Gandhi led the masses, true, but nowhere near freedom, much less to it. It was Netaji who did it as the climactic evolution of armed struggle for freedom in India whose legacy dates back to the Jugantar, the Anushilan Samity and the Ghadar Party.
The massive attempts of Bagha Jatin, Rash Behari Bose and the Ghadar revolutionaries at an all-India armed insurrection failed but set up the glorious tradition for other revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association and the Indian Republican Army to follow which eventually culminated in the war waged by the Indian National Army against the British Crown during the Second World War and catalysed events to free India. The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny in 1946 followed by mutinies in the British Indian Army and Air Force made the Crown's control over India untenable and forced the British to quit in a hurry.
This much for Gandhian contribution to the eventual eviction of the British, although, it must be historically admitted, and no more than that, that Gandhi gave solidarity to the freedom movement through his mass mobilisation programmes which kept up the consciousness of servitude as an intolerable feature of our national life and helped foster a constant sense of nationalism in the vast body of our people.
Thus, it was Gandhian mass movement that kept alight the flame of the aspiration for freedom without in any way achieving it and it was the armed revolutionary programme stretching over decades that actually forced the British to quit India.
Bande Mataram!
The massive attempts of Bagha Jatin, Rash Behari Bose and the Ghadar revolutionaries at an all-India armed insurrection failed but set up the glorious tradition for other revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Association and the Indian Republican Army to follow which eventually culminated in the war waged by the Indian National Army against the British Crown during the Second World War and catalysed events to free India. The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny in 1946 followed by mutinies in the British Indian Army and Air Force made the Crown's control over India untenable and forced the British to quit in a hurry.
This much for Gandhian contribution to the eventual eviction of the British, although, it must be historically admitted, and no more than that, that Gandhi gave solidarity to the freedom movement through his mass mobilisation programmes which kept up the consciousness of servitude as an intolerable feature of our national life and helped foster a constant sense of nationalism in the vast body of our people.
Thus, it was Gandhian mass movement that kept alight the flame of the aspiration for freedom without in any way achieving it and it was the armed revolutionary programme stretching over decades that actually forced the British to quit India.
Bande Mataram!
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