The Selective Reverence: What the Recent on Netaji's Insult Controversy Reveals About India's Politics of Convenient Patriotism

I. What Happened

In early August 2026, a video began circulating on social media of BJP Rajya Sabha MP Nagendra Ray — better known by his chosen title, Ananta Maharaj — addressing a gathering in Dinhata, Cooch Behar. In it, he questioned whether Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose deserved credit for the Azad Hind Fauj, suggested the force was effectively British in composition and organisation, and went further, reportedly describing Bose as having been officially labelled a "war criminal." He attributed this last claim to unspecified "historical documents" from the Nehru era and, when the row broke, refused to retract or apologise, insisting the burden lay on his critics to "prove him wrong."

The remarks did not stay contained to Cooch Behar. The Forward Bloc — the party Bose founded — filed police complaints. Civil society groups, sections of the Rajbanshi community that Ananta Maharaj claims to represent, and opposition parties demanded his arrest and the cancellation of his Rajya Sabha membership. For roughly two weeks, the controversy simmered largely in regional media and social platforms, without much uptake in national English-language outlets — a gap the original premise of this piece rightly flagged as its own small scandal, given how routinely Netaji's name is invoked in national discourse.

What forced the issue into the open was West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari — himself a BJP leader, since the BJP won the 2026 West Bengal Assembly election and now runs the state government Adhikari once opposed as leader of the opposition. On 12 August, Adhikari publicly warned that "the law is equal for everyone" and directed police to act against anyone making derogatory remarks about Netaji, regardless of political affiliation. Within 24 hours: a Cooch Behar resident's complaint became a formal FIR against Ananta Maharaj; the state government withdrew the Banga Bibhushan honour it — under the previous Mamata Banerjee government — had conferred on him in February 2026; and a statue of Netaji in Kolkata's New Alipore was found vandalised, its right arm broken off, in an incident police are still investigating.

II. The Inconvenient Detail: This Is Now an Intra-BJP Problem

The framing many observers reach for instinctively — a ruling party at the Centre staying silent while its own Bengal unit condones an insult to a Bengali icon — needs updating. Since the BJP now governs West Bengal, the state machinery that filed the FIR and stripped the honour is BJP machinery. That is a genuinely unusual spectacle: a party's own state government taking punitive administrative action against its own sitting Member of Parliament.

But the more revealing hypocrisy sits one level up, inside the party organisation rather than the government. As multiple reports have noted, West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya himself made a separate controversial claim in the same period — alleging that Forward Bloc activists had once physically attacked Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a claim critics read as an attempt to cast Bose's own party in a discreditable light by association. No disciplinary action, show-cause notice, or public rebuke has followed against Bhattacharya from either the state or central party leadership. Ananta Maharaj himself pointed to this asymmetry directly, asking pointedly why he alone was being singled out for arrest when "even Samik Bhattacharya is an MP."

This is the crux of the matter: the BJP's state government acted — under direct public pressure and against the backdrop of an opposition (now led by Mamata Banerjee) eager to make political capital of it — while the BJP as a political organisation, at both the state and national level, has been markedly less willing to apply its own stated "zero tolerance" standard internally. As of this writing, there is no public record of the party's central leadership — the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, or BJP president J.P. Nadda — issuing any statement on Ananta Maharaj's remarks at all.

III. A Useful Precedent: How the Party Has Handled Insults to Other Icons

The silence is worth measuring against precedent, because the BJP does have a track record of swift central intervention when a member's remarks about a national icon become politically costly. In 2015, BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj called Mahatma Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse a "patriot" in Parliament. The fallout was immediate and public: reports at the time indicated the Prime Minister was personally displeased, the Finance Minister confirmed as much to the press, the party issued a show-cause notice, and under mounting parliamentary pressure Sakshi Maharaj was made to stand and offer a public — if initially grudging — retraction on the floor of the House.

The comparison is not offered to relitigate that older episode, but to establish that the party has, when it judged the political cost sufficient, moved quickly and visibly to distance itself from an offending member and compel a public correction. That machinery — show-cause notices, parliamentary pressure, an unambiguous central statement — exists and has been used before. Its absence in the Ananta Maharaj case, more than two weeks after the remarks first surfaced and even after a state honour was withdrawn and an FIR filed, is conspicuous by the standard the party has itself previously set.

There are plausible institutional reasons for this difference that a fair account should register. Godse's status as Gandhi's assassin is a settled matter of criminal historical record, giving that controversy an unambiguous factual floor that made continued silence politically untenable within days. The Netaji dispute, by contrast, has been allowed to be framed — including by Ananta Maharaj — as a "historical" argument about wartime allegiances and the status of the INA, murkier terrain that offers more room for a party to calculate that saying nothing will cost it less than saying something. Whether that calculation is itself a form of moral evasion, or a legitimate reluctance to adjudicate contested history through a press statement, is a fair question for readers to weigh rather than one this piece will settle for them.

IV. Netaji as Bipartisan Property: No One's Hands Are Entirely Clean

It would be a mistake — and a partisan one — to write this as a story of a uniquely BJP failing, because the instrumentalization of Bose's memory has been a genuinely cross-party affair for decades, and the historical record bears that out plainly.

The Congress governments of independent India were, for much of the twentieth century, notably reluctant to fully declassify files on Bose's disappearance, a reluctance Bose's own family and later governments have criticised as evasive at best. In 2016, the Modi government's decision to begin declassifying those files was itself framed by BJP leaders as correcting decades of Congress neglect — a framing Congress rejected as opportunistic, pointing out that no BJP government before 2014 had done anything more.

The BJP's own record in office has produced its share of missteps on the same subject. In 2015, a tweet from the Press Information Bureau referring to Bose's "death anniversary" — implicitly endorsing the 1945 plane-crash account many Indians dispute — caused enough embarrassment that the state BJP unit privately lobbied for disciplinary action against the official responsible. Then-Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made an identical error in a personal tweet the same year, deleting it after immediate backlash. In January 2021, the BJP's own supporters at a central government event marking Bose's 125th birth anniversary chanted religious slogans that led Mamata Banerjee to walk out mid-ceremony, an episode she and her party characterised as a deliberate insult delivered in front of the sitting Prime Minister.

Nor has the Trinamool Congress or Congress been free of embarrassment. In January 2025, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's tribute post to Bose contained an incorrect date of death, drawing criticism from both the BJP and the TMC — a small error, but one that fed a familiar pattern in which every party's engagement with Bose is scrutinised primarily for its utility as a weapon against rivals rather than as an act of historical reckoning. The Left, too, has had to publicly walk back its own historical hostility to Bose, whom Communist parties once criticised as a fascist collaborator before revising that assessment decades later.

The pattern that emerges is not one of a single villainous party but of a recurring national habit: Bose is invoked reverently in January around Parakram Diwas, contested bitterly whenever a rival's misstep can be exploited, and largely forgotten in the intervening months when no election or news cycle demands his name. Every major party has, at one time or another, been on both the giving and receiving end of a Netaji controversy.

V. What This Says About the State of Indian Political Accountability

If there is a genuine and specific concern in the present controversy, it is less about which party is "guiltier" in some abstract historical ledger, and more about a structural erosion visible in this particular episode: the gap between what a party says its standards are and what it is willing to enforce against its own members when the political cost of enforcement is unclear.

A Chief Minister's public warning, backed by a police FIR and the loss of a state honour, is meaningful institutional action — it should be acknowledged as such rather than dismissed. But institutional action from a state government is not the same thing as party accountability, and the distinction matters. A party that disciplines its members only when a court, a police complaint, or an opposition leader forces its hand — rather than as a matter of its own stated principle — is signalling that its reverence for national icons is conditional on external pressure rather than internal conviction. That is a criticism that can, with appropriate modification, be levelled at nearly every major Indian party at one time or another, which is precisely why this deserves to be read as a systemic problem rather than a partisan talking point.

The vandalism of the Netaji statue in New Alipore, whatever its ultimate cause turns out to be, has already become a proxy in this fight — claimed by some as evidence of a climate of hostility the original remarks helped create, and dismissed by others, including local BJP workers, as an opportunistic act timed to embarrass the party further. Until the police investigation concludes, neither reading can be responsibly asserted as fact, and this piece does not attempt to.

VI. A Concluding Observation, Not a Verdict

There is a longer democratic question underneath this specific controversy, and it is worth naming plainly, if speculatively: when reverence for a national figure becomes primarily a seasonal political performance — invoked at Parakram Diwas, deployed as a rhetorical weapon against rivals, but rarely backed by consistent internal accountability inside any single party — the figure himself becomes hollowed out. Bose stops being a subject of serious historical engagement and becomes, instead, a symbol available for temporary rental by whichever party finds it useful that week.

Whether that hollowing-out reflects something specific to the BJP's current internal culture, or something endemic to how all mass parties in a competitive democracy relate to inherited national symbols, is a genuinely open question — and one on which reasonable people, including serious historians of the freedom movement, disagree. What seems harder to dispute is that a controversy involving a sitting MP's remarks about one of India's most revered freedom fighters taking over two weeks to draw any central party or governmental response — while an equally sensitive remark about Gandhiji's killer drew one within days a decade earlier — is itself data. What that data ultimately proves about the ruling party, and about Indian political culture more broadly, is a debate this piece hopes to open rather than close.

This piece is a factual and analytical account based on contemporaneous reporting as of 14 August 2026. The police investigation into the Netaji statue vandalism was ongoing at the time of writing, and any claims about its cause should be treated as provisional pending that investigation's conclusion. The post is out of my deep love and gratitude for Netaji and not out of hatred for anyone, even those who insults him. They will suffer their own karma. Netaji will remain immortal. The false heroes and gods of our time will vanish into oblivion.