Recent History Revisited
Revising history and the cultural context is much easier in
absolutist, totalitarian dictatorships.
When a democracy undertakes it, it is generally tumultuous.
So a Mao, Stalin, Castro and even Ataturk, made a slap up
job of it, but by ruthlessly eliminating all dissenters.
When America set about abolishing slavery however, it had to
fight a bloody civil war. In India, when
the Modi administration started stepping on established ‘Idea of India’ toes,
of the long-lived Nehruvian construct, immediate cries of ‘intolerance’ and
‘communalism’ went up. And these show no signs of abating. Of course, these protests
tend to be all the more strident with a free press as a megaphone, and the absence
of any fear of a midnight knock.
But yet, despite the clamour, a revision of sorts, begun
perhaps in NDA 1, and cast into the deep freeze for the intervening 10 years,
is once again, underway.
The declassification of the first 100 central government files related to the legendary and elusive Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, made on his birth anniversary, the 23rd of January, is a case in point.
There is a further promise to declassify another 25 files
each month, till they are all done. Not to be left out of all the political
correctness, West Bengal and its TMC government also declassified some 65 innocuous files in its archives, and in
advance of the central action.
The BJP, hopeful of a political dividend from all this
transparency, has anointed Netaji’s grand-nephew, post the declassification, hailed
by the entire Bose family, as its possible face for West Bengal’s coming
assembly elections.
And already, in black and white, an old mystery is resurrected, with accusations of forgery from the Congress Party alongside.
The files have thrown up two controversial issues about a
founding father of this republic so far. These two principal revelations
actually revisit what we know so far.
The first one suggests that Netaji did not die in an
aeroplane crash at Taipei, in Japanese occupied Taiwan in August 1945. And
those are not Netaji’s ashes in the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo. So, no wonder that
no DNA test was ever sought to be done on them. Netaji’s 73 year old daughter, economist, Dr. Anita Bose
Pfaff, reportedly wants a DNA test done,
and perhaps this government will help her in this too.
And secondly, the files suggest, Netaji was clandestinely moved
to Stalinist Russia (USSR), a war-time ally of the British. After all the INA
did surrender at the fall of Singapore to the British, and Bose might have been
present there too.
But it is also long known that Bose was planning to go to
Russia by way of Manchuria himself, because he thought Russia was turning away from
the Allies. Given his many incognito and overland trips in the past, this is
not implausible.
According to the declassified files, Bose was listed in
British records, as a ‘war criminal’, obviously not from the Indian
nationalist, but from an Allied point of view.
Netaji did, of course, consort with Hitler’s Germany and
Tojo’s Japan, both opposing Axis Forces, unlike MK Gandhi and Nehru. He also
made nightly radio broadcasts from Germany exhorting the Raj to ‘free India’.
Netaji also sought and obtained some support and succour
from the Japanese for his INA. He stood accused of inciting loyal
British-Indian forces to mutiny and cross over to the INA. The INA/Azad Hind
Fauj also fought alongside the losing Japanese side against the British-Indian
forces in the Imphal area.
While all this has been known for long, the revised outlook
suggests much more clearly than heretofore, that it was Subhas Chandra Bose’s
efforts that went farthest to secure Indian independence.
He managed to put the wind up the British, more because of
the possibility of inciting mutiny amongst
the millions of British-Indian forces in India and elsewhere during WWII, than the
actual military prowess of the INA.
This apparently had a bigger strategic impact on British
thinking than the non-violent and collaborative efforts of MK Gandhi and his
cohorts.
Extracts from the freshly declassified files also suggests
that Jawaharlal Nehru knew that Netaji was possibly being held prisoner in
Russia, most probably in Siberia. But Nehru did not follow through on this and hid
this possibility from his fellow Indians. In fact, he preferred the air crash
proposition, and did everything possible to make that version of Netaji’s death
stick.
Nehru, it is now revealed, more or less aided and abetted
the British stance regarding Bose, without ever challenging the ‘war criminal’
tag, even after independence, presumably motivated by his own selfish power
calculations. Even Mahatma Gandhi made remarks that seemed to suggest Bose was
alive after 1945. Of course, the Mahatma himself was gone by 1948.
This unproven narrative of Netaji’s death in the plane crash
has been maintained, more or less intact, right up to the present day.
More details are bound to come out soon, as files on Netaji,
both in India and with other countries abroad are declassified, via Indian
diplomacy. But yes, in top secret matters like this, such files are rarely
conclusive.
Judging from present trends, and if substantiated by more
revelations, it may well occasion a reassessment of the official history force-fed
to the nation thus far. But what is significant is that Netaji has never faded
from the affections of the Indian people despite little state promotion of his
ideas or legacy.
It is ironic, in this context, that a week after Netaji’s
own birth anniversary, we mark Mahatma Gandhi’s death anniversary, on the 30th
of January.
While it is both established, and unquestioned, that Mahatma
Gandhi (Bapu), was indeed ‘the father of the nation’; enthusiasm for his legacy
has been on the wane for some time.
Besides the routine genuflection on the Mahatma’s death and
birth anniversaries, and the de riguer visits of visiting dignitaries to
his Samadhi; it must be noticed that the Mahatma’s international influence is
now greater as the apostle of non-violent political action.
These have been strengthened, in recent times, both by the
late Nelson Mandela’s South Africa emerging out of the scourge of apartheid
using Gandhian methods, and the evolution of the American Civil Rights
Movement, from the late JFK and Martin Luther King, to the first
African-American president in the White House.
In India, there has been a resentment, certainly in
non-Congress circles, that other independence era stalwarts have been relegated
to the margins. This feeling has perhaps been given expression under Narendra
Modi. There is Dr. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a founder of the Jan Sangh, of
course, but also Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, BR Ambedkar, Sardar Patel, and
even brave revolutionary martyrs to the cause like Bhagat Singh, joining the
public discourse, after decades in obscurity.
Suggestions, coming out in the wash, that both Nehru and MK
Gandhi were, in fact, British collaborators, does not help their legacies
either.
The Congress, not willing to admit to anything untoward,
calls it all a deliberate and malicious attempt to diminish the contribution of
the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. It is to them a ham-fisted and distorted
re-evaluation of recent history, and an attempt to make political capital out
of the matter.
The BJP is however making the point that there were many
others who made signal contributions, but have been deliberately and
systematically forgotten.
Another trend is the lessening importance of socialism as an article of faith, even though it was enshrined in the preamble to the constitution by Indira Gandhi during the emergency. This is mainly because it failed to deliver more than 3% growth, for an economy that stood at less than half a billion dollars then, compared to over 7% for an economy that stands at $2 trillion today. And nobody can assert that Indian socialism’s 2-3% can provide for 1.2 billion people, given inflation that stands at twice as much, no matter how lovely the rhetoric.
Bose and Patel, being raked up today, represent also,
somewhat poignantly, the roads that were never taken. But, now their ideas
resonate quite strongly with India’s aspirations for development, military
strength, and growth.
The new India, after all, must invent itself afresh in a
multipolar world that has paradoxically
grown smaller and more interdependent. Modi, the outsider to the Congress
legacy and its dynastic construct, is just the man to show us the way ahead.
This rethink on our recent history did not happen by
accident. It actually started right after this government came to power. Modi decided
to build a colossus of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a Statue of Unity, to be
completed in 42 months from May 2014. It is designed to provide employment for
15,000 people when completed. At 182 metres, it will be the tallest statue in the world and
stand on an island 3.2 km away from the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river.
It will be linked to the mainland by a specially constructed road.
Modi called for ordinary Indians throughout the country to
donate iron to be melted down and
reworked to go into the statue’s foundations.
The Congress Party, predictably, has mocked and ridiculed the whole endeavour. Indeed, it accuses the BJP’s mentor, the RSS, of not even having participated in the independence struggle, and holds it responsible, obliquely, for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi.
That Patel’s memory had been lying on the shelf, and that
Netaji was ruthlessly thrown out of the Congress by MK Gandhi himself, is
another matter altogether.
The Statue of Unity is being cast however, not in India but
China’s Nanchang province, where ready facilities for such a giant undertaking
exist. The Chinese will then come to
help set it up in Gujarat. This process is perhaps symptomatic of the world today.
Patel, known for his pragmatism, would not have blinked. And
Narendra Modi wants to get the job done in 42 months.
For: Swarajyamag
(1,640 words)
February 1st, 2016
Gautam Mukherjee
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