IN RESPONSE TO PARASHURAM PURUSHOTTAM'S POST THAT RASH BEHARI BOSE WAS THE GREATEST REVOLUTIONARY, EVEN AHEAD OF NEHRUJI, BAGHA JATIN, NETAJI AND MAHATMAJI

IN RESPONSE TO Parashuram Purushottam's POST THAT RASH BEHARI BOSE WAS THE GREATEST REVOLUTIONARY, EVEN AHEAD OF NEHRUJI, BAGHA JATIN, NETAJI AND MAHATMAJI

Rash Behari Bose was the only one among the aforementioned freedom fighters whose revolutionary career spanned the entire first half of the 20th century. Bagha Jatin died early even as the First World War was being fought, Netaji came into political prominence after World War I was over and Gandhiji's Indian career spanned between 1917 and 1948 from Champaran to Birla House on that fateful day of 30 January when he was assassinated by Nathruram Godse.

Nehru I would hardly call a revolutionary for he compromised with revolutionary principles at every bend and turn of his career as a freedom fighter and, as such, ever adopted the softer Gandhian course of non-violent activism till he even abandoned his political master and settled for personal political ends with Jinnah and Mountbatten. Gandhiji was a revolutionary, true, and in his own unique way of quickening mass consciousness among his countrymen about their bondage to the British but he was hardly a revolutionary in the classical sense of the term. His soft policy of cyclical compromise, appeasement and activism in a pacifist way -- literally a contradiction in terms, you might say -- hardly elevated him to the rank of a revolutionary of redoubtable methods whose sole aim is to free his subjugated country from the shackles of bondage. This latter requirement was abundantly there in the likes of Rash Behari Bose, Jatindranath Mukherjee alias Bagha Jatin, and in Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and in a host of others of lesser prominence but no less patriotic fervour or sacrifice for the motherland.

How each one of us will view these soldiers of the soul, these martyrs to the motherland is entirely one's personal prerogative, shaped by education, awareness, self-culture, a sense of history, and individual preference, not free entirely from the compulsions of character-attributes and experience, despite the balancing feature of rational rigour and fact-based judgement. Therefore, I would personally not engage in this judgemental exercise out of reverence for these heroes and out of a precognition of the corrosive consequences that may be should I make this misadventure inadvertently. For such judgement I leave the post to the better discretion of my readers.

Vande Mataram !

Written by Sugata Bose