‘Win back our democracy to fulfill goals of leaders of freedom struggle’

KOLKATA: Paying her homage to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on his birth anniversary, Indian scholar, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, said it was important to remember the leaders of the nationalist struggle but to fulfill their goals, we must win back our “fearless democracy.”

Delivering a lecture at Netaji Bhavan, on Monday, Chakraborty expressed her delight at the presence of delegates from Japan to whom she said: “The fact that Netaji was indeed a global hero was evident when I was approached by an overwhelming audience and faculty members at Hitotsubashi University, Japan, asking endless questions about Netaji.” She was there to deliver a lecture on literature, she said.

The renowned scholar said that even as India celebrated the 75th birthday of its independence, its structural principles were beginning to disappear. She said it is important to remember the leaders of the nationalist struggle and pick up the relay from them in advancing the original goals to the solutions of our imminent problems today. “We have very different problems today,” she remarked.

“Democracy is the most hospitable system. It implies full civil and political equality for all minorities. Democracy is defined by minorities although it is supposedly run by the majority. This is the peculiarity of democratic hospitality,” she felt.

Chakraborty warned: “We now suffer from a withdrawal of citizenship and therefore of civil rights from non-Hindu minorities. Our democracy is hurt.”

Citing an example of religious harmony, she said Dilip Kumar Roy was a close friend of Netaji. Roy, having lost his mother at a very young age, grew up with Gayatri Chakraborty’s mother. Having reached his college years, he brought home his three friends who became her mother’s three brothers. Two of them were Subhas Bose and the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. “Religious harmony was so natural that it went unnoticed. That is the comfort of a fearless democracy. We must win it back,” she highlighted.

Earlier, Netaji’s daughter, Anita Bose Pfaff, said the revolutionary leader, in his struggle for India’s Independence, was forced to seek the cooperation of fascist countries which did not share his ideology.