IN HIS ABSENCE

Given the conditions that prevailed in India in the aftermath of the Second World War, it was but lucky for the Nehru-Patel brigade that Netaji could not surface in time to carry the nation with him and it was the worst misfortune that befell the motherland at that. The country was dismembered soon as Gandhi witnessed it helpless, having by now realised his terrible folly at having rejected Subhas and foisted Jawarharlal on the nation which he was about to sacrifice to fulfil personal ambitious ends, a protege who now merely gave lip-service to the Mahatma even as he sidelined his mentor in taking momentous decisions at the behest of the British authorities even to the point of getting influenced by his romantic dalliance with the Vicereine Edwina Mountbatten.

The country was rife with revolutionary fervour and the spirit of the people, especially those of the services, had been quickened to revolution against the colonial masters which manifested in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny at Bombay in 1946 followed in quick succession by insurrection by the British Indian Army at Jabalpore and the Royal Air Force Mutiny at Karachi which spread to the largest air-base at Kanpur and to air-bases in Ceylon and even as far as Singapore. The INA Trials at the Red Fort set up the scene for open defiance of British authority throughout India as news of the glorious sacrifices of the Indian National Army led by Subhas Chandra Bose, so far suppressed by the British Indian Government, now found its way into the masses and gripped the public imagination. The loyalty of the armed forces serving the colonists now critically challenged, the British could no longer rely on their continued support for their presence in India and found it expedient to hand over partitioned power to the perfidious Nehru-Jinnah combine in August 1947. Gandhi remained a mute spectator to the worst tragedy to have befallen India in her chequered career stretching millenia and kept himself busy trying to pacify emotions and lend sanity to civilians gone berserk in a frenzy of communal hatred.

But the worst perfidy had been perpetrated by the powers that be. India, hoary India, land of the gods and sages that has fertilised the cultures of the world, that motherland of ours, invincible and undying, rising tier after tier in the high Himalayas, plumbing the depths of the ocean of knowledge whose symbolic manifestation hangs about her in her vast water masses that make her a peninsula, the home of a myriad diversity that has sung through ages the harmonic melody of unity, that blessed mother of ours had been amputated in her limbs with a million of her children cast into the cauldron of communal violence that saw to the end of the Mahatma's dreams of a non-violent resurgent civilisation arising out of the chaos of colonial corruptions. The forces which he had through his unrealistic and short-sighted policies unleashed, now recoiled upon the Mahatma and he rued the absence of Subhas in his days of utter agony when none who rose riding his shoulders followed him anymore. The mentor had been cast aside as so much dispensable baggage and the young eagle now took to flight along the charted course of neocolonialism to follow. In his private moment the Mahatma was seen to muse on his colossal mistake in backing the wrong horse and rejecting the one who he should have nurtured despite diametric differences, for rapprochement was ever possible in the light of a common love for the motherland.

But the hour was gone and the flag of freedom had flown over the ramparts of the Red Fort. But was this the freedom the revolutionaries had dreamt of? Was this the end of it all, the final fruition of the clarion call for freedom sounded by Netaji as he thundered 'Chalo Dilli'?

Hail Macaulay's children! Can you hear? Or, has your Anglo-Saxon degeneracy of borrowed lineage utterly perverted your discretion, your judgement? If there be a semblance of self-respect left, if there be an iota of intelligence, that is the legacy of your hoary heritage rolling down like the mountain cataracts, left in the fabric of your fallen selves yet, then awake and undo this damage done unto your motherland and repay the debt that you owe to your leader, Netaji. Jai Hind!