THE BETRAYAL OF GANDHI AND NEHRU

Sugata Bose The respect is mutual and I have sent you, Abhishek Sanyal, a friend request to ease up the path of our future communication. An abbreviated assertion cannot do justice to a seminal personality of the political stature of Gandhi or Nehru, I am well aware of that, but considering the perfidies that these two perpetrated to bring India to her knees despite their own not inconsiderable contributions to directing the freedom movement, moving the masses and awakening them to the possibility of freedom, leaves me with no alternative than to give vent to my frustration at these two great leaders who I criticise 'not because I love them less but because I love my motherland infinitely more', if you pardon my modified Shakespearean quote from 'Julius Caesar'. Gandhi was the de facto dictator of the Indian National Congress, although, he was never the four anna member of it. He ever railed at the armed revolutionaries and gave a mix of admiration for their valour and patriotism and ridicule for their methods. He had his own philosophical and psychological compulsions for such reactions of his. Gandhi's magnetic influence on the masses and his quasi-ethical standards of public behaviour induced Tagore in his folly to call him 'Mahatma', an honorific the politician from Kathiawar did not eminently deserve as subsequent developments in Tripuri, 1939, gave evidence for. However, a debilitated India, impoverished and grovelling, found in their Mahatma the saviour and followed him to the man with unflinching faith to the dastardly end the British had designed for them. Gandhi unwittingly played party to it by his stubborn subscription to non-violence to the exclusion of all else as the necessary means to freedom even as he espoused his cause by citing the Geeta which completely endorses righteous violence or armed struggle for the establishment of dharma. As such, Gandhi was more a pacifist Christian by self-following in real than a Hindu, for, while the Nazarene did espouse non-violence as his method of revolutionary change, barring the solitary incident of his chasing the money-changers from the Jewish synagogue with a whip, the King of Dwarka literally whipped the third Pandava to take up arms against the enemy and destroy them for preserving dharma. The Mahatma's status --- self-earned, afforded by India's historical circumstance and hyped up by the British who never took serious punitive action against him as they did with the armed revolutionaries and their sympathisers like Bose --- allowed him the privilege of weaning away the masses from the masculine movement that was being developed by the extreme revolutionaries of the land, and this significantly harmed India's cause of freedom. His own caprices with regard to the civil disobedience movements launched by him (ref. Chauri Chaura, 1922, as an instance) led to the fizzling out of mass enthusiasm for revolution. In this way, Gandhi unwittingly played into the hands of the enemy over and over again to gain worldwide the status of saint and, in the bargain, the motherland of sages and saints had to pay for his unholy holiness. What transpired at Tripuri in 1939 and subsequently till Bose was forced to resign his Presidency of Congress, was banned from holding Party position for a couple of years and was eventually evicted from the Party, was shameful and the direct design of the malicious Mahatma who could not brook opposition from an adversary who had the power and potential to career the freedom movement and the destiny of post-independent India into an avenue that was alien to his rarefied rustic dreams. Bose forgave Gandhi for all the machinations he faced from the Mahatma and moved on with fresher programmes for liberation of the motherland, for, indomitable in spirit was he and no power on earth could stop him from progressing to his cherished ideal. He even addressed Gandhi over overseas radio as 'Father of the Nation' and how did Gandhi pay him back? Interviewed in 1946 by Louis Fischer, Gandhi summed up Bose's contribution to that year's mass awakening in India, which historians now consider the preeminent cause of India's independence a year later, thus. He said that Bose had merely caught the imagination of a section of the youth and women and that his influence was far from being a nation-wide mass influence. He further referred to Bose's influence as akin to that of Robbin Hood's on his following. How far from truth could this be? Gandhi, losing ground, resorted to understatements and positive lies just as he had done earlier at Tripuri. Where was his magnanimity as a Mahatma now? Was he ever one? Perhaps, perhaps not. Who cares? I love my motherland and in her defence and in the defence of the revolutionaries who were her brightest children, I will wield my pen just as the kshatriya wielded his sword in the glory days of India's valorous past predating her present precipitation into passive piety and a like resistance to pernicious elements that have destroyed her of late and threaten to complete her annihilation if we do not give up our foolish notions and adulation thereof of all that is debilitating in the Mahatma's ideology and action. The next edition will be my response on Nehru. @ Abhishek Sanyal

Sugata Bose That was Netaji's magnanimity and not Gandhi's deserving, for he plotted the former's downfall when his position in the Indian polity was threatened. Netaji was a patriot who could get past personal differences and, thus, to prevent the British from splitting the ranks of the freedom fighters, he addressed Gandhi as such. He also, accordingly, named three of his army brigades 'Gandhi Brigade', 'Nehru Brigade' and 'Azad Brigade' to bring about the solidarity of the freedom movement and thwart any attempts of the British to create factional divide in it. This was Netaji's magnanimity as well as political sagacity. Moreover, the contention is not what Netaji addressed Gandhi as but what Gandhi did to Netaji and with it the untold harm he caused our motherland. To call my post 'distorted' may appeal to your refined sensibilities but it is a travesty of the truth which I have tried to project --- for which I have given you a detailed response as well which I guess you have not chanced to read as yet but may deem to do so now --- but a truth which evidently seems beyond your understanding coloured by partial predispositions. God bless you and your endeavour to establish the man who played the cards game in a Ladies Kitty Party (Ref. Amit Sen) well enough but had neither power nor propensity, in the real sense, to liberate India, nor the character (Ref. Gandhi's dalliances with umpteen women in his bid to 'brahmacharya') or moral fibre, founded in the truth he so articulately espoused, to do so! Regards as usual to you, Abhishek Sanyal, for being an ardent scholar and a gentleman devoted to the discovery of truth, although, as yet, struggling with it. Never mind, keep up the struggle for you are an asset to the nation despite my differences with you in perception and propagation thereof of truth.