JUSTICE DONE OR AN ANTITHESIS OF NO CONSEQUENCE?

JUSTICE DONE OR AN ANTITHESIS OF NO CONSEQUENCE?

Let us honour our greats without being acrimonious towards some of them for their sectional failings which need no more circumscribe us in our national attitudes and actions. And they ought not to as well for it is time to read history right and right the wrongs that have thus far restricted us in our progressive endeavours. But let us not therefore relegate some of the greats to the periphery of our attention to our own detriment, for history throws up seminal personalities to steer the affairs of a state as per its determined course coming down the ages, and such directors of a nation's destiny must be given due attention for us to draw lessons from the past so that we may either pursue the line they showed us or alter course to avoid earlier disasters that resulted from such following. But this ought to come with objective and unbiased study irrespective of political orientation of thought, as historical study in its ideal setting ought to be, and this cannot be achieved by uncritical adulation or consistent calumnising of past personalities as is the wont today where extremes of appreciation or denunciation rage in the public sphere regarding some of these greats. They are deemed either as gods or demons when they were only human and made some massive blunders along with their mighty achievements for the masses, with their follies and foibles the result of their human status rather than their imaginary godly one, never a reality but thrust upon them to suit the dependent mental condition of the commoner. Of course, some of these leaders even deliberately fuelled such imagination of the masses to maintain their hold on them and, so, achieve their ends for what they deemed was national good. The reaction in retrospect is following and must necessarily reduce these leaders to their truer status of the somewhat frail human being. But ought not such a standard be applied to all and not just a select few who apparently are earning the ire of the public today on account of revelation of hitherto undisclosed facts that undermine their supposed greatness greatly, continuous convenient counter-propaganda to the same effect, and yet again the selfsame error of showering undue adulation on a select few who will in due course die in public memory or live on to be the butt of their carping criticism? History is vengeful and will not pardon indiscretions of the hour in the High Court of Time.

Written by Sugata Bose