What does Anita Bose(Subhash Chandra Bose's daughter) think about BJP?

Riposte to LK Advani's Speech on Subhash Chandra Bose's112th birthday 13/01/09

THE PANTHEON HEROES OF HINDUTVA

Emilie Schenkl (Austrian wife of Subhash Chandra Bose)
Gandhi and Bose

L K Advani has made a speech on Subhash Chandra Bose's 112th birthday trying to APPROPRIATE the legacy of Subhash Chandra Bose; and in the same breath putting Veer Savarkar on the same pedestal as Subhash Chandra Bose. He has been trying to appropriate Subhash Chandra Bose's speech Give me blood, and I promise you freedom!

See full speech below:

The debate is focused to the following:

1. Who is the true torch-bearers of Subhash Chandra Bose's legacy?

Answer: The true bearers of Subhash Chandra Bose's legacy are "The All India Forward Block Party" in letter. And also the Congress Party to a certain extent, since Bose was a Congress Party member and President.

2. Would Subhash have compromised with "Communal forces like BJP", in the opinion of his daughter Anita Bose-Pfaff, Forward Block and others carrying the legacy of Bose.

Answer: NO.

3. Is the controversy about Netaji's death important to his daughter Anita Bose-Pfaff?

Answer: NO. She is interested in how he lived. And, how he died is no longer relevant.

The whole country knows that during the freedom movement, Nothing positive was done by certain parties. One certain ex-PM was involved as a British informer, and one certain other person was allegedly identified in ' a failed assassination plot of Jinnah". And now, they are teaching us about freedom movement of India.

References: Wikipedia on above-named persons.

So, MR LK Advani, please do not try to appropriate Subhash Chandra Bose as a right-wing icon, because despite the fact that he tried to enlist the support of Hitler's Germany to help Indian freedom movement, he is not a communal person with prejudices and discrimination.

Subhash Chandra Bose is a figure of personal belief (to be kept at home) with a deep sense of Hindu spiritualism with a respect for multi-culturality (He married an Austrian lady in Germany). He respected Gandhi, despite his opposition and would not have supported his assasination.

The pantheon of right-wing icons Gopal Godse, Nathuram Godse, Veer Savarkar and Mookherjee all made death threats to Mohandas Gandhi and were accused in the Assassination plot of Mahatma Gandhi.

But where Netaji parted company with Nehru and Gandhi was his strongly held conviction, which he voiced from 1939 onwards, that armed resistance was a perfectly legitimate tactic for India to use in the struggle for its independence.

It was this belief -- the British would only yield to force -- that led him to seek help from the Axis powers during World War II. He met Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and was befriended by their Japanese allies in the lead-up to the formation of the Provisional Government of Free India that was recognised by the Axis powers and their Southeast Asian allies on October 21, 1943.

During his stay in Berlin in 1943, Netaji founded the Free India Center and the Azad Hind Radio station. It was also in Berlin that the foundation was laid for what later became known as the Indian National Army or INA.

Indian prisoners of war captured in North Africa by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps were released into Netaji's custody and went on to form the India Legion that fought against Allied forces on the Western front.

The idea taken up by the Japanese high command led to the release of some 30,000 Indian prisoners of war in South-east Asia. The resulting INA force traveled as far as Kohima, now in Nagaland in northeast India, in 1944. Then, as the tide started to turn against the Axis forces, the INA was forced to retreat into the jungles of Burma.

Netaji was born on January 23, 1897 in Cuttack, Orissa, one of the 14 children of a successful lawyer, Janakinath Bose, and his wife, Prabhavati Devi. A graduate of Kolkata's Presidency College, he was subsequently sent by his father to England to prepare for entry into the prestigious Indian Civil Service.

Although he passed his ICS exam with flying colors, Netaji's heart was in politics. Strongly influenced by Gandhi, Chittaranjan Das and the teachings of Swami Vivekananda, he joined the Indian National Congress and was jailed 11 times by the British between 1920 and 1941.

Like many Indians of his generation the turning point in Netaji's political education was the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of April 1919 when hundreds of unarmed Indian civilians were shot dead at point blank range on the orders of a British general.

British analysts have vilified his subsequent meetings with Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese government as evidence of Netaji's so-called fascist leanings. Quite the opposite was true. A Left wing activist to the end of his days, he held no brief for Hitler and Mussolini's racist and fascist ideologies and viewed his relationship with them purely in the context of India's freedom struggle.

Although he failed to win Hitler's unqualified endorsement for a free and independent Indian state, Netaji secured the freedom of Indian prisoners of war in German custody. The story of how some Germans and Indians subsequently fought side by side in the India Legion against British forces on the Western front has remained one of the best kept secrets of the Second World War.

Netaji died in a plane crash on the island of Taiwan in August 1945. At the time US troops were only two days away from occupying Japan and Netaji, on his way from Saigon to Tokyo, was trying to make contact with remnants of the Imperial Japanese government. What remained of the INA had started to disintegrate after Germany's surrender in April 1945, followed soon after by Japan's. Netaji's death accelerated the process.

Anxious to reassert their control over India the British attempted to try Netaji's senior commanding officers for treason. But the trial of commanders like Shah Nawaz Khan, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Prem Sehgal in Delhi's Red Fort soon collapsed and a general amnesty for all INA soldiers was declared.

Critics have questioned his belief in a more authoritarian system of government for the sake of India's development, but even they concede that his views on workers and women's rights and population control were considered far ahead of their time and are still relevant today. How India would have developed with Netaji in charge remains one of the great 'What Ifs' of 20th century history and politics.

Anita Bose Pfaff, Netaji's only child, was born in Vienna, her mother's city, which her father visited in 1934 for medical treatment. During his stay Netaji asked an Indian friend to locate an English-speaking secretary to help him with a book he was planning to write.

The friend, who ran an English conversation course, introduced him to Emilie Schenkl in June 1934. Emilie was the daughter of a prominent veterinary surgeon. They soon fell in love and married in December 1937 in Bad Gastein. Anita, who was born in 1942, is married to Professor Martin Pfaff, formerly a Green Party member of the Bundestag, the German parliament. They have three children: Peter Arun, Thomas Krishna and Maya Carina. 

1---------------Appropriating Subhash Bose's Legacy debate in 2004---------- 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/440027.cms

The last birthday that Subhash Bose celebrated, in all probability, was on January 23, 1945, in Rangoon. In the shadow of imminent defeat,despite his distaste for pomp, it was observed with gusto by his supporters.

On the material plane, they collected 20 million rupees and weighed him in gold. On the emotional plane, several young men and girls pledged, in blood, to serve him by forming a suicide squad.

While it is not possible at this distance in time to evaluate the depth of feeling that those unknown youngsters had for their leader, it is reasonably sure that the platitudes that will come from all parts of the political spectrum on his birth anniversary today will be tokenisms in comparison.

In acceptance of the fact that Bose refuses quietly to fade away from public memory, the political class now wish to claim him as its own, indeed, the BJP deems it appropriate to kick off its campaign for re-election.

Who really has the copyright politically to encash Subhash Bose today? The party that he joined first famously elected him president (Congress Party) and shortly afterwards realised that divergent opinions didn't work there, leaving him with little choice but to tread his own path.

The Congress somehow pretends that all this never happened and that he is part of the Congress diaspora.

When Messrs Pawar, Sangma and Tariq decided to defend the Congress legacy against Italian influence, they wrote of the party having "the good fortune to have, as role models, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Pt Nehru, Maulana Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi".

Subhash Bose doesn't quite fit in this list. Nehru candidly spoke at a press conference in April 1942: "We parted company with him many years ago. Since then we have drifted further apart and today we are very far from each other".

Those distances were never bridged, even if the mood in the country after Subhash Bose's death meant that the party never lagged behind in paying tribute to him.

The absurdity of the Indian Communist position on Netaji took many decades to strike home, till his last birth anniversary when Buddhadev Bhattacharya famously apologised for the great mistake committed earlier.

The chief minister's statement that "Netaji never compromised with communal forces" served to confirm the perception that the Left needed politically to reclaim Netaji in order to foil the RSS-VHP-BJP plan to showcase him as a right-wing icon.

It is not just the communists who take offence at the idea, though; another school of thought supports the militarist stance taken by Subhash Bose but asserts that having contributed little to their efforts in the freedom movement, the Hindu right wing has no business to claim Bose and other militant leaders as their own.

Then there is the Forward Bloc founded by Bose himself. It could have done so much with that USP but never quite did.

The FB may have chosen to atrophy into an also-there element in the Left Front for decades, but Bose certainly did not suffer from Marxist tunnel vision.

His daughter, Anita Bose-Pfaff, has pointed out that he was no communist, since he consciously chose to form the Forward Bloc instead of aligning with the existing Left forces.

Netaji was a devout Hindu and believed in spiritualism and his ultimate aim and goal was to serve the nation, she said, ironically enough, at a function organised by the Forward Bloc at Mumbai in March 2000.

The FB has followed Bose in letter, but the spirit seems to have eluded it. Further, how did the FB so comfortably cohabit with the Left Front in the context of the period when the great mistake was being made, are questions Bose's loyalists could well ask the party that claims to idolise him.

The BJP's critics say that it has tried to sell the idea of a homogeneous national pantheon consisting of Shivaji, Bose, Savarkar and Bhagat Singh.

It has certainly found that a re-invented Bose is complementary to its ideological position. It has been vocal in giving him his due: L K Advani, for instance, told INA veterans in April 2002 that Bose's place should have been such that no leader could have matched it in 50 or 55 years.

BJP ideologues wrote as far back as 1996 of Mr Advani's audacious attempt to co-opt Subhash Chandra Bose in the pantheon of proponents of Hindutva.

An article in a BJP journal says: "Not only does the BJP stand to gain electorally, but Subhash Chandra Bose will be freed from the confines of political myth-making. The appropriation by the BJP is a posthumous homecoming for a nationalist who believed that rashtrabhakti is a synthesis of religion and nationalism, of the spiritual and the political".

A question as campaigning for the elections kicks off: Those who swear by Gandhi may be clear that they will not vote for the BJP, Marxists will not vote for anyone from the right wing, hardcore RSS activists will never vote for a communist, but do those who swear by Subhash Bose know whom they should not vote for?

http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/may/11inter1.htm

2-------------Interview with Anita Bose Pfaff, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's only child----

http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2001/02/19/stories/0219000w.htm

She refused to attach importance to the unending debate about the circumstances under which her father died. She said Netaji's life and not his death was more important. 

Asked what she felt when right-wing parties exploited Netaji's name, she said her father would not have gone along with the BJP so long as it did not shed communal policies. The Congress was also using Netaji's name. But, this did not detract from the fact that there were thousands of genuine followers of Netaji.

She defended Netaji's decision to seek the help of Germany in his fight against Britain. His choice was limited between a colonial force and one which was openly fascist and racist. 

3------------------------The Introduction-------------

How old were you when your father saw you last?

I was only four weeks old when he saw me last. I was born in 1942 and he left Germany by submarine for Southeast Asia in early 1943. So he saw me when I was very little. When he most likely died in an air-crash in what is now Taiwan -- in August 1945 -- I was about two and three quarters (years old].

How did your parents meet?

It was in 1934 when my father was in Vienna to seek medical treatment (he had been in jail in Mandalay, Burma, because of his struggle for India's independence). He was sick and getting quite weak and was released on condition that he would leave the country to get medical treatment.

Vienna at that time was quite a famous centre for medicine. So he came there during the period when he had his treatment. At the same time he was working on a book. He looked for a secretary to type his manuscripts and approached an Indian student to ask if he knew a lady who might do this for him.

The student was running a discussion course in which my mother was a member. So he recommended her and this is how they met.

After that, was your father in and out of Europe between 1934 and 1943?

You could extend that period that far; in and out during the 1930s. Then he had more extensive stays in India. First of all, he was Congress (party) president in 1938 and got re-elected in 1939 against the wishes of Mahatma Gandhi who had set up another candidate. After that, the Second World War started in Europe and during that period there was not that much traveling back and forth.

In 1941 my father returned to Germany by an adventurous route. He had been interned at home in Kolkata (by the British) but made an escape from there, traveling in disguise as a Pathan from northern India to the North West Frontier Province (now in Pakistan), and up to Kabul. There he had the support of the German and Italian embassies to give him an Italian passport. Accompanied by a German diplomat he traveled across the Soviet Union, which had not entered the war and allowed him to pass through to Berlin.

What do you know of your father's role in forming the Indian National Army that fought the British?

Actually, the INA had existed before his reaching Southeast Asia, but it had not picked up so well. One of the persons actively involved in it -- Ras Behari Bose -- wanted my father to take over. Ras Behari had lived in the region for some time and was married to a Japanese lady.

The INA wasn't just made up of former prisoners of war released by the Japanese. There were also many Indian plantation workers in Malaya who joined up; some of the recruits were prisoners of war and the Japanese handed them over to the INA. Quite a few joined up because they wanted to do something for their country.

What was unusual for those days was that the INA had a women's corps. My father was quite modern in his views and he had always felt that India had under-utilised resources. One was women and the other was the downtrodden, the workers, who were not recognised as a human resource.

So the INA had a women's corps of 1,000 women; its commander was Dr (later Colonel) Lakshmi Sehgal. At that time she was Dr Swaminathan from south India who had gone to Southeast Asia. She is still alive. In fact, she was one of the contenders for the Presidency of India (Colonel Sehgal was the Communist parties' candidate for President against A P J Abdul Kalam in July 2002. She lost the election).

The INA then saw action on the Burma Front.

The INA reached Indian soil in what is now called the Northeast provinces. There was a battle of Kohima and Imphal where they were defeated (by the British) and had to retreat. Quite a few died. Politically they were more successful as subsequently released documents have shown.

In post-Independent India the INA's role was played down. The official evaluation was that its activities had little effect. Militarily speaking that was true because the army was not that well equipped, but the British made a great political mistake by putting three INA officers on trial at the Red Fort (in Delhi), expecting that people would look down on them as traitors. The opposite happened and the trial publicized the efforts of the INA, which had previously been censored.

Until the trial little had been known of the INA or the Government of India in exile in 1943 when they tried to send food to Bengal during the Great Famine. All of a sudden this trial made everything known and it revived the struggle for independence in India, which had been lagging because the leadership of the Congress party and other groups mostly had been imprisoned. Their efforts like the Quit India movement had not been successful and so this gave a new dawn to the movement.

As a consequence of the INA's efforts, large numbers within the British Indian Army -- which was not just British but for the most part Indian -- became unreliable. There was a mutiny in Bombay (by the Royal Indian Navy), which showed the armed forces could not be depended on. The administrative system was what had controlled India and with the army unreliable the British realised India could not be held as a colony any more. This led to the transfer of power. It was meant to have taken place a few months later, but it was brought forward to August 1947.

You could therefore say the INA had this effect of destabilising the British hold on the Indian army and reviving the independence movement within India.

The INA certainly has its place in Indian history.

When the first few INA soldiers returned to India they were treated as heroes, but I must say in the later stages India has not treated them very well. The INA veterans were not recognised as army veterans and for a very long time they were not even recognised as freedom fighters, which meant that certain benefits such as a pension and free rail travel were denied to them. Many members of the INA were reduced to poverty and some of them died in hunger. These were simple people and could not find their way that easily in the country to which they returned.

India has not behaved towards this group in an honorable or fair way.

How often have you visited India?

Oh, 12 or 15 times, starting in the 1960s. I first visited (India) in 1960-1961 and during that stay Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru invited me to stay with him for some time, which I did for about a week. We talked about my father, about other things in India. It was a long time ago and I don't remember what it was all about.

What would India have been like if your father had been prime minister?

It is conceivable that at an earlier stage there would have been a bipartisan system or a multi-party system in India. As it was, the Congress party ruled India from 1947 to the late 1970s. For a spell there was a Janata Party movement, but that was an alliance of parties welded in a very short period of time with rather diverse interests. It did not retain power for very long and the Congress returned (to power).

The forces favoured everyone flocking to the Congress party, which had positive and negative consequences. The positive side is it created a period of stability. On the other hand, if you have a political system that is democratic, then if you have one party that is very dominant this is not in favor of strengthening democracy.

The competition for better ideas is a useful thing in a democratic system. A system dominated by one party tends to become sluggish and also corrupt.

If my father had been there, there would have been dissenting opinions, a rallying point for alternative forces. Nehru -- if you look at him as the leading figure of post-Independent India -- used to be part of the Left wing of the Congress. So was my father.

Both would have come with a Left-wing approach. In spite of this India at the national level did not have a very Left-wing party. There is no Social Democratic Party, there is no Socialist Party. There are Communist parties in India who might be regionally strong, as in Bengal and Kerala [Images], but there are no socialist parties that are strong at the center like you have in Europe. My father and Nehru might have posed alternatives, but on the Left wing. Whether this would have strengthened the system, it depends.

Some things my father recognised very early may have been brought to the forefront if he had been there.

Could you give us some examples?

For example, even in the 1930s he recognised that population expansion would pose a problem in India. Education as one of the key necessities of the country was one he recognized. He would have pushed very strongly in the direction of spreading education and improving education. Whether he could have abolished illiteracy totally now, one can only speculate. He would have been a very strong proponent of that.

He would have been one to strongly advocate the active participation of women. Of course, India today is a very heterogeneous country with regard to that.

On the one hand you have a country that was one of the first to have a woman as a prime minister. On the other hand in many areas of social life women are downtrodden. You still have wife burning and abuse of women. My father certainly would have been one to stand up for women's rights.

Why did Mahatma Gandhi not support him?

In some ways they were of (the same) opinion. In other ways they were not. In the 1930s Gandhi clearly worked against him. Very often Gandhi is portrayed as a saint, which he was not at all. In my opinion he was a very shrewd politician. He was a lawyer who really knew how to work the system and manipulate people in a positive sense. He certainly made my father resign as Congress president.

My father respected him very highly in spite of that and was always anxious to hear Gandhi's reaction to what he did and what he said. It was my father who called Gandhi 'Father of the Nation.'

The INA slogan 'Jai Hind' is still the greeting used in the Indian Army today; my father picked the Indian national anthem. It was first played in Hamburg at a gathering. So there are still a few symbolic remains from his activities in India which people tend to forget.

Gandhi and my father were of the same opinion regarding the partitioning of the country. Both of them were dead set against it and in some context my father said, 'The British will try to partition the country.' He and Gandhi were very much against this.

What do you know of how your father died?

It seems quite plausible that he was killed in a plane crash in what is now Taiwan at the end of the Second World War. In Europe the war ended in May 1945; in Southeast Asia it only ended in August. The Americans tried to end the war faster by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a nuclear bomb.

At that time when the Japanese decided to capitulate he was on his way to Tokyo. At that time planes could not cover very long distances, so he flew from Saigon to Taiwan -- where he had a stopover -- and then took off from Taiwan. The plane caught fire. He was injured and died as a consequence. This was August 18, 1945.

Later he was cremated and his remains were taken to Tokyo and placed in a temple there. The idea was that his Japanese associates would keep his remains for a few months until they were transferred to India. This has never happened for the simple reason that there were a number of people who did not believe my father had died in that plane crash.

There were all sorts of stories that he had shown up as a sanyasi in some part of the Himalayas, that he was a prisoner of war in Russia . The only story that is consistent and is backed up by eyewitnesses is the plane crash.

My father was allowed to take along one person with him on this journey, a man called Habibur Rahman, who later went to live in Pakistan. He maintained up to his death that the plane crash took place; that my father was killed and he was a witness to that. Some people said there were inconsistencies in this evidence and that if he asked Habibur Rahman to spread the story of his death, he would do it.

It makes sense until independence, but as nothing was heard from my father after independence, Habibur Rahman would not have been bound by any such commitment.

Could British agents have sabotaged your father's plane?

I doubt it. This was after capitulation. One day after this happened the Americans moved into Taiwan. If anyone sabotaged it would be more (likely the) Americans than the British at the time. I very much doubt it because it would have been a question of trying to infiltrate at the end of the Second World War when it was clear that Japan [Images] was going to capitulate.

It does not make a lot of sense. It would have been a question of spite, maybe, or trying to remove someone who would have been a pain in the neck for the British, but I doubt it.

The Japanese feel rather strange about the whole situation. They feel it is a matter of honor that India should take the remains of one of their greatest independence fighters back to India.

Gandhi and my father were not tainted by corruption. They were not tainted by things people did not like. So some people in India now say, 'If they were alive, things would be different.' This is an emotional reaction.

4-------------LK Advani tries to APPROPRIATE Subhash Chandra Bose legacy-----------

Speech by LK Advani at the FICCI Audiotrium to commemorate the 112th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

http://www.lkadvani.in/eng/content/view/711/282/

23 January 2009

FICCI Audiotrium, New Delhi

“Netaji Bose had said to his countrymen: 'Tum mujhe khoon do; main tumhe aazadi doonga! (Give me blood, and I promise you freedom!) The times have changed, India has been azaad since 1947, and we need to make different kinds of sacrifices and commitments. Hence, if I were to rephrase Netaji’s clarion call, I would say that the call of all nationalistic and forward-looking political leaders to the people of India today should be:  'Tum humein samarthan do; hum tumhe sushaasan denge! (Give us your support, we promise you Good Governance.) This is what my colleagues and I would humbly say when my party, the BJP, and my alliance, the NDA, go out to seek people’s support in the forthcoming elections to the 15th Lok Sabha.”

Today is the jayanti of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Had he lived till today, he would be 112 years old. However, rare are human beings who live that long. But rare also are human beings who perform so many heroic feats in as short a lifespan as Destiny gave to Netaji Bose.

We do not still know conclusively and beyond the shadow of any doubt when, where and how Netaji Bose died. Officially ― and here I am referring to the official version of the British government ―,  he died in a plane crash over Taiwan, while flying to Tokyo on 18 August 1945. Which means that, he was only 48 years old when he died. However, his body was never recovered.

Several committees were set up by the Government of India to probe into this matter. Indeed, when I was the Union Home Minister in the NDA Government (1998-2004), we set up an Inquiry Commission in 1999 under Justice Mukherjee. Its report, which was tabled in Parliament in May 2006, said that Netaji Bose did not die in the plane crash and the ashes at the Renkoji Temple in Tokyo are not his. However, the UPA Government rejected the findings of the Commission.

Netaji Bose: a unique patriotic warrior

There is no need to go into that debate now. What is beyond doubt is that Netaji lived life heroically, and he died heroically, fighting for the cause of India’s liberation from foreign rule. In many ways, he was unique among India’s freedom fighters. Bose advocated complete freedom for India at the earliest, whereas the Congress wanted it in phases, through a Dominion status. Once World War II broke out, which convinced him that the path of non-violent resistance chosen by the party under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi was not the right one, he followed Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic line ‘Ekla Chalo Re’. 

He escaped from British captivity, travelled to Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan, seeking alliances tha could defeat the British in India. With an audacity that only brave hearts are capable of, he formed the Azad Hind Government in exile. The Indian National Army (INA), which he led, forms an incredible chapter in the history of the revolutionary branch of India’s freedom struggle. 

Netaji was a devout Hindu. He was greatly influenced by the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda and Maharshi Aurobindo. Indeed, it is his rootedness in India’s spiritual heritage and his belief in the teachings of the Bhagwad Gita that imparted to him the values of discipline, valour and the spirit of sacrifice. Not many know that he published a special edition of Veer Savarkar’s monumental book 1857 : India’s War of Independence as reading material for the soldiers of INA.  

Friends, it is important for us to remember that men and women following several ideologies and several strategies participated in India’s liberation movement. And they often coexisted in the Congress itself, at a time when the Congress was a broad national platform and not a political party as such. Even Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, founder of the Rashriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was earlier a functionary of the Congress in Vidarbha. Although Mahatma Gandhi dominated the national movement, there were many, like Netaji Bose, who followed divergent paths. 

And then there were men like Shaheed Bhagat Singh and Veer Savarkar who fought for India’s independence while remaining outside the Congress platform.

What does Himani Godse Savarkar (daughter of Gopal Godse, married to Veer Savarkar's nephew, President of Abhinav Bharat=accused party in Malegaon blasts) think about BJP?

Why did Netaji Bose become a ‘Fogotten Hero’?

As I have often stated in the past, we should honour all these great men and women, irrespective of their divergent and sometimes conflicting ideological and operational stands. For in spite of differences, one thing was common to them all: their boundless patriotism and their total dedication to the cause of India’s freedom.

And this was my message when I undertook the longest yatra of my life, the Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra in 1997 to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of India’s Independence. I travelled all over the country by road and paid homage to hundreds of well-known and lesser-known martyrs and heroes of the Freedom Movement. For me, it was a Patriotic Pilgrimage.

What pains me ― and it also pains and angers millions of fellow Indians ― is that after Independence, an impression has been created that those who belong to a particular family have made the greatest contribution to India’s liberation and post-1947 nation-building. For example, a feature film on Netaji Bose was released in 2005. It was directed by the renowned director Shyam Benegal. What was its title? 

Bose: The Forgotten Hero. We must ask ourselves: “Why did someone like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose become a forgotten hero in our country?”

* * *

Netaji fought for Swaraj. We should strive for Su-raj

When we remember heroic personalities from the past, it should never be for ritualistic purposes. Great men and women are those who outlive their own lives. Long after they depart from our land, their ideas and deeds continue to live, inspiring and guiding others. 

How does Netaji Bose guide us today? How do others from his generation guide us today?

I can summarise this by saying what I said during my Swarna Jayanti Rath Yatra. Our Freedom Fighters gave us Swaraj. But we have not been able to convert it into Su-raj. Self-Governance has not been transformed into Good Governance.

The people who lived in the era of the freedom struggle had hoped and dreamed that India, once it became independent, would be a land of prosperity, free of poverty, illiteracy, backwardness and want. This dream has not come true even after six decades of Independence. 

India ranks 128 out of 177 countries in the world in terms of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Why?

India has the highest number of malnutrition-related deaths. Why?

Only 45% of our children complete eight years of schooling? Why?

Why are thousands of farmers committing suicide in this day and age?

Why are we witnessing the largest ever migration from rural to urban areas?

Why is India suffering from such severe infrastructure bottlenecks that something as basic as electricity and drinking water are in short supply in many parts of the country?

The short answer to all these and more such questions is that there is lack of Good Governance India. 

Congress party’s legacy of knotty problems

Lack of Good Governance has a direct bearing on threats to our national security. For example, people like Netaji Bose would be horrified at the manner in which the Congress rule has bequeathed knotty problems to future generations ― problems like the border disputes with Pakistan and China that have become knottier with the passage of time. He would be equally horrified at how the Congress has colluded, purely for votebank considerations, in the demographic invasion from Bangladesh into Assam and other parts of the country. 

??The same votebank considerations have guided the Congress party’s approach to cross-border terrorism, sponsored from Pakistan??. Its opposition to POTA in 2002, its scrapping of POTA in 2004 and its refusal to implement the Supreme Court’s judgement on Afzal Guru, who has been convicted for his role in the terrorist attack on Indian Parliament – all these are such that they show the warped thinking of the Congress leadership on the issue of terrorism.

In the aftermath of the recent horrendous terror attacks in Mumbai, the UPA Government was forced to take some partial corrective measures, such as enactment of two anti-terror bills. But I must make two points here. Firstly, the it government acted out of compulsion and not conviction. Secondly, facts about the 26/11 incidents have revealed that there was not only an intelligence failure but also a monumental failure of governance by the Congress-led governments in New Delhi and Mumbai. The Congress has a lot to answer for this failure.

What I am saying is simply this: As a party that has ruled India for the longest period since Independence, the Congress must bear the greatest responsibility for the problems that are plaguing our country today. I have seen all the Congress governments from 1947 onwards. I can say on the basis of this knowledge that this is the worst of all the Congress regimes ― the most corrupt, the most inept and most unfaithful to the dreams of the great heroes of our Freedom Struggle.

Satyam mega-scam: Judicial probe needed (??what about 14 years after Babri Masjid??)

Let me take the latest example of the humungous corporate scandal in Satyam. Small investors have been badly hurt by this fraud, which involves a figure of Rs. 7,000 crore. It has also hurt the image of India’s corporate sector globally. Reports now reveal that the company’s balance sheet was fudged. Revenues were inflated. Even the number of employees was inflated. What were the relevant agencies in the governments in New Delhi and Hyderabad doing? 

There are also reports that the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh showered a largesse on the promoters of Satyam in the form of giving away lucrative contracts and large tracts of precious land for throwaway prices. There is a stench of political corrupton here, and I demand a high-level judicial probe into this mega-scam.

BJP/NDA’s promise: Good Governance

I shall conclude with one thought. Netaji Bose had said to his countrymen: 'Tum mujhe khoon do; main tumhe aazadi doonga! (Give me blood, and I promise you freedom!) The times have changed, India has been azaad since 1947, and we need to make different kinds of sacrifices and commitments. Hence, if I were to rephrase Netaji’s clarion call, I would say that the call of all nationalistic and forward-looking political leaders to the people of India today should be:  'Tum humein samarthan do; hum tumhe sushaasan denge! (Give us your support, we promise you Good Governance.)

This is what my colleagues and I would humbly say when my party, the BJP, and my alliance, the NDA, go out to seek people’s support in the forthcoming elections to the 15th Lok Sabha.

We shall remind the people that India has ample resources, both natural and human, for making great strides forward. Indeed, wherever and whenever governments have governed well, they have produced good results. For example, the states in which the BJP has governments are far better governed than the Congress-ruled states. Similarly, now that the term of the UPA Government has almost come to an end, I can also claim that the track record of the NDA Government under Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee was far superior to that of the incumbent government under Smt. Sonia Gandhi and Dr. Manmohan Singh.

We shall attend to India’s developmental challenges with a sense of urgency, bringing many innovative ideas to bear on our efforts. We shall be uncompromising in our fight against terrorism. We shall not tolerate corruption in governance, especially at the top echolons. I am saying this because if there is probility in public life at the top, it will have a positive influence down the line. With Good Governance, Development and Security as our mantras, we shall serve India in a manner that would befittingly honour the ideals of great patriot-warriors like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.

Thank you.

L K Advani