FORGOTTEN HEROES ... 1

Blessed are they who can sacrifice their self-interest and much of mundane necessity as well to serve the greater cause of the resurrection of the real heroes of the freedom struggle. From Mangal Pandey to Netaji Subhas, there has been a veritable procession of revolutionaries who fought and died for freedom and, yet, due to the purposeful negligence of the powers that be to recognise their contribution to our country's gaining independence, they lie virtually in the shadow of those who wrested power post-independence, the likes of Nehru and Patel who had acceded to Jinnah's demand to perpetrate the worst perfidy, the partitioning of our motherland. Gandhiji remained a mute witness to the unfolding drama of dismemberment of the motherland despite vehement initial opposition to the perfidious programme. In due course he was won over by his protege, Jawahar, and he surrendered meekly the fate of the motherland to a mischievous malicious man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who thus fathered Pakistan. The consequences are too gruesome to recount and are best left to history for future generations of the sub-continent to shudder on studying and, hopefully, to realise the significance of the integration of the motherland which must surely come to pass, I say, in the fullness of time. For India is one and indivisible, its solidarity is like that of the Brahman whose shadow it is.

However, here I am neither delving into the past nor fast-forwarding my reader into the future but am merely stating that those who had given their everything for the freedom of the motherland could be so easily forgotten by us and those who reaped the benefits of their life and labour, their suffering and sacrifice, their torture and torment at the hands of the most barbarous regime on earth, have gained our honour and respect. What worse blasphemy can there be on earth? What greater treachery has visited any country that did shake off the foreign yoke by sacrificing its flavour of youth? The Nehruvian dispensation did play their roguish role to bring about this historical heresy but we cannot remain content with merely a blame-game and absolve ourselves totally from the sin of sheer collective negligence in highlighting the real contribution of the revolutionaries of the freedom struggle whose crowning glory was the life and career of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

The academia and the intelligentsia have sold themselves to their patrons in power and dished out a cooked-up tale of non-violence as being the primary cause for the British leaving the shores of India when the truth of the matter is quite otherwise. It was the organised armed aggression of the Indian National Army led by Netaji and aided by imperial Japan that precipitated certain political consequences forcing the British to leave India in a hurry. The revolt in the ranks of the British Indian Armed Forces that came in the wake of the INA Red Fort Trials literally inflamed the whole country and the British, ever pragmatic, were quick to realise that the sun had already set in India for the British Empire and it would be an enormous embarrassment for them to be literally driven out of the country by the rising Indian masses aided by an army no more trustworthy. The British had never been able to forget the hiding they had received once at the hands of the Indians during the initial phases of the First War of Indian Independence in 1857 and dared not a similar experience again. So, they packed bag and baggage and hastened home. But before they did so, they put paid to India's political future by partitioning the country threefold under two dominions ever at war with each other since.

Unfortunately for India, an Anglophile inherited by deceit the Empire that the British left behind and he spared no means to further connections with the conniving colonists who had brought the most prosperous country in the world to its knees in its near two hundred years of tyrannical rule and left it debilitated like never before in its history. And here was Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress Party selling India's self-respect in agreeing to becoming a dominion of the very same British Crown that had thus far sucked the lifeblood of India to build its basis in the world. Macaulay had, after all, won. His dream of creating a nation of subservient Babus had tellingly come true despite all efforts by our revolutionary patriots to build a nation of real men. And to this was added the slow infiltration of Nehruvian myth-making which debilitated our emergent nation by perpetuating many a false narrative whereby we were force-fed, albeit in a carefully crafted subtle way, that we owed our freedom to British magnanimity and Gandhian passive resistance while the active armed revolution of the INA was allowed to sink into oblivion by sustained propaganda of the Congress that played the traitor in this terrible tragedy that unfolded for the motherland.

Thus, the heroes of the freedom struggle were lost to posterity and Indians grew up to revere Gandhi and Nehru while the revolutionary fraternity was completely buried under the desert sand of dynastic desire.

... end of Part 1
... to be continued