India is a land of netas. But no one is Netaji. Actually none dares to be. Because it takes travails of a travel – mental and physical – to be a Netaji.
Bengalees are universally acclaimed for being good at brain. They are proverbially squeamish when it comes to pulling trigger of a rifle. Netaji combines a character, brainy and brawny. He secured second position in the Matriculation examination. In the prestigious Civil Services Examination, he secured fourth position. But he declined to join the service to serve his motherland. The honorific NETAJI, i.e. respected leader in Hindi, was first applied to Subhas Chandra Bose in Germany by the Indian soldiers of the Indian Legion, Indian and German officials in the Special Bureau for India in Berlin. So, to the Bengalees, Netaji is like a figure, who can be deified from a distance only; and cannot be defied (none can dare to, in spite of some of his politically risky decisions).
Netaji looks up at his country as a Mother to be prostrated before, in the line of thinking of novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and his mentor Chittaranjan Das. For the liberation of his motherland from the satanic clutches of the British rulers, he can go to Germany, then back to Japan and from there, after getting engaged in a bloody battle with the British, he can think of slipping away to Soviet Union to wedge the battle from there. In between, he can die of a supposedly-held aircrash in Taiwan, the evidence of which is shrouded in mystery, to put it metaphorically. To put it bluntly, the evidence is very flimsy. Indians do no wrong in waiting for their Netaji seventy-six years after his “mysterious” death. This wait is more symbolic than realistic. It is a wait for a man who can dream big for freedom; and who can sacrifice the comforts of life to secure it. There is an honesty of approach. There is no pretension.
Indian National Congress, under the stewardship of Mahatma Gandhi, cannot bear to stand the popularity Netaji has among the masses. His no non-sense stance against the British catches the imagination of Indian people. And it has caught Gandhi and his Congress napping. It was Subhas who conceptualized the idea of Quit India. He fine-tuned it. He was gracious enough not to lead the campaign himself. He gave the mantle to Gandhi and requested him to start the movement in 1939 immediately. Subhas sensed that the morale of the British army was at a low ebb. Subhas’s anticipation was vindicated when in the battlefield of Europe the weakness of British army was poignantly exposed in 1940. But Gandhi dillydallied. He gave vague excuses of lack of preparation and the threat of communalism. Gandhi started the movement three years later. The 1942 quit India movement was destined to be a failure for its wrong timing. Because by then British army regrouped with the tacit help from the USA.
It seemed that Gandhi used his non-cooperation technique not against the British, but against Subhas with finesse when Subhas emerged on the national scene in a big way after his second stupendous victory in the presidentship of Congress at the Tripuree meet. Gandhi’s not-so-subtle opposition to Subhas’s re-entry to Indian National Congress’s presidentship caused Subhas to step-down from the helm at the Indian National Congress’s Wellington Square’s meet in 1939 April, Calcutta. Gandhi did it in spite of Tagore’s bringing up the issue of Subhas’s presidentship before him and Nehru for an amicable solution just on the eve of election. But it was of no avail. Gandhi lamented hard in public after the election that his hand-picked man for presidentship, Pattabhi Sitaramaya’s defeat was his own defeat. Gandhi even went on to hint that he would step aside with his followers, throwing the party into throes of doldrums. Subhas had to step down. Tagore was hurt and upset. From Puri (where he was holidaying, taking time off from busy schedule), he wrote a letter to Subhas, praising his grace and poise in accepting the sorry situation that stared him in the face. He hoped that the apparent defeat would make him victorious in the long run.
Tagore was right. Subhas won the heart of Indian masses. He remains in their heart as Netaji. He may not be “Mahatma”. He may not dwell on delightful vagueness of Satyagroho. But Indians have faith in a man who says plain that price of freedom is blood. They still are waiting eagerly to hear Netaji on radio, resonating through it, “Give me blood, I’ll give you freedom”. Indians know from their experience, to realize elusive freedom, blood is the only option, not the endless discussions for consideration of liberation over innumerable cups of tea. In the words of the British Prime minister, Clement Attlee (who presided over transfer-of-power), it was only for Subhas that they were forced to grant freedom with a sense of emergent priority.
Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is a seller of that dream to the Bengalis, Indians, world populace that enlivens them with the dazzling hope of “Breaking the barrier….With the deluging passion for life…(to) flush out the moronic, decrepit old…..(as) we’ve heard the call of a new beginning” in the words of Tagore in “Tasher Desh”, which he dedicated to Subhas, his “Leader of the Nation” for “breathing in a fresh air in the life of nation’’.