave which is a surface-dweller, and fashions fresh tsunamis to sweep off present perfidies and leave behind a harvest of deeds divine of forgotten times, forgotten climes, the lost symphonies of the soul. They recede from the shores of human memory, but only for a while before they deluge on the return in an all-advancing tide sweeping hindrances from the path of human progress and refashioning the state of human affairs as allows for rapid movement towards the destination, the goal of human freedom.

What then will be our stance towards these luminaries of our freedom struggle? Must we remain apathetic towards their memory and fail them in every possible way to seal our own fate? Is this what freedom is all about, the freedom that we so vaunt of as being the foster-child of non-violence and truth practised in cyclical bounds of the spinning wheel? Or is there something more to morality than the Mahatma could conjure with his magical wand wielded before a degenerate Congress leadership that towed his line to avoid sidelining of self and to promote positional advantage on gaining independence through payment of portfolio for perfidy perpetrated against the patriot nonpareil?

The proposition is there before us : 'To be or not to be a nation'. The choice is ours to make and upon it rests our future fate. No harm shall come to Netaji or to Rashbehari Bose or to any other valorous son of the soil like Bhagat Singh, Surya Sen, Chandraseskhar Azad, Bagha Jatin or the countless others who manfully fought for freedom and gave themselves up on the gallows or before the British bayonet. They have paid their debt to the motherland with their every pulsation of being, with their soulful sacrifice to free her from British bondage and with their very lifeblood to pay the price of freedom. It is we who are on the hammer now, in the witness box of the 'high court of history', and it is our deposition before the jury that will count now either to convict us or to acquit us in this contentious case where we are at once the perpetrators of offence, the defendants thereof, the prosecution and the defence counsels, the jury and the judge, for here in this national scenario there exists no separation of powers when our very own life-story is reset, readjusted and recounted in the right spirit for posterity to behold it with the eye of honour as inviolable truth passed unto them.

This, dear countrymen, is where we stand. Netaji, betrayed by our political ancestors in the Indian National Congress, we are running rapidly towards ruination as a race and unless we can fast alter the narrative to what in sooth his contribution was towards our attainment of freedom, and rebuild our nation following the blueprint laid down by him, we are going to a precipitous end as a nation, a catastrophic culmination of all culpability of the past. Lest such a doomsday visit us, let us in real earnest work for the redemption of past perfidies and reinstate the heroes of the freedom struggle to their rightful place. Else, we will have to pay an incalculable price for the sins committed as the nation slides into a corrupt congregation of conflicting cultures, a mass of political nothingness with neither ideal nor philosophy to hold on to save a rotting complex of ruinous liberalism on the one hand and archaic articulations of unlived principles on the other, combating each other in myopic malevolence and securing, for sure, the destruction of the nation with it.

Such then is the state of things in our motherland where, barring the armed forces, not one segment of the political hierarchy or the social superstructure speaks in unison with the solidarity of the nation in mind and with national interest uppermost in their agenda. The country has been dismembered at birth despite the bravest efforts of the armed revolutionaries to win freedom, united and whole, before the World War was over. But such an event never came to pass as history unfolded in a variant way, and these martyrs, who kissed the dust of the Road to Delhi as they fell to Allied assault, their spirits could never reconcile to the dastardly deed of Partition, their comrades-in-arms who faced trial and tribulation in British custody on apprehension, they could never accept this betrayal by the Mahatma's camp despite tallest protestations by the sage of Sabarmati that had but little bearing on the eventual outcome of things. And the country is threatened even now from fissiparous forces within, and must we wallow still in selfish dreams and delightful desires while the motherland goes to ruin?

Perfidies are past, rectification is at hand and the hour goes by. Netaji lives on in the fringe of national consciousness, the INA has been buried for long and the armed revolutionaries need to be exhumed from the graveyards of history. It is time we bring these heroes centre-stage. Else, the rot continues and this emasculated entity we call our political nation may never see manhood enough to rise to full sovereign glory. The history of the freedom movement needs to be rewritten objectively, dispassionately and without deliberate deletion of the daring deeds of the revolutionaries that ran contrary to the tenor of the non-violent movement of the Mahatma, and these must be retold to every school child that a nation of heroes be brought up in the future who will guide the destiny of our motherland right.

What shall we do then? Stay accursed a nation of half-men, punishing innocents with power of capital and a mandate gone wrong? Or, shall we rise as a nation, fired by the idealism of Swamiji, by the patriotic fervour of Netaji, the self-immolation of Bagha Jatin and the lifelong struggle for freedom for one's motherland while living perennially in self-exile in a foreign clime separated by oceanic distance from the very dust he held holy. I mean Rashbehari Bose. The ball lies in your court, my countrymen, and you may do what you like with it. But the price will have to be paid if we step amiss once more. I rest my case here. Vande Mataram! Jai Hind!

Photo : Courtesy, artist signed in the portrait who I, hereby, thankfully acknowledge but am unable to do so personally, and, courtesy, Anuj Dhar's post where I saved it from.