The extreme revolutionaries of the freedom struggle were the ones who sacrificed the most for our motherland but the votaries of the easier path of soft politics, the creed of Gandhian non-violence, they have been the ones who have reaped the reward of being best remembered for their contribution to the liberation of our motherland from British yoke. Such is ever the tale of a weak nation that knows not what manhood is and we, debilitated as we are with our insistence on everything weak, have reduced leonine men like Swami Vivekananda into objects of passive adoration in much the same way as we reduced our mass struggle for freedom into spinning the yarn of imaginary progress towards a peaceful transition from bondage to liberation with a change of heart of the adversary by the melting act of our love. The consequence of all this is an absence of patriotism in the general mass of people and a persistent drive towards material possessions, now eulogised contrarily to the preeminent principle of the peerless Paramahamsa of Dakshineshwar in this age of perverse pretensions to piety.
If we are to rise as a nation, it is absolutely imperative that we shed this feeble adherence to half-truths and full lies that are preached in this nation in regard to the freedom movement and that we take immediate recourse to the study of the lives and works of the extreme revolutionaries who bled for the motherland like none else did. Only when we are well grounded in the knowledge of the lives of the real martyrs to freedom will we be able to see the distinction between real martyrdom at the gallows and on the field of battle on the road to Delhi and the supposed martyrdom of the Mahatma of undeniable attainments otherwise in so far as contribution to the nation's history is concerned. This is the core issue that must be held up before the citizens but who will listen? The country has well nigh become what Swamiji had called it to be, a race of women and eunuchs, utterly devoid of the slightest sense of masculinity. Hence the trumpeting of every weak impulse in the nation beginning with that stupendous exercise in debility, non-violence to drive the Devil away from the land and that too in the name of the Geeta which expressly exhorts armed revolution against evil.
The Geeta had its adherents, though, in real earnest. The extreme revolutionaries were inspired by Vivekananda and the Geeta and carried copies of both as they plunged into the maelstrom of revolutionary activity. And by the way. What was the Mahatma doing in South Africa in all those years when the country was ravaged by the British before he set foot on his motherland when the first phase of revolutionary activity was over? Gandhi was born in 1869, Jatin Mukherjee was born in 1876 and Rash Behari Bose was born in 1886. Yet see the activity of Jatin Mukherjee and Rash Behari from early youth to liberate the motherland and compare it with the Mahatma's career till 1917 for the freedom of the nation. Please read up their lives and see the difference. You will clearly see that Jatin Mukherjee, Rash Behari Bose and a galaxy of other leaders laid down everything for the freedom of the nation but beloved Bapu was blissfully oblivious to Indian needs back home and struggled on in South Africa with movements of far less consequence to the motherland. No wonder he used to believe in staging the mockery of individual satygraha at a time when Subhas Bose urged him to announce mass satygraha with a six month ultimatum to the British to leave India just six months before World War II would break out in Europe. I find Gandhian logic in principle and practice exasperating for I can clearly see that it was primarily he and his coterie of followers in Nehru, Patel, Pant and Prasad who forced Subhas Bose out of India to seek foreign help when all hope of home help had failed, an ouster that cost India the Partition eventually and untold human suffering in its wake and thereafter in the last seven decades since our so-called independence.
What more will I say as my blood boils to contemplate the plight of my motherland ever since the dark days that Gandhi brought on our nation with his perverse tools of political liberation that have no place in the tricky world of realpolitik? The revolutionaries have been wronged and we are paying the price for it and will continue to do so till we have resurrected their memory and accorded them their rightful status in our national history.
Written by Sugata Bose
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