Long after the departure of the great
leaders, a part of national thought seeks to pitch them in a battle which
beyond the manipulation of the political consciousness of this nation, for
obvious vested political gains has little utility and a great insult to the
majesty of the leaders who in their ways united or severally contributed to the
struggle for freedom.
To pitch Patel against Nehru or to now pitch
Subhash against him or Subhash against Gandhi can only come from a mind that
pitches Modi against Advani and has come to believe that such spinning and
pitching would bring same results all the time.
Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Subhash
Chandra Bose were all part of the Congress and believed in the principles of non-violence
and Satyagraha. The disagreement between the trio on one side and Subhash on the
other lay in the option whether satyagraha had failed and was violence the
better recourse. Never at any point of time were they divided or any none of
these, lesser in patriotism in the cause of freedom from the British. The
disagreement arose in consequence of the alignment of powers during the Second
World War.
Subhash saw reason in aligning with the Triple
axis formed by Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Japan pitted against
rest of the world. Gandhi and the Indian government of the British opted for
the British and the allied.
In the reliance on options available to the
enslaved nation Gandhi appeared wiser than Subhash, the latter failing to make
a correct assessment of the situation having underestimated the might of a war torn Britain which even in that reduced
state was mighty and still had the potential to contain any revolt in the
native forces.
Gandhi’s judgment of the situation was based
on the history of the sepoy mutiny of 1857 popularly remembered as this nation’s
first war of independence. Subhash’s belief that the British weakened by a
prolonged war were no longer in a position to withstand militant response from
the Indians was perhaps analogous with Saddam’s claim that he would fight the
“the mother of all battles” with the Americans “and beat them or Pakistan
hoping to wrest Kashmir from India a nation threatened by terrorism, by some
indulgence in military adventurism.
Gandhi showed wisdom in realizing this reality
which Subhash ignored losing thirty thousand brave Indians as he tried to march
into India and snatch it from the British, a brave and patriotic act no doubt,
but perhaps unwise. Bravery is not an exercise in ignorance or violence the
sole recourse of the brave. Chivalry needs to be read and exercised in the
light of wisdom. Gandhi stuck to his belief “that the means should justify the
end” and in exercise of such belief refused to go on the side of the evil the
“Triple Axis “.
The immorality of the moral of this
Goebbels story, whose chapters keep unfolding by the day, is an exercise in the
belief in the tool of divisiveness. Tire the Congress party through a concerted
publication of untruth and make it increasingly unacceptable to the people in
line with Modi’s philosophy of a “Congress free India.” Modi in a way similar
to Subhash is too speculative in his belief that he would eventually succeed in
doing this. Humans come and go, Ideologies stay, and Congress is one such which
may be lost on a supine mind dwelling in the dreams of the dream seller but
only till such time as reality disables such slumber. Atal’s India had been
shining only a little before, it came to be shunned by it.
The dirty pitching game should stop
as should such distortion of History. No history flowing through the pen of the
historian can escape of influence of human subjectivity and to insist that the
entire history of this nation is an exercise in distortion on that ground can
only come from minds which in their political speeches while narrating the
historical majesty of Bihar find Takshila an ancient place of learning situated
there, and not in Pakistan. The indulgent in such art of falsehood should bear
that truth which enables reason and response, has the capacity to block all
such deliveries.
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