NETAJI https://www.facebook.com/groups/netaji.bose/

The life and legacy of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the one leader who the whole of India identifies with even today despite the conspiracies that be, the hope and aspiration of a billion Indians, it is this that is the essential subject matter of this group page and it is he who is the life-force behind us, inspiring us onto the sublimer ends of patriotism and fraternal feeling for all with a bond forged in the crucible of sacrifice and service for the common weal. Associated are the lives of the great personalities of the world who have fought for the emancipation of mankind and who, for sure, must have left indelible impression on the formative mind of Subhas Chandra as he blossomed into political maturity. Allied are some posts on the great revolutionaries of all time and climes but for whom the peoples of the world would have largely remained under the tyranny of malevolent forces that have afflicted the world periodically throughout history, and the saga is not done yet, for history repeats itself in alternate terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis which is the dialectical triad governing human evolutionary movement. 

However, the thrust of the page is on Netaji in whose name we have assembled here to learn, study, analyse, research and discover, especially, when the hero's whereabouts post his sudden disappearance on 18 August, 1945, remain shrouded in mystery, known, perhaps, in the corridors of power, but unravelled as yet by scholars from their limited access to classified Bose files the world over, and so, unrevealed to the general public. We shall make our own effort here on this group page to throw light on his career and the mystery thereafter, by way of our homage to him but for whom we would have been in bondage to the British for God knows how long. Netaji was, historically speaking on the basis of hard facts, the true liberator of India, and we owe it to him and his valiant associates in armed revolution against the British, the Indian National Army, that we shall strive our utmost to do justice to their cause of national liberation by setting the records straight amidst historical heresies perpetrated by successive Congress Governments at the Centre in alliance with the British and who knows which other nation. We shall raise an army of disciplined workers in the name of the hero, pure and selfless, dedicated to the motherland, who will serve and sacrifice to rebuild our nation following the blueprint laid down by Netaji and his spiritual master, Swami Vivekananda. Jai Hind! ... Written by Sugata Bose (administrator)

NETAJI IN RETROSPECT ... 3

Netaji is a much misunderstood man. Imagine how it feels to be labelled ‘war criminal’ by your own countrymen for your efforts to free your country from British bondage. And that is what he remains even after seven decades since the Second World War in the records of the victorious Allies, a label which no other self-respecting sovereign nation would have allowed without making serious effort to erase such appellation.

America took help from the French to gain liberation from the British in their War of Independence. The French were the enemies of the British historically till the First World War allied them against the Germans in a common war effort. Netaji applied the same principle of the ‘enemy of the enemy being one’s friend’. He found in the Axis Powers his friend against the British occupiers of India.

America ended the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Was this not a war crime of the worst order? Should then not President Harry Truman be considered ‘war criminal’ for, after all, the nuking of the cities led to unnecessary civilian deaths by the hundreds of thousands?

Churchill caused the death of five million Bengalis in the man-made Bengal Famine of 1943 when crops were exported from Bengal to the European War Front to be stocked as buffer for the soldiers fighting for the British, in anticipation of future requirements. This was the worst genocide perpetrated by the British under specific command from the evil Churchill. Should he not, therefore, be called ‘war criminal’?

Reflect, friends, before you think you have done justice to your motherland in any mean measure, before you practise your daily perfidies of pious pleas and prayers to your partial Protector who you have permanently purchased as your prime possession for the sake of self and familial priorities, oblivious of the plight of the martyrs who bled that you be free today to indulge in your daily indolence of deliberated dastardliness. Jai Hind! 

A LAYMAN'S TIPS TO A JOURNALIST IN A TEMPESTUOUS SEA

In interviewing extreme elements of society, a journalist who has genuine concern for the country, who quizzes the interviewee without vociferousness of articulation but with a quiet and firm assertion, such a one does not inflame the irrational passions of rogues around and carries the conversation to conclusion without quickening over-aggressive response that is unwholesome. Even though the issues be contentious, so much so that they arouse one's indignation and ire as citizens of the nation, yet, a journalist must necessarily be neutral to the conversation and must in no way give vent to his personal feelings that may compromise him both professionally as well as personally and mar the objectivity of his approach to the issue which is the precondition for effective journalism. The interviewer must be relaxed and calm even as his incisive interrogation throws his interviewee oftentimes into a quandary and results in the nonplussed person giving out his actual stance on an issue even as a witness on cross-examination by an experienced prosecutor gives out vital information that helps solve a complex case. The personality of the interviewer must be pleasant and reassuring, his manners affable and by no means aggressive, and his judgement unerring as to how far he may prod and probe in a given situation, given the volatility of situations often in field journalism. A winning smile is handy and an overall affable personality, sending signals of fraternal feeling for all, a winning virtue indispensable in this art of eliciting information or attitudes from individuals without causing undue offence to them. There must be civility of discourse from the interviewer's side and a dispassionate delineation when alluding to vitriolic events of the past such that journalistic non-partisanship be maintained in the pursuit of the discovery and the establishment of truth. May good sense prevail and permit journalistic fidelity amidst 'smiles and affability', to quote Brutus' suggestion to his co-conspirators in the assassination plot then being hatched to eliminate Julius Caesar!

ON THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW AWAKENING

Students must devote themselves to studying and building up their character at this critical phase of their lives for effective contribution to the nation later rather than this lining up for devious political programmes in the name of nationalism which effectively will be ruinous in the long run both for their individual selves as well as for the nation at large. This sort of saffron nationalism or secular nationalism, however you may label it, stands in sharp variance to what the ancient forest universities of Bharatvarsha stood for when emphasis was laid on spiritual and academic pursuits in the Brahmacharya schools during the period of tutelage and politics left to be pursued after the blossoming of mature wisdom post the university days. If this government that upholds the cause of nationalism, truly stands for our ancient nation's values, then it will have to do a lot more of contemplation than the surface scratching of scriptural texts it is wont to doing and then articulating the findings thereof in the form of well-known aphorisms followed by the unleashing of the blossoming force of the youth of this nation along wasteful channels of violence and mass hysteria, all for the purpose of building its mass base for future electoral gains. My plea, therefore, to the nation is that politicians, perfidious as they are at any rate today across the spectrum, desist from destroying the flower of our youth by halting their induction programmes in university campuses and in this I include even academics who are culpable to the same charge. It is for professors to teach their courses and teach nobly, not to awaken hatred for the nation through one-sided discourses delivered nor not to encourage critical thinking about contentious national issues as is in vogue in totalitarian societies. But through it all, it must be remembered by academics that the youth must not be led into vociferous denunciation of the nation which plays into the hands of enemy nations like Pakistan. At the same time, the government must understand that the law enforcement bodies must control civil disorder which ought not to be the prerogative of student bodies like the ABVP. It is in the present government's best interests to take a more rational stance towards student demonstrations in universities and take to tackling the problem by genuine good governance instead of deflecting public scrutiny of its failings by thrusting self-interpreted definitions of nationalism and anti-nationalism. Let public discourse be civil and not brutal. May peace prevail despite pluralism of opinion! May the word of dissent be met with the word of debate and neither the bayonet nor the bullet! Let us once more prove that we are worthy inheritors of an ancient civilisation which had ample space even for the heretical Charvakas who were allowed to freely propagate their views, so potently against the Vedas, but which, nonetheless, by their contrasting colour heated up the public discourse in a civilised and rational way, thereby, facilitating in truest terms the flourishing of democracy of thought and action which in essence is the bedrock of our hoary culture. May the God of India's destiny (Bharatabhagyavidhata) bless the youth of our motherland with patience, fortitude and forbearance, and above all, love for each other, even though they be across the table of dialogue, debate and dissent! May Sri Ramakrishna bless you, young man, dear Meghnad Bose! Remember Swami Vivekananda's immortal mantra: purity, patience, perseverance.

THE MAHATMA OF THE MASSES ... 1

The Himalayan blunders Mahatma Gandhi made to fit the nation in to his almost doctrinaire creed of non-violence, oblivious of the calamitous consequences for the country thereof, shows him, despite his seminal contributions to the freedom movement, in a rather poor light as a statesman worth the salt in the world of realpolitik for which, of course, partitioned India has paid dear. His idiosyncrasies and instability of judgement and resolve, his unplanned impulsiveness in unfolding a line of action, then suddenly changing course or disbanding a movement owing to the slightest deviation by a section of the people from his intended programme as in the case of the disbanding of the Civil Disobedience Movement after Chauri Chaura in 1922, made him as a revolutionary easy meat for the villainous British. Gandhiji's inconsistency in action also severely decelerated the revolutionary movement in India and allowed the gradual rise of uglier heads like the sinister forces of Partition in the form of Jinnah, Suhrawardy and the like. The Mahatma, despite his obvious protestations to the contrary, never could quite reconcile his dual role of national leader and world teacher and his work, ever oscillating between the two, suffered from conflict of interest and eventually amounted to India paying his debt, interest compounded, by suffering dismemberment, a gory legacy whose illicit offspring on either side of our holy land  continues to undermine our peace and security even today in the selfsame way it did when the Mahatma's folly in fondness for the befriended enemy sent a nation to despair amidst the worst fratricidal bloodbath recorded in human history.

To be continued...

SHAHEED, SWARAJ AND NETAJI

The dreaded Cellular Jail in Shaheed (Andamans) where the most dangerous revolutionaries in British eyes were incarcerated, tortured and executed whose horrors send shivers down one's spine and fill one with pathos at the plight of the prisoners who lived and died to set us free from the hands of the barbarous British. It has been my privilege to intimately know one such prisoner as a child, our Jogi Dadu, who used to tell us stories from his days of internment in the Cellular Jail, how iron nails used to be driven into the fingernails of the prisoners to extract information from them and how the fingernails would then be taken out from the fingers. I remember I could not quite fathom then the import of the stories but I used to watch with rapt wonderment at the stoic face of Jogi Dadu as he recounted those days of old. This was in the mid-sixties of the last century when I heard these stories. I still can recall the wistful look in his eyes as he beheld his comrades in his mind's eye suffering torture and death so many years ago in the island of hell where blood flowed in equal stream with the waves of the surrounding waters and the tears of mothers and wives and daughters from the far-off mainland sent emissaries of empathy across the black waters (kalapani) to sustain the valorous ones in their hour of terrible torment.

On 29 December, 1943, Netaji visited the Andamans and headed straight for the Cellular Jail where he paid glowing tributes to the martyrs that had fallen there and the prisoners that had suffered persecution. The following day he hoisted the National Flag on this, the first territorial tract of India to be liberated form British occupancy. In the spring of the following year, Netaji, now the official administrative head of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands by agreement with Imperial Japan who had handed over the islands to the Provisional Government of Free India, renamed Andaman as Shaheed in honour of the incarcerated heroes and martyrs of the freedom struggle at the Cellular Jail and Nicobar as Swaraj in celebration of the installation of the Provisional Government of Free India in the islands, the official handing over of charge taking place on 17 February, 1944.

Shaheed and Swaraj being the first territory of dependent India to be liberated from the British, became symbolic of the revolutionary fervour that now drove the INA to the mountainous terrain of Northeast India, and the fall of the Cellular Jail became likened to the fall of the Bastille in Paris, 1789, that had sparked off the French Revolution. In the days to come half of Assam, a slice of Imphal (Manipur) and a portion of Bengal were liberated and held by the INA for nearly three months but sudden reverses in the Second World War suffered by Japan and early heavy precipitation that year forced a retreat for the INA from the liberated lands leading to their re-annexation by the British.

However, Shaheed and Swaraj have passed into folklore and so has the Cellular Jail but the British restored the earlier names of the islands and the Government of free India later exhibited scant interest in upholding the legacy of Netaji there out of loyalty to the alien masters who had entered the nervous system of the Anglophile Nehru and his comrades in non-violent cooperation with the divisive British who surgically partitioned the motherland before beating a hasty retreat out of sheer fear of a violent reprisal at the hands of their Indian Armed Forces whose loyalty, now significantly eroded by the INA's wartime activities, they could no longer rely on. Netaji never showed up again since his reported air crash at Taihoku airfield on 18 August, 1945.

And what followed was heresy of an order unmatched in the annals of history when a freshly freed India, at the behest of Nehru and later his successors in the corrupt Congress, conspired with Britain, USA and USSR to suppress all information on the missing Netaji and, instead, perpetuated the myth of his death in the air crash that had been first floated by Imperial Japan on 23 August, 1945, to provide a smoke screen for Netaji to escape to the Soviet Union. This inference is being based on evidence emerging from recently declassified files on Netaji. Furthermore, the INA was disbanded, the pensions of the soldiers who freed India were denied and the soldiers themselves were refused recruitment in the Indian Armed Forces. Netaji was written off the history books, the INA Treasure was appropriated by sinister forces with a non-committal silence by the Nehru Government on the issue of an official enquiry into it and files on Netaji were kept classified for close to seventy years and two crucial ones even destroyed by Indira Gandhi's Government. Netaji has remained a 'War Criminal' in the eyes of the world even after seven decades of Indian independence which we owe principally to him, and the Government of India is still reticent to get his name cleared of all such scurrilous charge.

This much for gratitude from a benighted nation for a soul sublime, the like of whom has not visited us in recent memory barring the warrior monk, Vivekananda. Between the prophet and the patriot, Swamiji and Netaji have apportioned the burden of resurrection of the motherland and none has even remotely matched their absolute commitment to the cause, not even the Mahatma of malicious manipulation for magnificent intent. The rest pale into insignificance, despite their seminal contribution, before the splendour of the soul of the Netaji whose superb sacrifice and indomitable will saw to the eventual eviction of the British from the landmass of India as his shadow stalked the ramparts of the Red Fort during the INA Trials that set ablaze a nation long suppressed of its right to respire free of colonial roguish restraint. May Netaji be reborn in our hearts and minds as an undying source of inspiration to rebuild our motherland and career her back to her pristine glory and way beyond unto the zenith of her future progression! May the martyrs of Shaheed and Swaraj inspire in us courage of conviction to combat the corruptions in our consciousness that we may consider it our calling to correct our course! Jai Hind!

BRILLIANCE OF BOSE

Subhas Chandra Bose was a brilliant student throughout his academic life. This is why he was able to see through the cunning schemes of the British and could expose them before the world like none other among the Indian freedom fighters. It is a pity that the Congressmen, weak and cowardly, attacked the hero from all sides and virtually saw to his expulsion from the country which eventually brought about India's partitioned doom.