As ghosts return to taunt the Netaji riddle, a flight of fiction into the political junkyards of its uneasy trail becomes inevitable
So Subhash Chandra Bose is having a hell of a time in his yet to be undisclosed grave, assuming that he is no more. A parliamentary panel has told the government that there was no reason to believe that the firebrand freedom fighter died in a plane crash in 1945, as is widely believed.
But the government, uneasy with anything to do with the ghosts of the past, has said it doesn't agree with the findings.
The Centre has also refused to toe the line of the Justice M K Mukherjee panel that the ashes in Renkoji Temple in Japan were not of Bose.
The Mukherjee panel was set up by the NDA government to showcase its affection for Marxist West Bengal, some believe. Anything related to Bose achieves a regional fervour which could be a trigger to a better political redemption, according to one school of thought.
And the NDA thought the best way to get a posting in the electoral roadmap of West Bengal was through a resurrection of the last journey of Bose, which is mystery at its shrouded best.
So the panel was named to probe the circumstances concerning departure of Bose from Bangkok in August 1945 and his subsequent disappearance.
The mystery remains unravelled and the political game plan behind it will have to wait a bit longer to even hope to bear fruits. While Bose remains a revered figure shrouded in the mystery of his disappearance, the political star gazers have failed to claim his legacy and subvert it into the ballot box of democracy.
May be it is a tribute to the fighter in Bose who wanted to overthrow the British with arms that no one could claim the legacy of the warrior in him. Not the Marxists who pillion rode into the altar of democracy after realising the futility of the oceans of blood shed by their unsuspecting comrades.
As for the Hindutva cheer leaders who wanted to make a dent in the Marxist bastion by digging up the chronicle of a missing nationalist, they failed to realise that Bose's brand of nationalism does not even have a remote link to the sham of "nationalism" which they preach without much success other than rousing passions of hatred and triggering a scattered mutiny of divisive forces in pockets of ignorance.
For the Congress, whose claim to the country's fortunes was extracted from a holy association which the Mahatma had with the party at a vantage point in history, everything uneasy is unwelcome. So the Congress would like to bury Netaji, not to rake up his last journey.
May be Netaji did a Houdini act to vanish from the geographical flashpoints of history, only to save himself from the ignominy of seeing his unparalleled legacy of conviction torn to shreds to make or mar subversive political agendas.
