A single revelation will go a long way in exposing their horrible lineage of collaboration among left-liberal media, academia and political establishments. It will unearth the disgusting history behind the transfer of power, and will blissfully dissolve some of our long-held icons
Anuj Dhar’s India’s Biggest Cover-Up speaks of an interesting episode on page 49: in October 1952, quite a few questions were disallowed on the floor of India’s Parliament, on the ground that they were too sensitive. “Inquiry about death of Netaji” was on that list, along with a question about the oppression of the Hindus of East Bengal which was also prohibited.
If there are certain questions which have remained a taboo for media and academia throughout the history of our country’s dominant left Nehruvian establishments, then the disappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose and the disappearance of the Hindus of East Bengal both feature distinctly among them. This silencing should be symptomatically studied and we plan to do that in this article, as we shall see that this left-liberal attitude unearths a secret. The secret Achilles’ heel of the anti-nationalist consolidation in our country, masquerading as respectable academics, intellectuals and media magnates can be discerned in this steadfast fear of these two taboos, and we shall presently see how they are related.
Undoubtedly they are two of the greatest tragedies this subcontinent ever witnessed. Both of them vouchsafe for the blood Bengal shed and the fate it suffered in India’s freedom struggle, and how subsequently Bengalis were punished by imperialist designs for the audacity they exhibited in their attempt to decolonise India not just politically, but socially, economically, culturally, spiritually, and morally.
Three commissions of enquiry till date: Shahnawaz, Khosla (the first two were puppet commissions formed by Jl Nehru and Indira Gandhi respectively) and Mukherjee (this one was formed by the first NDA Government following a directive from India’s judiciary itself, and its findings were not tabled in Parliament by the UPA Government), and yet the mystery over the disappearance of India’s greatest leader of armed freedom struggle remains officially unresolved, because files have been either destroyed or carefully concealed as classified.
And we still have a truncated history to deal with, as the official version tells us that Subhas Chandra Bose died in a place crash, whereas documentary evidences have established beyond doubt that no plane crash took place on that fateful day, and the ash earlier kept at Japan’s Renkoji temple (later brought to Kolkata by the last UPA Government amid a lot of protests) did not belong to Subhas Chandra Bose.
However, our professional academics remain unfazed, or so they pretend to be. Nirad C Chaudhuri said in his autobiography that in no country of the world such a bizarre scenario was to be seen; elsewhere in the world the groups which shed blood for their country’s freedom came to power after independence, but in India, those who gave blood, those who filled up Andaman’s cellular jails for charges of high treason to the British crown, those who were treated as the most dangerous rebels against the British empire, namely, the Hindus of Bengal, became the most marginalised, most decimated and most victimised community after independence. But then India probably did not have a proper independence, it was a transfer of power that took place on 15 August 1947, a condition which probably still lurks behind the inability of successive Indian Governments to declassify the Bose files.
A jaundiced history has been written by India’s intellectual apparatus. Interestingly, the ethnic cleansing of the Hindus of Bengal has been suppressed essentially by those Bengalis who found an easy way to rise to prominence by aligning with the dominant establishments. India came to be ruled by a collaborator regime following transfer of power, and such collaborations paid rich dividends to those Bengalis who sold out their community, be it Bengal’s Congress-leaning intellectuals like some of Bose family scions (Sugata Bose and his luminous parents for example), or the communist apparatchiks like the haloed jhola-clad brigade from our premier universities.
As a result, you will find no comprehensive history of the armed freedom struggle that was launched from Bengal. You will find no history that painstakingly chronicles the history of Bengali martyrs, of those who did rot in British jails, of those who died in the gallows. They have been systematically uprooted from public memory and from official commemoration. The philosophy of Bankim Chandra, Vivekananda and Aurobindo (in that order) were paramount in producing the revolutionary nationalist movement (and Subhas Chandra Bose was the last great hero in that tradition), but these thinkers have suffered a silencing on an unprecedented scale in our academia. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (born 1838) completed 175 years in 2013, and there was not a single programme anywhere in the country which could do justice to the memory of this great ideologue-creator of Vande Mataram. Today, his major theoretical writings sadly remain unavailable in English. Shoptodina Foundation, then in infancy, organised a small conference in Kolkata on June 27, 2013 to commemorate Bankim’s 175th birth anniversary.
The fact that Bengalis had a glorious, highly intellectual and brave nationalist past needed to be erased, and Bengali left-liberal intellectuals of jhola gangs were promoted by Nehruvian establishments in our country for this precise purpose. Just the way Bengal once gave birth to the discourse of nationalism in modern India, the new class of intellectuals like Amartya Sen very successfully came to uproot that very sense of nationalism. And make no mistake, if today we cry over the interference of Ford Foundation into India’s internal matter, if the likes of Rajiv Malhotra are cautioning us about the ways in which the west continues to perpetrate its cultural colonialism over us, one major factor behind that is the historic crushing of Bengal’s revolutionary nationalist movement by British imperialism.
left was used for this purpose. They have the inglorious beginning of 1942, when they called Subhas Chandra Bose the running dog of the Japanese, while communists happily acted as British spy (on Moscow’s diktat) to hand over nationalist Bengalis associated with Subhas Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc to British police, and did everything in their power to dishonor the fight of INA.
History was written and taught the way it suited the objectives of our establishments. Thus, there have always been concerted efforts from the establishments to sideline the great nationalist figures from Bengal. But when we consider that such maneuvers were just a part of the overall strategy to decimate the Bengali people as a punishment for standing up for India’s cultural freedom from the yoke of the west, then we can begin to fathom the real apprehensions which declassification of Netaji’s files arouse.
Declassification of the Bose files can disturbingly reveal the conspiracy to annihilate the memory of the patriotic intellectualism and bravery of Bengalis which existed prior to the left-liberal-internationalist takeover of Bengal. This was a potential that needed to be harnessed, the wild horse of nationalism needed to be broke, and tamed into the figure who would wear his liberalism on his sleeves, break into a mellifluous Tagore song every now and then, would be concerned for Palestine’s human rights, but will turn a deaf ear when cries for help emanate from the mutilated Hindu community of East Bengal.
A tremendous strength existed, which imperialism now needed to use against the Bengali community itself. Mere oppression and the unleashing of Islamist forces were not sufficient. Various foreign interests, be it Britain, Russia or China, which wanted to tame India for their own strategic gains made good use of Bengal’s intellectual hydroelectricity, by simply diverting the course of the river of Bengali consciousness. The Congress with an open understanding with the left undertook this project and successfully carried it out.
Now, this recent snoopgate has unsettled the core of our left-Nehruvian legacy and establishments. The files on Subhas Chandra Bose were not being declassified, we often heard, because that might affect India’s relation with friendly nations. What kind of friendliness we are talking of hereIJ It seems the great imperial policy of subsidiary alliance introduced by Wellesley is still in effect, as we remain ever submissive “friends” of some great powers who don’t like declassification. The rot is in the core of this neo-colonial system, and it was for this very reason the great armed freedom struggle of Bengal stood for a revolution, not piecemeal reform. Subhas Bose, despite all hogwash by some of our eminent historians, was indeed the bête noire of the comprador establishments which came to rule India after transfer of power, and we all can see why the situation is jittery and desperate for them.
Because, Subhas Bose is not just a litmus test for India’s nationalists, but is an acid test for the left-liberal media, academia and political establishments which they know quite well they will miserably fail. A single revelation will go a long way in exposing their horrible lineage of collaboration, will unearth the disgusting history behind the transfer of power, and will blissfully dissolve some of our long held icons.
We welcome this latest initiative by the Modi Government following his meeting with Bose family members, to set up an empowered panel which will look into the matter of declassification. History is waiting with bated breath. let us hit the bull’s-eye, let us shoot the inevitable arrow at the Achilles’ heel of Nehruvian legacy. let us declassify.
(Both Anish Gupta and Tamal Dasgupta are founder members of Shoptodina Foundation, and teach Economics and English respectively at Delhi University. They can be reached at shoptodinafoundation@gmail.com)