WHAT THE FUTURE NEEDS (UNFINISHED)

We need warm-blooded people in our country whose blood boils in indignation at the perfidies perpetrated against Netaji by the forces that be. Heartless pseudo-intellectuals with barely a modicum of knowledge and a scant bit of power of expression ever try to pervert discussions for a national cause by bringing in their silly arguments based less on investigative research or study and more on preformed prejudices to gain attention of all and sundry. These are to be discarded as so much occupational hazard without entertaining any hate for them. Fools galore make corrupting comments on the great one even as the cur barks at the elephant when it moves through the mart. What is necessary is the attribute of seeking the truth in a rational and scientific way that can withstand the whirlwind of logical opposition. As such, such truth must be substantiated by documentary evidence that bear legal validity. Else, it will be opinion and not truth, and, hence, bearing no historical weight.

This must be the attitude of those who aspire to know what happened to Netaji post 18 August, 1945 and also what the real events of the freedom struggle were that have been kept under wraps by successive governments of this partitioned landmass that I refuse to call the real India. There must be a thoroughness about the study and not merely cacophony of confirmation of what is the dominant narrative of the day. Only then will the truth emerge as each one sinks in his ploughshare to the cultivation of this fertile soil of the rediscovery of the hidden history of India.

Emotional effusions are but natural when Netaji is the subject of one's devotion. But merely restricting oneself to such effusive displays will not serve the greater purpose of the resurrection of the heroes from enforced oblivion by a political dispensation that consistently worked against the interests of the revolutionaries right from the days of the Mahatma donning the dictator's garb as his essential apparel and passing on his perfidious legacy to his protege, the Anglophile representative of the British Crown, who did horrendous damage to the cause of India and her most beloved sons, the armed revolutionaries whose leonine leader was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. We must be scholarly in approach, never the heartless intellectual but the one imbued with the will to know the truth and the heart to feel the throbbing aspirations of the nation's heroes. Such heroism is lacking in the hired historians of the day and we must fill up this lacuna in our academia that has over the last seven decades perverted the narrative of the freedom struggle beyond reasonable bounds and, so, caused immense disservice to the emerging nation.

This is the crying need of the hour and the fulfilling condition of the future, this gathering in of data, processing them rationally and presenting them before the world at large in a coherent way that makes for ordered understanding. The mass dissemination of the rediscovered truths of the freedom struggle thus will make for the re-education of the polity in the correct narrative and strengthen the nation by restoring its arsenal of ideas and ideals in the form of the resurrected lives and message of the heroes who now lie in oblivion.