Another political gimmick

Narendra Modi has grandly announced that come Jan. 23, 2016 all top secret files on Subhash Chandra Bose, the great revolutionary who vanished 70 years ago while the British were still ruling India, will be declassified because he is dead against “strangling history.”
But the timing of lifting the veil of secrecy gives away Modi’s real motive. He has done a quick calculation that the BJP stands to gain in the West Bengal assembly elections early next year from the declassification of around 39 Bose files gathering dust in the Prime Minister’s Office. Modi, of course, took his cue from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who laid bore 69 Bose files last month for electoral advantage. Both the politicians obviously think that the independence hero venerated by Bengalis as Netaji, or The Leader, will pay rich dividends in an election year.
Banerjee at least has a few things in common with Bose who sought German and Japanese help to end British rule before his disappearance in the controversial 1945 air crash in Taiwan. Both are Bengalis who clashed with the central leadership of the Congress Party and charted an independent course after parting ways. There is a strong regional resonance in their respective rebellions. Banerjee’s claim to be Bose’s political heir, therefore, has some basis.
But Modi and Bose are as different as chalk and cheese. And nowhere is the contrast as stark as in their policy toward India’s Muslims. Bose was as secular as Modi is sectarian. Bose had a soft spot for Muslims, unlike Modi whose anti-Muslim views and acts have made him such a polarizing figure that even a country like the United States had to shut its door on Modi’s face for years.
Modi can learn a lot from Bose about how to treat minorities — if he wishes to. Bose’s major emphasis in public life was to unite various religious communities to build a strong India. Historians believe that if Bose had been alive to play an instrumental role in the run-up to independence, he would have been so generous to Muslims that there would have been no need to divide India. He was vehemently against partition of British India and wanted Hindus and Muslims to share power equitably in an undivided post-colonial nation.
Hindu-Muslim unity and the unity of India were equally dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Bose despite their political differences. But Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel were not on the same page as Gandhi and Bose resulting in partition of the subcontinent. Bose wanted Muslims feel secure and wanted. His Indian National Army was a perfect example of Hindu-Muslim unity. Bose was, in fact, so secular that he kept his own religious faith very private.
Bose’s stature was no less than Nehru’s — India’s first prime minister. If he had not clashed with Gandhi and slipped out of India in 1941, he would have had a major say in pre-independence confabulations with the British. Historians reckon that if Bose had not gone into exile and remained in the political mainstream, he and Mohammad Ali Jinnah could have together averted partition and we would be happily living today in a country stretching from Khyber to Chittagong.
Bose resigned from the Indian Civil Service to fight for independence. He shone in the Congress Party becoming its president in 1938 before clashing with Gandhi on a number of issues. Bose was compelled to resign in 1939 instead of becoming president for a second term. Bose was a little too rebellious leading to a real conflict with Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi, Bose wanted to take the British head on.
He had serious reservations about the policy of non-violence and advocated an armed uprising. Escaping from house arrest in Calcutta in January 1941, Bose secretly met Adolf Hitler in Germany and sought his help to free India from British rule. When the Nazi leader declined, he turned to the Japanese and established the INA, which advanced to northeastern India but the British Army ultimately crushed the ill-equipped, ragtag INA with ease.
Before he left India, Bose clashed repeatedly with Vallabbhai Patel whose commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity was practically non-existent despite being a Congressman. A staunch secularist, in The Indian Struggle, published in 1935, Bose branded Hindu Mahasabha reactionary and charged it with helping the British by torpedoing Hindu-Muslim unity he and Gandhi were fostering.
Modi’s BJP is the descendant of Hindu Mahasabha and Jan Sangh, which never took on the British but fanned communalism. If Modi really believes in his poll cry Sabka Sath Sabka Vikas (Together with all, Development for all), he should take a leaf out of Bose’s political philosophy whose cornerstone was secularism at any cost.