"The Congress has always been ill-at-ease with Bose," says historian Bhaskar Chakraborty. Though, ironically, in 1995, it was a Congress government that mooted the idea of bringing his remains back to India from Japan and also confer the Bharat Ratna on him posthumously. Not to be left behind, recently, both RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan and former HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi demanded that the Mukherjee Commission be given more time with its investigation. "The Sangh parivar never really had any interest in Bose or his ideas," says Basudev Chatterjee, former head of the Netaji Institute in Calcutta. "But now they want to prove themselves the true inheritors of his nationalistic ideals." Even the Left, which has always described Bose as a fascist agent, has changed its tune. Some years ago, former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu exhorted Bengalis to pay their respects on Bose's birthday by blowing conchshells!
The revisiting of Bose, according to historian Hari Vasudevan, has to be seen in the larger context of India's search for alternative symbols, from the past for the present. In a political scenario dominated by the unscrupulous and the corrupt, there is a need for unadulterated heroism. And in this scenario, Netaji is too valuable to be left out. Everybody wants a piece of him.
