Bose's legacy

A statue offers a reminder of his secularism and egalitarian outlook

The National Democratic Alliance government’s decision to place a statue of Subhas Chandra Bose at India Gate, predictably, generated controversy across the political spectrum. But the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) latest attempt to harness its political ideology to yet another non-Hindutva icon of the national movement —Vallabhbhai Patel, B R Ambedkar, and Bhagat Singh being others — could turn out to be a salutary decision after all. The India Gate C Hexagon complex in which the statue will be placed is one of the city’s busiest traffic roundabouts, being at the intersection of west, east, south, and north Delhi, and