On this very day (28th sept) nearly 104 yrs ago a most remarkable person came into being. Bhagat singh truly noblest of freedom fighters there is. He read too much for his age from marx,lenin,the gita to urdu poetry, was an atheist & possibly commited the most sacrilegeous of acts a sikh can do by shaving of his beard and cutting his hair for the sake of the revolutionary movement. Singh thoroughly deplored of “Gandhian pacifist Ideology” according to him it would all “
replace one set of exploiters with another“ a very visionary statement indeed. We have been all too soft on every tom dick and harry utterly giving a whole different dimension to the famous sanskrit adage 'vasudhaiva kudumbakam' ,the Indian subservile mentality which has bowed down to every imperialist there is starting from the turks,arabs to the british has been successfully carried forward by the man termed 'Mahatma'. I for one only admire Gandhi like Hitler just for his charisma as a leader and his persona & conviction to convince more than 500 million people and make them dance to his utterly erroneous philosophies the core of which is called “Ahimsa”
Ahimsa-The misplaced notion
Ahimsa or non-violence supposedly originates from Hindu ideologies. But in Hinduism upon careful scrutiny Ahimsa only means non-violence to animals, other beings and importantly one's self thats right! Self Defense was completely allowed in hinduism and we see from mythology that war in terms of need and violence to restore order or in self defense was a Dharma. Abhimanyu who slained hundreds of soldeirs in the 'Chakra-vyug' was a martyr , Arjuna who was reluctant to wage battle against his brothers was reminded of his duty to restore order by Krishna,Krishna,rama waged battles against hordes of demons who came to destroy their cities.
There is just no reference just no reference which says Ahimsa needs to be practiced when one's family is enslaved or killed, when people(friends,neighbours) are plundered, women raped and children massacred,and draconion laws are imposed.This is precisely the connotation of Ahimsa given to us by Gandhi. He distorted the very Hindu essence of ahimsa into “Impotence”.Take this quote about Kurukshetra battlefield by Gandhi-
an allegory in which the battlefield is the soul and Arjuna, man's higher impulses struggling against evilHe misled hordes of his countrymen and proceeded to sacrifice thousands and thousands as pigs for slaughter to the british. Bhagat did not tolerate all of this he knew this whole notion of non-violence was a huge mistake and aptly took revenge when a veteran congress leader Lala Lajpat rai was brutally beaten to death in front of him . Bhagat wanted killing for justice,honor and self defense like any true Kshatriya warrior of ancient Hindu time.When he famously threw a bomb into the legislative assembly in 1929 it was to make “the deaf hear” in other words a desperate attempt to bring back all of the misled indians. Some heard it indeed and those that heard were the later revolutionaries who would join the INA of Netaji Bose as one organisation.Thats Why its safe to say Bhagat was the "foundation" of it all.
OK?!So who got us the freedom then?It was certainly not Gandhi, the british did not fear the Indian National Congress it was too soft a body for them. British could still live with all the non-co-operation, hunger strikes, boycotts without any alarming damage but they feared the rising force of the INA which though was a relatively insignificant force under Bose had instilled deep fears in the mind of the British by its patriotic exploits in WWII in south east asia against the raj. According to Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, reflecting on the factors that guided the British decision to relinquish the Raj in India, is said to have cited the effects of the INA and Nethaji's activities on the British Indian Army and the Bombay Mutiny as being the most important. The INA was gaining widespread support among the British Indian Armymen and the british fearing a catastrophical mutiny cum backlash withdrew from the Raj. Only our History books give Gandhi and his entourage complete & undue credit forgetting the Real hero Subhash chandra bose.
Read Climax of Independence movement-INA
If you ask any person alive from the independence era in Malaysia, Burma or any part of malay peninsula they still believe that Bose single handedly got India her freedom! Where the facts swallowed up by the Congress & Muslim league for Political benefits? Congress which has an inherent “Soft core” ingrained from its 'false ahimsa' times has gone onto create and nurture pakistan,terrorism & corruption,bureaucracy in the name of governance.
Hunger strikes and Hazare:
Hunger strikes have become publicity grabbing stunts. Bhagat singh fasted for as much as 100 days in prison demanding decent amenities for Indian political prisoners on par with european prisoners breaking all the hunger strikes record then.In this age of democracy(supposedly) its highly impractical to fight corruption in RDB or "Indian" Kamal styles and I have no qualms about peaceful protests or hunger strikes taking its place. But the media's projection that Anna Hazare's culmination of fast as victory for India against corruption is worrying. This should be seen in the perspective of what it actually is, agreed the awareness the fast has generated against corruption is tremendous. It is still a long long way off from the Hoo haa the media is doing merely for its TRP ( am sure they ll move away into other things soon). There is serious misgivings on whether the Lokpal bill will first get implemented as strong as it is warranted and that will be the first step in a long arduous battle and India must focus on getting this done.
I prefer Sept 28 to Oct 2 and a trip to n Museum Khatkar kalia
is high on my agenda and not Porbandar nor Raj ghat.
I Leave on this note
Legend of Bhagat singh
5 comments:
Don't u think more people die in war than in non-violent protests?
Interesting. For someone whom I had always thought was along the lines of a Gandhian, this extremist anti-gandhian view comes as the wildest of surprises.
It is true, that the role of Bhagat Singh is probably one that is often downlplayed, as against the efforts of Gandhi and co. But that doesn't mean Gandhi's philosophy is one that is totally erroneous. I would probably say its more misunderstood, becoz ahimsa/civil-disobedience is never the same as submissiveness. rather It's exactly the opposite of it. There is nothing impotent about what Gandhi did. It's a pro-active method to put pressure on the oppressor, it helps unite the larger parts of the nation to join the freedom struggle and captured the attention of the rest of the world without which Independence would've been not possible.
The problem with violence itself as a movement is it doesnot have the capacity to unite people like ahimsa. It's pretty difficult to say if violence alone could have won us Independence and even if it had would it would have led to severe quarrels between many of the states and there are other complex things. But yes, when we have the means to match any other aggressor's violence, we dont have to sit up and take the beatings.
However, the bigger problem today is equating Gandhi's effort to that of Anna Hazare. Gandhi's purpose of fasting is to promote civil-disobedience, but Anna Hazare's is more of an impotent movement where the concept of civil-disobedience is absurd. The Gandhiji of today would not have sit in some playground and fasted, rather ideally he would have gotten himself involved in the reform process. The nation is corrupt not because the leaders are corrupt, but the nation as a whole is corrupt. And that is because the system allows it to.
Shyama- I totally Agree with you war kills more people . But all am saying is War is required in self defense when like our freedom, countries wealth, ideologies,dignity were at stake and eroded away under yrs of imperialist rules under British & Mughals etc. We sat back and got damaged. India was leading the world in GDP by miles till 17th century and where has all that wealth gone today? We lost most of our wealth long before these swiss accounts came into picture :P India is the only big country which never really practiced agression on anyone.Ashoka took up ahimsa coz he was the "Aggressor" ,I feel you can never fight Himsa with Ahimsa its completely misplaced.
@Arvi- I feel Gandhi had the country united and under his notion of "Ahimsa" but whether without the INA we would ve got the freedom is a question mark i think there is every chance we could ve relapsed to even more years of Imperialist struggle under this ahimsa take whats happening with Aung san su kyi even South africa , Hong kong got independence much later coz almost all european countries were giving up on imperialism by then owing to enormous pressure from UN, world countries. And still we might have allowed ourselves to get exploited in all these years of struggle, self torture.
Yes supposing we had got freedom from violent means there is no ruling out the factor that there would ve been post war bloodshed due to state sharing, internal quarrels, civil war etc but our "Non-violent" Gandhian past was no less bloody we had more deaths post independence due to partition than say US, France,China ever had after their mostly violent revolutions & civil wars.
As for Anna Hazare's movement i feel it will not yield any result in the long run even am skeptical about it .
And "The distorted ahimsa" was not the only brainchild of Gandhi which he forced on ppl . Read Brahmacharya under Gandhi wikipedia, you will know how screwed up the guy was.
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