The enigmatic life and death of Bengali icon and India’s marshal of Independence, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, was a ticking political time bomb. It took over 68 years and 14 governments before West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee detonated it by declassifying 64 Netaji files, which had been lying in the West Bengal government archives since 1947.
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In the explosion, shrapnel has scattered in the direction of the BJP, which was hoping to dethrone her with its Hindutva-Modi mantra in next year’s Assembly elections. It has wounded the Congress, which has been trying desperately to reincarnate itself in the state. It has damaged the Left, which is Banerjee’s deadliest foe and was sitting on the Netaji files during its rule of over three decades. Ahead of the 2016 state polls, with a single masterstroke of her political brush, the political artist in Banerjee has repainted the canvas of public discourse in the elite drawing rooms of Kolkata, the street corner addas and the verdant Bengal countryside where politics is practiced with a fervour that matches the Bengali veneration for Maradona.