THE CONGRESS THEN AND THE CONGRESS NOW WITH REGARD TO NETAJI BOSE

THE CONGRESS THEN AND THE CONGRESS NOW WITH REGARD TO NETAJI BOSE

Subhas Chandra Bose did not leave the Congress of his own accord owing to disagreements with Gandhiji and the Congress High Command as today's Congress makes it out to be. He was non-cooperated with, marginalised and abandoned by the Congress Working Committee and forced circumstantially by design to resign from his Presidency in 1939. Thereafter, he was debarred from running for any executive office within the Congress for a period of three years as a disciplinary measure adopted against him for his radical ways of rousing the nation against the British. Finally, when he could not be persuaded to adhering to the moderate methods of the Mahatma, life within the Congress was made so impossible for him that he was forced to resign from its ordinary membership even.

That today the Congress pretends that it was Bose who of his own accord, on account of differences with the top brass of the Congress then, had resigned his Congress membership is indicative of the bankrupt party's utter loss of historical honesty and integrity. The way post-resignation and his escape to Europe and, thereafter, on his armed arrival on the eastern borders of India, he was treated by his erstwhile Congress colleagues puts patriots to shame. Worse followed post his disappearance as the revolutionary soldiers of his INA were refused recruitment in the ranks of independent India's army and even refused pension till in the early 1970s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi undid the dastardly deed perpetrated thus far.

Bose, now Netaji, was marginalised in India's chronicled history of the freedom movement and when the Morarji Desai government unearthed the underground capsules laid by Mrs. Gandhi's government that carried the core content of India's history, Netaji was nowhere to be seen there even by way of mention. Other than this, his files were kept classified for seven decades and some crucial ones even destroyed by the Congress government under Indira Gandhi, his role in India's history deliberately downplayed and the INA soldiers and officers, barring a few favoured ones who had sided with Nehru and made common cause with him, were denied honour, livelihood and due gratitude for all that they had done to free the nation. These hapless ones along with their forgotten leader were made to live lives in penury and in utter oblivion even as the ones that had spun the yarn earned the royal right to rule and receive all the royalty in return for riding the crest of the revolutionary wave to freedom for which they had made scant contribution.

Let us brood on these issues, these injustices, indignities and historical heresies, and right the wrongs of history rather than merely spewing our venom that will tantamount to nothing. Netaji demands it of every patriot that breathes the free air of freedom today, of every nationalist that has his/her being that he/she may live and die for the sovereignty, security and solidarity of the nation.

Written by Sugata Bose