'CHALO DILLI' ... 6

Right you are, Maj Gen Gagandeep Bakshiji, and it is, therefore, pertinent for us to continuously campaign for the right revival of our strengths as a nation with the rewriting of the real history of our land as one of its principal pillars. The entire focus of the narrative is misplaced and it is a fabrication altogether whereby what has suited the post-independence political dispensation has been broadcast before the nation as the gospel truth of the freedom struggle.Gandhian non-violence did play a principal part in the mass mobilisation of the nation to fight for freedom but it failed at every crucial step of its ill-conceived way when the British brutally crushed all such pretensions the satyagrahis had of loving them off the land. The colonists feared the firebrand Bose much more and, thus, saw to it that he was either kept incarcerated or in exile for most of the time to render him politically ineffective. Gandhi and his men served as the perfect foil to these radical revolutionaries and served to keep the country's manhood in a state of passivity. This served the British well enough who knew that with their loyal Indian soldiers armed with modern military equipment they could easily gun down any insurrection as and when they arose. So far as the Gandhian movement was concerned, it was surely an irritant and even a nuisance to a degree for the British but, the nation of shopkeepers that they were, to quote from Napoleon this pertinent phrase, the British knew how to effectively neutralise the Mahatma's movement, each time he came up with such fantastic innovation of his, with their superior administrative and military organisation.

When Gandhi had arrived on the political scene of India, the revolutionary movement in Bengal and the Punjab had already died down and the country, disarmed since the defeat of the Indian forces in the First War of India's Independence, had no recourse but to opt for a non-violent struggle against their imperialist masters. A mass armed insurrection was now out of the question, especially in the light of the fact that Great Britain had been victorious lately in the First World War and was at the height of its powers, and, consequently, Gandhi fitted into the scheme of things perfectly with his brand of non-violent mass movement methods which had worked well in South Africa on a relatively smaller scale and begged application in the much larger political context of British India. Recognising the imperative of the times even Subhas Chandra Bose readily joined in the Gandhian movement under the tutelage of Chittaranjan Das and gradually rose through the ranks of the Indian National Congress to become its President at Haripura and then in Tripuri in the years 1938 and 1939. Meanwhile, he maintained secret contacts with armed revolutionaries across India and even played godfather to them in a covert manner. This the British suspected but had no first-hand evidence to substantiate. Hence, they tried to neutralise his political influence by keeping him away in prisons or in exile for the major part of his political life in India. In all Bose was in prison for 11 years and several more years in exile. This was a couple of years more than the combined period of incarceration of Jawaharlal Nehru who spent a total of 9 years in British prisons and Gandhi who spent 4 years.

Gandhi was the architect of mass movement in the freedom struggle, there is no controversy over it. But his movements were ill-planned, ill-directed and had no comprehensive political future programme for the nation in the making. His decisions to launch movements and to stop them were impulsive and rash with neither forethought nor foresight. Consequently, the country despite being up in arms, so to say, with their beloved leader who they revered as their God-sent Saviour, to strike hard at the imperial masters and drive them on to the back-foot, Gandhi by his sudden dismissal of the movement as in 1922 after the Chauri Chaura incident, poured cold water on the flames of revolution and allowed the British a timely reprieve and the chance to tighten their grip on the administration. This capriciousness of Gandhi ruined many a chance for India to assert her right of self-governance and it was left eventually to the redoubtable Bose to set things right. But that will in the next instalment of this series.