This a series of booklets punlished by Penguin Books (I only recently go to know that enguin's founder was V K Krishna Menon!!!) that gives us a collection of speeches and writings of 14 personalities involved in the freedom struggle.
They are B R Ambedkar, Aruna Asaf Ali, M K Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Rajaji, Maulana Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Sardar Patel, Periyar E V Ramaswami Naiker, Bhagat Singh and Rabindranath Tagore.
The basic idea behind the series is to highlight the fact that the freedom struggle was not a monolithic or monochromatic movement that had no centrifugal and centripetal forces acting on it.
The struggle for Indian independence had a collage of ideas and minds fuelling it. The idea of freedom and nation as espoused by Bhagat Singh (a thorough communist - though he is much in demand among today's Hindutva brigade) and Rabindranath Tagore is so widely apart and dissimilar that one wonders how and when such thoughts managed to merge into ne mainstream and form a torrent that the world's mightiest empire could not held against.
What comes across is the unthinkable pain and effort that these guys went through to give us that much cherished freedom. And what makes the reading even poignant is the fact that so many of us today choose to deny these gentlemen the credit by unilaterally declaring that India gaining freedom had nothing to do with the lifetimes these folks gave up for the cause and the British themselves left India because they became weak following the world wars.
I am sure it serves a definite purpose to paint such a picture, which is mass character assassination.
Meanwhile, each of these characters -- be it Bhagat Singh or Maulana Azad, Naidu or Periyar – with their distinct vision for the country, went through immense personal difficulties (which many of us take pleasure in declaring as personal failures, as in the case of Gandhi and his eldest son Manilal) to maintain the integrity of their mission for India.
Take these words of Patel, for instance, on February 23, 1949, at Madras: “In this country, the greatest need of the hour is food. We import millions of tons of food into our country. We have not got the ships to bring that food that we want. So we pay crores of rupees as freight charges simply to bring the food here. We have not enough boats to even catch fish. We have no mercantile marine. We have nothing left in the country; for the past 200 years it has been bled white; during the war years in particular, every ounce of blood has been taken out. Our railways system has been completely disorganised. The transport member makes tremendous efforts to set it right. But the railways are like a decrepit old widow. Railway sleepers and rails were taken out and sent to various theatres of war. We cannot replace the wagons that been over used for so many years. We cannot get locomotives. We cannot make them here; we have yet to establish factories for meeting the requirements of our country.”
The sad part is not that Patel struggled his entire lifetime for the country. The sad part is that the freedom struggle in its entirety is painted as bogus and meaningless by a good section of our generation today. The sad part is that many of us try to make Patel a pawn in trying to project his colleagues, whom he held so dear and loved so much, as villains of Indian history – be it Nehru or Gandhi. The sad part is that we are totally decimating history for our own partisan purposes.
If we have an iota of shame, gratitude and dignity left in us, all we can do is thank the likes of Patel, Bose, Nehru and Gandhi and move on with our present and future.
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