80 yrs on, Netaji’s homecoming still awaited

In short, 80 years have elapsed without a reverential farewell to his departed soul

On January 30, 78 years ago, Mohandas Gandhi, supreme leader of the Indian National Congress, met an unspeakably violent end. In a radio broadcast the same night, his hand-picked second-in-command and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, tearfully told his people, “The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere”.

Subhas Chandra Bose died following a plane crash in Taipei on August 18, 1945. (HT Archive)

The “father of the nation”, as Subhas Bose first addressed the Mahatma over the airwaves from Burma in 1944, was cremated in Delhi and his ashes