This concept of national paternity is a western implant into Indian imagination. Bharatvarsha has ever entertained the principle of universal maternity, and national maternity as well, as essentially identical with its divine abstraction and manifesting through the myriad garb of name and form.
Gandhi's follies and foibles galore notwithstanding, his seminal exertions in passive resistance and their supposed fruition in India achieving independence -- although, its stupendous failure in the partitioned fall of his countrymen is the truer picture -- lend him an aura even now which is diminishing, though, by the day owing to the awakening of the people gradually to a better sense of history devoid of the trappings of his so-called sainthood which has been attached to his persona through persistent propaganda with complete governmental backing bolstering it.
Netaji had personally a high regard for Gandhi despite his acute understanding of the Mahatma's political shortcomings, absence of insight into the subtler workings of realpolitik and the consequent Himalayan blunders made by him in his direction of the nationalist movement. This personal regard for the 'Sage of Sabarmati', as Subhas Bose sardonically referred to him in his 'The Indian Struggle' when exasperated by the political eccentricities of the Mahatma, despite devastating differences, endeared him enough to the leader of principled politics of sorts to address him as 'Father of the Nation'. This was despite the unscrupulous manner in which Gandhi called upon his brigade within the Congress to non-cooperate with Bose and isolate him unto resignation from the duly elected post of President of the Congress for 1939 in which he had handsomely defeated Gandhi's candidate Pattabhi Sitaramaiyya.
There was another angle and a politically more significant angle to it. National solidarity in the 1940s was being threatened by communal politics with the All India Muslim League demanding the partitioning of the landmass of India into two separate countries to allow for the creation of a Muslim majority Pakistan. The 1940s were being dominated by this dangerous creed of divisive communal politics which played into the hands of the British 'Divide and Rule Policy'. With Gandhi increasingly becoming irrelevant in the emerging scenario of global politics that dictated the national scene as well and Jinnah gaining ground by the day with the help of the British, and with Nehru seeking his self-interest ahead of genuine national welfare, Netaji, now away in alien land seeking foreign help to liberate India and unable to stop the growing factional politics at home which aided the British to keep India in subjugation, thought it best to integrate the movement overseas with the movement at home to foil the British designs at debilitating it. He, thus, resorted to boosting the position of Gandhi and called him 'Father of the Nation' in his radio address to India.
Yet another angle there was to it and this was concerning the Indian National Army itself. These soldiers, who were the Japanese prisoners of war, had been weaned away from loyalty to the British by the charismatic Netaji Bose into revolutionary war against their erstwhile masters. But the problem was far from solved as their original oath of loyalty to the British remained at the core of their consciousness which did not make for martial solidarity as was required for a successful waging of war against their erstwhile masters. Moreover, the INA, 60,000 strong, needed to be a much larger force for effective combat against the large British Indian Army. This could be possible only by winning over large sections of the British Indian troops that would be deployed to resist the INA. Now, Indians are overwhelmingly a religious people with an abiding reverence for sages and saints. If Gandhiji could be held before the INA as one of the movers of the forces from a distance by sympathetic support, then the army of liberation would gain the much-needed moral stature that would help inspire and integrate it. The saintly figure of Gandhi in being addressed as 'Father of the Nation' by Netaji amplified the Mahatma's image at home, gave the INA the moral sanction in the eyes of the 380 million Indians necessary for its acceptance at home once the INA set foot on Indian soil, and united the home effort and the overseas effort in freeing India, thus foiling the British designs at weakening the freedom movement by sowing dissension and division within the polity. Netaji understood the significance of Gandhiji's reputation as a saintly figure and his power over the people in consequence. This he amply utilised for the cause of the motherland.
Netaji was being projected by the British as a quisling of the Japanese, one who had changed character contours from his Indian days after courting absolute power as Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army and President of the Provisional Government of Free India and was now an arrogant absolutist tyrant intent on imposing his own dictatorship on the motherland in the fascist style of the Japanese. This was surely not what the Indians had sacrificed their all for in their protracted struggle for freedom. An enlightened democracy the Congress under Gandhi's leadership promised the people of India while fascist barbarism would be the fruit of cooperation with the invading Army of Bose. This was the British projection about Netaji and the consequent dilemma attempted to be foisted on the Indian people in which they had to make a choice between a dangerous end on one side and a placid terrain on the other. Nehru added fuel to it by announcing that should Bose dare invade India with Japanese troops, he (Nehru) would meet him with unsheathed sword on the borders of British India. This openly adversarial role of Nehru had to be countered by Netaji and this he thought could best be done by giving the INA and the Provisional Government of Free India a truly pan-Indian character, and this he thought could best be achieved by submitting to the Mahatma's name, if only out of pragmatic considerations.
That Netaji did so was not out of the instinct of self-preservation, as on the surface it may seem, but out of this complex melee of motivations, all geared to foiling the enemies of an unconditional freedom for the motherland. He had neither any personal axe to grind against any nor any particular person to eulogise or flatter to gain personal ends, all of which he had long back surrendered at the altar of the motherland's freedom. Everything that he did in his life was impelled by that singular motivation, the freedom of his colonised countrymen from the fetters of this feeding dragon, the dastardly Crown that had brought hoary India to her knees through its systematic drainage of its resources, material and human. Gandhi, for all his faults, stood emblematic of the reverse order of things, the mass resistance of India to this colonial control, and, so, drew the peerless patriot into naming him what he did. Netaji and Gandhiji, despite oceanic differences in their approach to the nation's deliverance, were fundamentally united in their eventual aspiration of freedom, and, as such, the former bore the latter ungrudging respect for his lifelong commitment to the national cause. There was neither fissure nor fracture in their personal relations nor fragmentation in Netaji's conception of the country's needs nor a terrible aberration in his understanding of the exigencies of the times that would allow him to divorce his overseas efforts at securing freedom from the effort at home. The armed aggression of the INA from without had to be coupled with the mass movement within and what better way to do so than to christen the brigades of the liberation army with the names of Gandhi, Nehru and Azad, and to top it all, to seek the blessings of the Mahatma for this holy war to be waged with the blood of freedom-loving Indians?
A last crucial point. When Jinnah was plotting the partition of India, Netaji thought it expedient to uphold the solidarity of India and chose the most widely accepted personality of Gandhiji to embody that ideal of national integration. To highlight this image of the Mahatma in his bid to carry home to the masses his underlying idea of integrated nationhood and so foil Jinnah's perfidious designs of partition, Netaji addressed Gandhiji as 'Father of the Nation' in his radio address from overseas. That Partition could not be eventually averted is another matter altogether and Netaji in absentia was not party to it. But his every move and measure had been to wrest absolute freedom from the British and not to be gifted one day the partitioned dominion status by a conditional Transfer of Power whose clauses remain beyond public purview for the purpose of the powers that be. To that end Netaji had fought and to that end he had he had honoured Gandhiji with the epithet 'Father of the Nation'.
In the light of all these historical complexities and the exigencies of the times must be viewed Netaji's address of Gandhiji as 'Father of the Nation' and its contextual reference thereof. Beyond that, the epithet falls flat and is shorn of its significance in literal terms. For, if Gandhi must be referred to as 'Father of the Nation' for all his follies and foibles, both on the personal front and on the political, Mother India has indeed lost her own spiritual status and her brightest and the best through the ages have been cast into oblivion. The paternity of the motherland in Gandhi at such a late hour in her earthly career would necessarily mean that her nationhood begins from the date of political entry into India of Mohandas Karamchand, a fact that would not only be historically untenable but would make a mockery of our national civilisation of ages. India, hoary India, the birthplace of philosophy and the highest ideals of humanity in all aspects, has been a nation from time immemorial, held as she was by the pristine principles enshrined in the Vedas into an integrated mass of spiritual cultural consciousness. This motherland of ours which gave the world the concept of cosmic solidarity, is it not puerile to give her such a deferred nationhood, blasphemous to foist on her a father who in truth is one of her innumerable sons?
Vande Mataram !
Written by Sugata Bose
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