2. At every point Gandhi foiled Bose using cunning masquerading as Mahatmahood and fouled up the whole cause of freedom.
3. The Khilafat Movement was a classic case of short-sighted Gandhian opportunism whose long-term effect was pernicious polarisation.
4. Crossing mountains,
plumbing seas,
he moves the world
to free, release.
5. Netaji seems like a personality right from the epics, an Avatar Purush descended into human clay to deliver humanity. Those that have studied him in detail and have an understanding born of devotion to his cause for his motherland and greater humanity in shackles, will wholeheartedly corroborate this view.
6. You see Netaji through the film of your frail personality and find frailty in him. But as you advance you witness what a phenomenal being he was, a man of epic proportions whose mission was the liberation of his motherland at any cost and through that the liberation of the whole of subjected humanity suffering the yoke of colonial-imperial tyranny.
7. Gandhi undertook a fast unto death to force the hands of the Government of India by way of giving Pakistan its due amount of 55 crore rupees at a time when the latter had invaded Indian territory in Kashmir. However, when Jinnah, Nehru and Mountbatten had earlier made common cause to partition the motherland, Gandhi was wary enough to avoid giving them the ultimatum of a fast unto death for he knew for certain that his truth at last would be kept, after a life of false promises and resolves, in the teeth of Jinnah's total unconcern for his would-be-death. The wily politician realised the futility of his fast this time for he was sure he would fail to achieve his objective through emotional blackmailing of the Muslim League and would only in the bargain lose his dear life.
When Jatin Das had undertaken a fast unto death, he had carried it out manfully till he perished after 63 days. Not so with Gandhi. He was careful when to fast and when not to, always weighing the probability of his possible death or survival and the likelihood of attainment of his pertinent political objective through his effeminate means of application of psychological pressure on the affected parties. Gandhi was manipulative even in his apparently noble --- though never really so --- endeavours such as the sacrifice of fasting for freedom and made every prior arrangement as cited above to see to it that he survived the ordeal. Thus, he never succumbed in the final analysis to his fasts unto death for they were never conducted to that end ever.
Where Gandhi really could have undertaken a fast unto death and suffered martyrdom for his principled opposition to Partition and, thus, saved the nation from dismemberment, he shied away from the challenge, meekly giving in to the amputation of the limbs of the motherland while offering lip-service of disagreement with the entire episode that has scarred the history of the sub-continent now for over seven decades.
That much for the Mahatma's courage of conviction and that much for his being dubbed by Netaji, in folly or out of pragmatic consideration to unite India against the British, 'The Father of the Nation', for, indeed, he emerged at the end of the holocaust the father of the newly-born Pakistan whose existence, had he acted upon the advice of Subhas Chandra Bose in time, he could have aborted but for whose rights he feigned to fast unto death a final time once the pernicious child had been delivered unto the world to spread the tyranny of terror. The rest is history.
8. When there is so great a display of ego among activists, where is the hope of a successful campaigning for the cause of Netaji?
9. Gandhi's debilitating politics of non-violence without proper organisation or planning, without any programme of future nation-building that addressed the exigencies of national defence, effective governance, the communal question and absolute opposition to any programme of partitioning of the motherland, his serious mistake of openness with respect to revolution which his enemies utilised to their fullest advantage and to the nation's disaster, and his terrible fickleness or inconsistency in launching and abruptly calling off the revolutionary movement whenever he intuitively or rationally or instinctively felt it his imperative to do so, all these facets of his character and his movement thereof, played directly into the hands of the British and the Muslim League just as Netaji had prophesied, and the price the sub-continent has had to pay and continues to pay till this very hour to the delight of the Western savants who savour every bit of Gandhi's supposed saintliness while hypocritically holding on to their quite opposite practised programmes to suit their own national ends.
10. Nehru ought not to have sold our national self-respect and future prospects by subscribing to the conditions of the Transfer of Power Agreement and then to further add insult to injury by making India a member of the British Commonwealth with titular acceptance of the British monarch as the sovereign head of the association of dominions, albeit, with India having her special sovereign republic status. All things said and done, Nehru sold our motherland to enemies, himself overseeing her amputation, in his desperate bid to become Prime Minister and to please his lady-love, Edwina Mountbatten, who played no mean role in getting many a difficult deal done by her dear Jawaharlal where her battle-hardened husband had failed. Her soft touch smothered Nehru's remaining semblance of a conscience and sealed the fate of India. Imagine the first Prime Minister of our country romancing with the lady who was party to her nation dealing death-blows to our motherland's independent prospects even then. If this is what iconic status in independent India is, woe unto the nation, woe unto Ramakrishna-Vivekananda-Netaji and the revolutionaries who gave their all to free the motherland and got this in return! Add to this Gandhi's perfidies, despite seminal contributions to awakening mass political consciousness, and you get your picture perfect. Patel, Pant and Prasad, the perfidious trio of the Tripuri treachery were but satellites of the stellar 'saintly' being who seldom shone when it mattered most but spun away to effect India's doom, nonetheless.
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