HE LOVED HIS COUNTRY LIKE NONE OTHER

HE LOVED HIS COUNTRY LIKE NONE OTHER

Netaji remains one of those rare souls who had not an iota of selfishness in his being unlike most of the celebrated leaders of his day who despite their seminal contributions to the freedom movement were not entirely motivated by pure love for the motherland without a tinge of personal gain in material terms or ideological imperatives coloured by their partisan personalities.

Netaji does not need recognition from his foolish, forgetful countrymen in whose ill-informed estimation, consequent upon a faulty education full of historical falsities and fabrications, his perfidious adversaries in Congress are reckoned as great and he, the hero of epic attainments, as one of the others who also ran for the coveted leadership of the Congress but was eventually expelled from it at the behest of the moral Mahatma, but he is richly ingrained in the hearts of millions of his devotees across the world for whom freedom and patriotism are synonymous with the lion-soul that Netaji was. These are the ones that carry the flame of his unfulfilled aspirations for the motherland in their heart ; these are the ones that will give utterance to his dream of a renascent India when the nation, long slumbering, will awake to self-consciousness with Swamiji and Netaji as their twin heroes, the guiding principles of their rejuvenated lives and the beacons for their advancing nation through the troubled waters of a darkened sea.

Written by Sugata Bose