THE ARMED REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM ... 4

 THE ARMED REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM ... 4

These were the valorous ones who remain unmatched in their undiluted love for the motherland. Others who were the votaries of passive resistance gave their selves only partially to the cause of the motherland's freedom but these heroic souls gave it their all. The motherland was to them their own mother and far more. She encompassed the whole of their beings, their souls surcharged with a daring delight in delivery of the coup de grace to the enemy who in perfidious bonds had held India for two centuries. These supremely selfless souls utterly dedicated themselves to the cause of freeing Mother India and the clarion call of 'Vande Mataram' resounded in their beings till it had caught the imagination of a vast number of people who came into their ambit.

But India was then a vast mass of sleeping humanity and the masses had yet to be awakened in a language that they could understand and appreciate, to which they could respond in their traditional way and participate duly without suffering too much of a cultural adjustment or, worse, upheaval. Thus it was that Gandhiji could wield his magic wand which no other leader before him could do so successfully and it was left to him to lend solidarity to an often dispersed movement, albeit in a manner that totally transformed, for good or for ill, the character of the movement that would lead to India's eventual political emancipation from colonial clutches.

The early revolutionaries had almost succeeded during the First World War to pull off a major coup and drive the British out of India but for traitors betraying the cause as has so often been the historical experience in most countries, and the revolution failed. The Ghadar Movement was aborted by the traitorous act of Sardar Kripal Singh and the Hindu-German Conspiracy was nipped in the bud by a like leakage of information abroad. Bagha Jatin's valiant battle on the bank of the Buribalam in Balasore, Orissa, marked the end of a heroic phase in India's armed revolutionary movement till Masterda Surjya Sen and his Indian Republican Army launched a like attack on British imperialism in Chittagong in 1930 to free it completely for three days and to retain control of some sort over parts of the province for close to three years before the leader was handed over by his traitorous cousin to the police for petty pecuniary gain.

The next phase was the culminating point of the parallel movement for freedom -- for Gandhian 'Satyagraha' had by now well hijacked the main course of the movement -- and it saw the emergence in martial attire of a leader who in every sense symbolised that term and earned from his adoring comrades the epithet 'Netaji'. His Indian National Army's final offensive on the eastern frontier of British India with the aid of the Imperial Japanese army dealt the deathblow to the evil empire that had consumed like a colossal cannibal many a country in its centuries of corrosive colonial control.

The revolution had completed its full circle when India, amidst horrendous circumstances precipitated by British divisive policy and Islamic intolerance, gained her dismembered freedom. The Red Fort Trial of three INA officers precipitated the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny in Bombay harbour, the Jubbalpore uprising of the British Indian Army and a like revolt in the British Indian Air-force which compounded already existing massive postwar complications for the continuance of the Raj and they left in a hurry to avoid being barbecued by their disenchanted soldiers consequent on the patriotic fervour that the looming figure of Netaji in absentia had been able to elicit from them.

These were the principal three armed attempts at securing freedom but between them there were countless other acts of revolutionary terrorism aimed at paying the perpetrator of State violence in their own coin and, so, arousing in Indians a sense of manhood to eventually precipitate a revolution that would have put paid to British aspirations to continued colonial occupation of the country. In this regard one reverently remembers the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association's glorious revolutionary contribution to the cause of freedom. One also remembers the early martyrs to the motherland's freedom in the revolutionary activities of the Bhavani Mandir that eventually led to the historic Alipore Bomb Case Trial, the daring acts of terror of the Jugantar and the Anushilan Samity and the deportation to the dreaded Cellular Jail in the Andamans where political prisoners were dealt a treatment worse than what was meted out to animals. The gallows claimed the other apprehended ones who, to British perception, were deemed dangerous to the Raj. Thus, so many heroes 'kissed the noose' -- Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru, Surjya Sen, Kartar Singh Sarabha, Basanta Kumar Biswas, Ramprasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan, Rajendranath Lahiri, Thakur Roshan Singh, Khudiram Bose, Kanailal Dutta, Satyennath Basu, Madanlal Dhingra, Sardar Udham Singh, Benoy Basu, Badal Gupta, Dinesh Gupta and so many others who I can scarce recall at this moment.

This was the revolutionary saga that was a parallel movement for freedom and a much downplayed one by a national government that has as yet not struck the right patriotic chord as was once so audaciously struck by the preeminent patriots of the motherland.

Written by

Sugata Bose