EXPECTEDLY, THE ANNOUNCEMENT BY PRIME MINISTER MODI that he will formally unveil a hologram statue of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose tomorrow at India Gate has led to profuse diarrhoea among Lutyens liberals. ‘tis the season once again, when the blunted teeth and emasculated growls of these uncaged Nehruvian canines have come out to prowl on the streets of Delhi and elsewhere, yelping “erasure of history,” “Hindutva project,” and variants thereof.
As we noted elsewhere, Narendra Modi is quietly decolonizing India and reclaiming our history in his own, distinctive fashion. Installing Netaji’s statue is just a continuation of this much-needed historical imperative.
Notwithstanding the nuances of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose’s legacy, the indisputable fact is that this trailblazing hero and indefatigable fighter for India’s freedom has been dealt a raw deal by Nehruvian darbaris starting all the way from Nawab Nehru himself. Small wonder that Nawab Nehru’s great grandson, the unsaleable product of a surreptitious India-Italy collaboration, has not had the dignity and grace to even mention Netaji’s name. Nawab Nehru’s Netaji burden is surely weighing heavily on his enervated shoulders.
The other antiquated Nehruvian darbari, Pawan Khera, quite low in the Congress food chain, commanded thus:
When Netaji was organising the INA to liberate the North East from the British rule, Savarkar exhorted recruitment of Hindu Mahasabha in the British army. That same army then indulged into large-scale killing of INA soldiers. If the PM were to read the shameful history of his ideological forefathers, he would first apologise to the nation.
Coming from the mothership of history distortions, this piece of hilarity is entirely consistent. Khera either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know the recorded fact that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose reverentially reprinted Veer Savarkar’s banned magnum opus on the 1857 War of Independence and presented it to him with great veneration. Before leaving India to found the INA, Bose once again met Savarkar and took his blessings. If Savarkar exhorted Hindus to join the (British) Indian army, it is a matter for celebration, not apology. It must be remembered that till then, Muslim soldiers comprised a whopping seventy-five percent in the Indian army. The rest is best left unsaid.
All this is recent history, which occurred less than a century ago and which the shameless generational denizens of Nawab Nehru’s court managed to mangle with a ruthlessness rivalling even Aurangzeb. From this perspective, Narendra Modi’s attempts to decolonize and reform the situation is akin to cleansing the national gutter created and nourished by the Congress. There’s just no nice way of saying this.
HISTORY RECOVERY IS A THREE-PRONGED AFFAIR. The first is of a positive sort, i.e., focusing on the real markers of our past greatness and present attempts to retrieve that greatness. The second is to scrub away the layers of Left and Congress whitewashing, especially of the history of the medieval Muslim rule. The third is to tell the truth behind the reasons for this whitewashing. All three prongs have to necessarily occur in a concomitant manner, and it is arguably occurring and has picked up speed in the last six years or so. This is also the contributory pill that regularly causes the aforementioned Lutyens-Liberal diarrhoea.
For all their hollering against Netaji’s statue, the talent-devoid Congress of today is either clueless or is venally silent about the third-rate treatment meted out to Subash Chandra Bose by the non-violent Mahatma. For the first time, Mohandas Gandhi got a cruel reality check of his own popularity and appeal within the Congress when his own party members overwhelmingly voted for Bose as President. The unscrupulous tactics that Gandhi used to unseat Bose from that position is a study in mercenary behavior coated with the pork-fat of egotism and jealousy. Given that Bose was also a Congressman at one time, why hasn’t the party still owned his legacy? From this and scores of other perspectives, the real contribution of the Congress to the freedom struggle is not only questionable and dubious but leads us to this inescapable conclusion: a tiny cabal of the top leadership of the Congress usurped the fruits of the selfless work and astounding sacrifices made both by its teeming cadres and millions of non-Congress patriots.
Let’s read what another Congress stalwart from Bengal said in a speech in Bombay in July 1948.
After ten months of existence, India has produced a maimed and crippled baby without much sign of life. She has been regulated and regimented to such a state that she is unable to throw up her arms and kick her legs. Our recent past has been one of which we cannot be proud. WE HAVE COPIED IN EVERY DETAIL THE EXAMPLE OF THE BRITISH. The repressive ordinances, acts and regulations of the British have all been made into law to-day; even a [British] ordinance of 1818 has found a place in our draft constitution. What is most shameful is that these repressive measures are far more stringent than the British ever dared to take. Free speech, association and assemblies are things of the past. OUR NEWSPAPERMEN ARE REPRESENTATIVES ONLY OF A SERVILE PRESS; the same men who once had the guts to criticize the British regime in their newspapers are to-day looking to New Delhi for orders. Corruption, nepotism and graft are on the increase in every province. Pandit Nehru had once said that all black-marketeers should be hanged from the nearest tree and that the public services should be manned by patriots and not by Indian Civil Servants… ALL THESE UTTERANCES AND PROMISES MADE IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS REMAIN MERELY UTTERANCES AND PROMISES WHICH AWAIT REDEMPTION…HOW CAN AN ORDINARY INDIAN LOOK UP TO THE CONGRESS ANY LONGER TO FULFIL THOSE PROMISES?
Capitals in the original
That was Sri Sarat Chandra Bose, brother of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose. Sarat Babu had served as a distinguished member of the then Central Legislative Assembly. The Congress owed its entire political fortune in Bengal to Sarat Chandra Bose. Quite obviously, he quit the party after being disgusted with the way things were panning out but showed it who the boss was. In a 1949 by-election, Sarat Bose contested as an independent from South Calcutta against the Congress party’s Suresh Chandra Das. The election was one of its kind. After filing his nomination, Sarat Bose went to Switzerland for health reasons. The campaign, fought in his absence, was entirely led by the people and pummelled the Congress candidate. Nehru campaigned personally. As did Patel and other powerful leaders. Sarat Chandra Bose was elected with a majority of 4:1.
Scores of such stories have survived and lie await for the diligent student.
OF COURSE, IT IS HARD to expect even the top leaders of today’s surviving Congress fossil to know their own party’s recent history but history is one of the greatest levellers. Rahul Gandhi continues to consume the poisonous harvest of the false history that Nawab Nehru seeded. Here is another titbit from that history written by the distinguished M.R. Pai:
Mahatma Gandhi, Netaji Subhas with his INA, and Hitler who exhausted the British brought freedom to India. The Congress Party was an organisation which actively participated in the freedom fight, BUT AFTER INDEPENDENCE, FOR PAST 22 YEARS IT DOMINATED THE INDIAN POLITY TAKING CREDIT FOR THE CONTRIBUTION OF ALL OTHERS TO THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT. THE SYSTEMATIC WAY NETAJI'S NAME HAS BEEN SOUGHT TO BE ERASED FROM PUBLIC MEMORY IS A FIRST-RATE SCANDAL and shows how lust for power can overcome ordinary decencies of life.
Capitalisation Added
Needless, the Congress is synonymous with scandal.
But before we close this, it is pertinent to dig up a long-forgotten fact from history that holds several insights in connection with Rahul Gandhi’s senseless comments on India Gate and the Amar Jawan Jyoti.
Centuries before India Gate was constructed, there was another fabled gate in Delhi. Fabled for all the wrong reasons. This was the Badaun Gate, forming part of the great citadel built by Prithviraja Chahamana. At one point, the Badaun Gate was the busiest in Delhi. Under the dark despotism of the so-called Delhi Sultanate, the Badaun Gate earned a pride of place in Muslim annals. This distinction singularly rested on a sickening occurrence so ubiquitous in the medieval Muslim history of India. Each time a sultan attacked and plundered a Hindu territory and destroyed temples and Vigrahas, their mutilated remains were transported by the cartloads, on elephants and camels and poured on the anvil of the Badaun Gate so that pious Musulmans could trample on them and enter Delhi.
This behaviour not only resembles Nawab Nehru’s serial assaults against Indian history but his conscious bowdlerisation of Netaji’s intrepid legacy as a hero of our freedom struggle.
The twenty-five-feet-tall granite statue of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose will eventually endure as an imposing pointer of accusation to Nawab Nehru’s insecurity-driven chicaneries masquerading as the history of our freedom struggle.
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