The vandalising act perpetrated on Netaji's statue at Narkeldanga in Kolkata brings to the fore the shameful decline of culture in the country. Across India statues of great men are being vandalised to score political points which is symptomatic of an abysmal decline of culture in the polity. If the Liberator of our Motherland from colonial conquest has to meet this fate, how far are we from decimation as a community, cowardly and devoid of character that we have become over the years? To what greater depths of degeneracy must we sink before we come alive as a people in defence of the brightest son of our motherland who gave his all for us to get such a return?
What this act of vandalism exhibits is that we are fast becoming a semblance of what we pretend to be but are no more in actuality so. All our vaunted culture, our spirituality, our heritage and history, our ethics and civic norms lie in the dust today with a billion strong people mutely watching the malicious designs of a handful of mischievous politicians ruling the roost with thugs and rogues, but have not the courage of conviction to massively protest to take the authorities to task. Who will do so, after all, for all are busy with their frivolities of life while the nation slowly sinks into a morass whence there will be no return? Such acts of vandalism are but the symptoms of a far more pernicious state of things, as is the order of the day, brought about by governmental misrule over decades and an ever worsening political class in terms of merit, morals and material honesty.
Netaji shines in the memory of senior citizens of this country as the iconic hero of the freedom struggle but for whom these vandals in the form of politicians and their protected hoodlums would not have seen the light of day in a free world of theirs. However, these venerable ones, advanced in years and in the twilight of their earthly existence, many of whom, like my mother, were fortunate to have had a glimpse of this sage descended temporarily to the terrestrial plane to save Mother India, have the eyes to witness the sacrilege of their God and the heart to feel the pain thereof but have no more the strength to voice their indignation in open marches through the avenues of this metropolis that has witnessed in the past the revolution against the Raj by a brighter youth of yersteryears. This, alas, is the fate of the faithful today, ruminating the glory of the bright ICS who spurned British subservience right from day one of his political life and spelt out the programme for the eviction of the imperialists from the sacred soil of our motherland. These near-silent ones must endure the profanity that goes by the name of politics today in this country while the youth and the middle aged busy themselves with the shop-keeping that is now called 'life'.
Netaji seems to have no friend in this wide world of cowards and calculating crooked converts to his cause. The hero dwells in his self-pride even amidst the ruins of his dreams of a brighter morrow for his motherland, for he had a vision beyond the turbidity of the times to behold the rise of a renascent India one day, supreme in her spiritual glory, integrated in territorial terms once more, a people of great martial discipline with sage-like sagacity as was the feature of national life for millenia before a thousand year gloom descended on the motherland.
How much can you hurt the hero by breaking his sculpted image when he could withstand the shocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender, thereafter, in WWII to be able to yet smile amidst the ruins of his dreams on 17 August, 1945, facing a smiling Leon Prouchandy in his Saigon headquarters? Know you the magnitude of this man, O people of this country? Hang your heads in shame that there are, as yet, no candle light vigils in place in Kolkata nor any spontaneous protest worth the call anywhere in the country against this dastardly deed. The city sleeps as usual to insults heaped on Netaji despite protestations to the contrary by its inhabitants at every beck and call. The spirit of Netaji also watches in mute amusement at the hypocrisy of his people in their professed but hardly ever practised love for him and his comrades-in-arms in the INA.
What more to say than this that a hero was once born among the predecessors of today's cowards? He was let down then and he continues to be let down now, for after all, we are 'men'.
Jai Hind!
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