Sunday, February 11, 2001		Speaking generally

SHAH NAWAZ KHAN, Mehboob Ahmed, Raja Mohd. Arshad, Abid Hassan, Mohd. Zaman Kiyani, Habib-ur-Rahman. These were the names of some of the top officers chosen by Subhas Chandra Bose for the INA. He was a believing Hindu but that did not interfere at all with his patriotism and those Muslim officers, as well as the non-Muslim ones, would have walked to the ramparts of death behind him.

On his birthday towards the end of January every year one is left in wonderment about his life and career. So much courage was pent up in a body which was so often wracked by illness. The British had exiled him to Mandalay prison in Burma but when he grew very ill there he was allowed to sail to Europe, provided his ship did not touch the shores of India! So much did the British administration fear his influence.

Their loyalty to him was amazing. He was far and away the most popular hero of Indian youth. The Tribune is a Lahore institution. Subhas was so admired in Lahore and Punjab that students would come by train from other towns of the Punjab, wait for hours to hear him and then take night trains back home.

Walking across the rugged Himalaya and through Afghanistan to the Soviet Union and Germany, living in a submarine for 90 days on a journey from Europe to Japan, building a government in exile, these romantic, heroic achievements which stirred the imagination of the Indian people right from his early days in the Congress and his challenge to Gandhiji for the Presidency of the Congress in which Gandhiji’s candidate lost, was a great story.

But he was not a very clever politician. His daughter Anita says this with emphasis and cites, as one example, that he should never have allowed himself to be manoeuvred out of the Congress and its presidency. Ironically and amusingly, she does not even believe that he would have been a good politician after Independence — but he would have been a very good administrator, she says. He could not ride out the irritation and anger which his victory let loose in the Congress Working Committee and he was forced out of office and the party. Anita’s views are expressed in a very long interview in a Bengali magazine which is very candid. She is critical at times and says that she could not really describe or characterise her father because he left her and her mother so early to go to Asia and she did not have the chance to be brought up by him.

Contrary, to the view which has been gaining strength lattely, she does not believe that he went to the Soviet Union after the defeat of Japan. She thinks he died in the plane crash at Taihoku island and she makes a passionate plea that the ashes preserved at Renkoji Temple in Japan (which she believes are his) should be brought to India and a suitable memorial erected.

Indeed she says that, if allowed, she would like to bring back the ashes to Germany, where she lives, and build a monument. She knows that this would only be possible if the Government of India refuses officially to do anything. She has met Inder Gujral as Prime Minister and Pranab Mukherjee came to meet her when he was Foreign Minister but she does not feel that they were inclined to do anything.

Of course like most others she is very surprised at the coldness which the Government of India has always shown to the memory of Subhas.It has been often said that Jawaharlal Nehru did not like his overwhelming popularity and took care to hide Subhas’s light under a bushel, I cannot remember a single writing of Nehru on Subhas. Anita’s belief also is that the Nehru family, she especially mentions Rajiv, did not want to do anything which, by contrast, would take the shine off, even a little, the Nehru dynasty. But it is high time that India set up a monument to this incomparable patriot whom Sarojini Naidu described as "India’s flaming sword unsheathed for India’s freedom". Unfortunately when the Congress Working Committee forced Subhas out of the Presidency, Sarojini was one of those who sided with Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad. Nehru, on that occasion, said that he was "neutral".

Not many, I think, put forward the unpopular view that the Republic Day parades should not be held in Delhi alone, depriving people in the rest of the country. Seeing things on television is not at all the same as seeing them with one’s eyes and feeling the thrill of the spirit.

How enormously expensive those parades are and how strong the emphasis on military might and violence! The terrible earthquake in Gujarat has put a finger in our eyes and shown how poor we are when emergencies slap our face. For lack of enough earthmoving equipment we must have lost thousands of lives and yet there was time to transport them if we had the equipment but we prefer to spend our money on missiles. How slowly water, food and medical help are reaching the half a million affected people and how eagerly we have to look at other countries to help us. I keep thinking of the Berlin Air Lift when several planes a minute landed with supplies in Berlin. Why have we not asked all private, companies and state government planes to send relief. The roads, many of them, and bridges may have been down but not the airways. There is nothing at all undignified in receiving help from the generosity of others but there is something deeply hypocritical in saying, as a senior Secretary Barua said, "We have not asked but are accepting what others are offering! On television the aid teams hurrying to fly swiftly into India said that they were held up for two days for want of visas!

We should reduce the scale of Republic Day Parades and stage them in other cities, metropolitan and non-metropolitan. What is the point of doing something simply for the purpose of impressing others? Who is impressed by the lavishness? We spend a fabulous sum each year on Rashtrapati Bhavan. Who is impressed? Not the world which used to beat a path to the immaculate simplicity of Bapu Kutir in Sevagram.