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Writer's pictureNetaji Subhas Bose

Who was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose?

The question may sound strange, and the readers may also have serious doubt about my sanity. But the idea came up from a comment by Swami Vivekananda's friend and a great figure of the nineteenth century Bhabani Charan Bandapadhyay or Brahmabandhob Upadhyay While reminiscing about Swami Vivekananda, Brahmabandhob recalled a particular moment of conversation with Swamiji when he realized who Swamiji was - the personification of pain and suffering of thousands of years by India and the Indians. In British India the two hundred years of systematic loot of wealth, economic exploitation, slavery imposed by the brutal colonial rulers, the imposition of an alien culture and education system that deprived the Hindus of their cultural pride, the racist slurs, the dogmatic assertion of superiority of Christianity as a religion over "caste and superstition ridden" Hindu ideals, the destruction of Nationalist thinking and ideals, killing and torturing of the Nationalists and the revolutionaries manifested in the brutalities in Cellular prison of Andaman, in the gallows of the British jails, in the Rowlatt Act which forced people to literally crawl and which exterminated Indians as vermins by using even British airforce on the poor farmers, culminating in the Jalianwalabagh massacre, the insane taxes on the poor depriving them of their basic means of sustenance that fuelled the prosperity of West and leading to widespread famines that killed tens of millions, four million in 1943 in Bengal alone. All these had one consequence - extreme pain and suffering. This pain and suffering under the British rule found deliverance in the form of a person, an ideal. That ideal was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, along with other great revolutionaries who preceded him. But in Subhas Chandra Bose, the India subjected to inhuman torture and abject humilitation, found the personification of the resistance against the suffering. Such resistance needed complete self abnegation, rising above all selfishness and petty interest. Netaji showed India the way. He became the very icon of fiery ideals that India would need to stand up facing the enemy eye to eye, not through passive resistance or meek submissiveness practiced by Gandhi, but by the assertion of strength advocated by Swami Vivekananda. Netaji stood for that leonine strength and he infused that strength in a moribund Nation, particularly the army, that needed a whiplash to come out of its subservience to amn oppressive tyrant foreign rule.

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