“I mean no disrespect to Shri Rasa Bihari Basu [Rash Behari Bose]. But he went to Japan and became a citizen and national of Japan. He married there, had children there and cut himself off practically from India. His family lives in Japan as Japanese citizens…There are very eminent persons who sacrificed their lives in India’s struggle for freedom, who died abroad and whose memory we cherish. We have not thought at any time of searching for their ashes or whatever remains of them and to bring them here. It is not that we have any objection to his ashes coming here. But they honour it in Japan, because in Japan we know that one of the old worships of Japan is ‘Shinto worship’ or worship of ancestors. I understand that the ashes of Shri Rasa Bihari Basu are honoured in his family and worshipped in his family."

This is how, in a few perfunctory and disjointed sentences, India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru summed up revolutionary leader Rash Behari Bose’s life of epic proportions on November 24, 1961 in the Lok Sabha. Nehru himself was cut-off from the revolutionary dimension of the freedom struggle and never cared to honour revolutionary nationalists and their legacies in independent India. The reason was not far to seek. He must have thought that honouring the legacies of the revolutionaries would overshadow or minimise his role or that of his own group in the freedom movement.

Contrast Nehru’s attitude towards Rash Behari Bose with that of Narendra Modi, who as the Chief Minister of Gujarat, had undertaken a historic and unprecedented initiative to repatriate the ashes of iconic revolutionary Shyamji Krishna Varma in 2003. Varma, who had died in Geneva in 1930, had willed that his ashes be immersed in a free India. Since then and for 56 years after independence, Varma’s ashes lay in a vault in Geneva, till Modi brought them back to India. Recalling that historic moment, Modi observed that bringing back the ashes of Shyamji Krishna Varma was “one of the most special moments" of his life and “the fervour and pride it generated across the nation was unimaginable,........

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