Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  Even a celebrated historian like Ramachandra Guha who wrote a piece in the Hindi edition of The Hindustan Times, maybe in 2009 (I have the copy with me, but I had forgotten to note the date on the clipping), while examining the pros and cons of the political consequences in case Bose came back to India, felt that Bose would have to wait a few general elections to dislodge a ‘failed Nehru’ as Bose had had more ‘charisma than the socialist leaders who were like the people of the country were getting increasingly disenchanted with the former.’

  Perhaps, Dr Guha implied that Bose would have to wait till Nehru’s ‘pious platitudes and frothy foreign policies’, leading to humiliation at the hands of the Chinese.

  Now, after I read the piece, I must admit with all humility that Dr Guha neither read some of the early British historians nor the British documents released during the Transfer of Power, nor did his writing reflect Nehru’s endless efforts to reinforce the forces to keep Bose in captivity.

  Maybe it all sounds like hearsay for Dr Guha, but there isn’t an easy escape route for a gentleman historian.

  However, this isn’t all for which I chose to write this introduction. First, I owe the readers an explanation. I haven’t attempted Bose’s biography, nor have I repeated the oft-stated details of his being ousted from Congress by Gandhi and his men in a conventional fashion, the details about his Great Escape, or the details of wars that he had led against the Anglo-American forces in South East Asia.

  My focus has always been his escape to Russia, and how Russia, at times, planted his comeback tales to deviate and opiate the Indian people as well as others globally. I have also focussed on how it was all a myth, and how Bose actually didn’t perish in fake plane crash on 18 August 1945 and Indian government’s repeated propaganda to confirm a fake story, notwithstanding the fact that the Taiwanese government denied any air crash to the Justice M K Mukherjee Commission in September 2003.

  Also, I have written two chapters that may not seem to be linked to Bose’s end in Russia and about the dark games that they played (which a greater investigation would reveal).

  However, without explaining his intellectual background, the end of Bose in Russia could have seemed like another myth.

  Notwithstanding the Cold War, his blunder in choosing a wrong ally actually helped America and Britain escape a greater threat called Bose, which even Kremlin had realised.

  Through these chapters, I have tried to bring out why Bose’s end was linked to his deep loyalty to his Indian cultural roots, his Indian interpretation of emerging political realities, and his becoming critical of Indians blindly following the prophets of Western democracies and their values in British terms as well as a Bolshevik idealism for India.

  Bose sincerely believed that imported values wouldn’t exactly solve the problems of the country.

  An example of this would be when Bose had given his extempore speech at the Tokyo University, on message of Indian civilisation, he told a huge audience that in the next phase of the development of India, he would like to ‘see an Indian version of socialism with a human face’.

  Bose never believed in frothy and empty pontification like many of his contemporaries did though they both impressed and delighted several learned scholars and historians even when they couldn’t convince.

  Bose never believed frothy idealism would ever save Indians from poverty, illiteracy and those with no basic health care system (for which British rule did not create any infrastructure), and also prescribed a uniform code of family planning.

  This was what made him the most feared, on the one hand, among the pro-British leftists in India such as Nehru, and on the other, the prophets of non-violence, besides of course, the British government and the Indian communists. And as destined, this scripted his fate as a lonely ideologue of his time. It was one of the major reasons why, when in Russia, he could not be trusted by Kremlin.

  This is primarily why I wrote the first few chapters on the various aspects of Bose’s philosophy.

  It wasn’t that Kremlin was less afraid of him, as I said earlier, but once behind their iron curtain, they treated Bose in the most insensitive manner.

  Another point I would like to make clear to my readers is that Bose was never allowed to return to India at any cost by the Stalinist Russian authorities.

  Instead, I was told by Communist Party of India as well as Revolutionary Socialist Party leaders that Bose was effectively destroyed by an inhospitable captivity, making him terribly mentally sick.

  It was the Russian way to disable Bose faster, much like the English did it to Napoleon Bonaparte with arsenic. I had quoted CPI leaders A B Bardhan and K Ponda, both of them by name, but I stuck to the leader who was more close to the CPSU.

  Though I have criticised Bose for having chosen Stalin and Kremlin as his next ally after the post-war situation, he had correctly analysed the situation politically – an inevitable split between the Anglo-American Bloc and the Soviet Union. He told his ministers of the same split in Allies grouping, during his last days debating and discussing what he should do.

  Although a brilliant academic and a brilliant student of history, political science and economics, Bose sadly failed to read that neither ideology nor ‘new humanity’ (like Kremlin used to say) guided Russian misanthropists such as Stalin and his predecessors, including Nikita Krushchev. While Stalin used to meet Bose to discuss issues, Bose’s psychological stress deepened after Khrushchev took over.

  It was power, much like the Gandhi - and Nehru-style, with a fake Bolshevik idealism package, that mattered most for the Russian political elite who clung to power.

  Though the British and Indian dynasty liked the turn of events, as they had been desperately looking for an apparent advantage, Bose failed to read the Russian writings on the wall, and got his priceless life doomed forever.

  It is to be noted, however, that Nehru’s friend Khrushchev never informed him about Bose’s death.

  If Bose’s escape to Russia should leave us without any controversy any more, differences may still emerge on the issue of the treatment they meted out to him, and how they scripted his end.

  I have therefore interviewed Dr Purabi Roy, who after S Sinha, NG Gory, H V Kamath and Professor Samar Guha, has done a great service to the cause by exposing the Russian connection to Bose’s last odyssey, whence he could never come back to his land and the people he loved so well.

  It is here that I must admit that my two other chapters – ‘Bose weighs options’ and ‘Bose in Russian hands’ – overlapped at places. It was extremely difficult for me to keep these two chapters independent of each other, despite my best efforts.

  It was also because the documents were numerous, as well as those people’s versions who wanted to pass on the information that they knew, before it all got lost.

  This piece was written also to express my gratitude to the men and women who, at times, simply helped me and inspired me to continue with my research.

  I would mention two top Government of India officials, Dr Prithviraj Chauhan, former Director General, and Dr Benoyk Kumar Sahay, In-charge of the National Museum of Delhi, who kept encouraging me to complete the book without delay.

  However, somehow it was delayed for reasons beyond my control, though I began my book sometime in March 2010, writing it in Press Information Bureau’s Press Room, Delhi.

  Lastly, I must express my thanks and gratitude to Bloomsbury for their cooperation. I must also thank the numerous authors and historians, both Indian and foreign, all of whom I could not always refer to or quote in my book.

  Santanu Banerjee

  Content

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Bose and Indian Political Consciousness

  Chapter Two

  Bose Emerges Indian from a Clash of Civilisations

  Chapter Three

  Bose Sends Feelers to Axis:

  ‘If you help us, you help yourself ’r />
  Chapter Four

  Bose Weighs Options:

  For the last struggle, decides for Russia

  Chapter Five

  Bose in Russian Hands

  Chapter Six

  When Thunder Spoke

  Chapter Seven

  A Lonely Left

  Interview

  Bibliographical references

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bose and the Indian

  Political Consciousness

  I

  t was 1921; Subhas Chandra Bose came out with flying colours both from Cambridge and the Indian Civil Service Examination. Bose decided to live for his commitment to the ‘sacred’ nation that ‘he was born in’– that was to dismiss any ideology that did not serve the interest of the poor and subjugated nation, and free them both spiritually and materially (economically), in a way which was Indian but without any global disconnect. Much to the annoyance of his father Janakinath Bose, he resigned from the civil services. It was also a time for him to choose a political ideology that served the goals he had set for himself.

  However, that could not be from any Ideological Foreign Direct Investment (IFDI), but that would emerge from within, with no disconnect with the ancient, spiritual Indian civilisation.

  For example, Bose, during his tender and younger days often wrote to his mother Prabhavati Devi, that God created this ‘sacred nation’ for a great mission. And though his perspective of the sacred nation got expanded as he grew up and evolved, it never quite left him. The same Indian spiritualism guided him much later when he thought of defining the Hindu-Muslim relationship in India.

  ‘Notwithstanding Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, art, music, and literature have created an innate sense of spiritual bond between two communities. And this spiritual bond finally melts away antagonisms,’ Bose expressed his faith in the ultimate spiritual unity between Hindus and Muslims which again much later Jinnah and his Muslim League, as well as the wily Britishers and their Indian friends destroyed by partitioning India.

  He looked at the British-engineered Hindu-Muslim problem with the eye of an Indian which, many would agree lay pointed to a solution to the problem.

  Then at that point of time, he also stood at an important crossroads: while his days in Cambridge and in London exposed him to liberal British and Western ideologies – like individual liberty, freedom, and maybe Fabian socialism, on the one hand, and Bolshevik-inspired-Communism making deep inroads among young intellectuals, on the other.

  However, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his disciple Vivekananda, who had had the vision of a new India and with whom he had had a mental encounter at the age of 15, would not leave him. Nor his experiments and experience with the Indian way of life at several stages both in Orissa and Bengal, and from the experience gained from prominent religious places in India that he visited when he was looking for a spiritual guru, and his days as a social activist who would go for compulsory begging, as well as nursing poor, pestilence-affected villagers in Cuttack.

  Nor his love and reverence for Sankaracharya’s Advaita would leave him notwithstanding his stay in London and his exposure to the West and its radical changes that began converting intellectuals after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.

  Though he recognised in his unfinished autobiography, An Indian Pilgrim, the fact that for him, Sankara’s philosophy, especially Maya, may not be practicable anymore, but as he emerged from those trends, he chose invariably which was Indian.

  It is interesting to note here that though owing to Bose’s continuous preoccupation with politics and the freedom movement, Bose could not devote much time to speaking his mind and formulating his thoughts and was often misinterpreted ‘as without a political ideology’ (Late Dr Girija K Mookherjee, and late CPI leader Hiren Mukherjee by inference, in their book Subhas Chandra Bose, a short biography, and A Bow of Burning Gold, a brief assessment of Bose’s contribution to the Indian freedom struggle).

  However, the British, often out of fear and disdain for Bose and Indian writers, for decades, found a communist ideologue in a man like Stalin, who lived and died for political power and could be identified with a particular brand of misanthropism after the death of Lenin. Bose could not be blamed for being opaque to the trend and decided to leave his intellectual profile untouched.

  And Bose’s life should not be expected to hold a brief for them. He remained Indian, though flexible and open to that was good with other pro-people experiments around the world, he would never disown his Indian identity or thinking-base that continued to colour his interpretation of emerging global political and economic realities.

  There is another fulsome difficulty: With the passing of years and decades, most of Bose’s writings that he wrote, either in Europe or in jails at different times, were lost due to a section of his family members’ well-designed apathy, as well as government neglect. It is thus singularly difficult to get them around, though they would have helped scholars with uninhibited minds to do justice to Bose as a philosophical theme.

  As for example, I tried to trace an article by Bose, Of Cultural Bondage, but I could not get it even in Lahore whence I got so many of his rare writings.

  There was a point of time when Bose got swayed and a very temporary phase of ideological aberration set in which led to his rather flashy sum up in The Indian Struggle.

  Bose thought since both Communism and Fascism believed in economic development but without any reverence for democracy, he thought India should produce the ‘next philosophical synthesis of both’.

  In the early 1930s, a young Bose, exiled in Europe by English rulers, could not immediately decipher the evils that these ideologies embodied for human civilisations as much as Capitalism in its naked form (which he understood so well, from a close look at the British Government’s colonial policy of an unequal distribution of wealth). His broadsides against Hitler was a case in point to reason that Bose’s first priority was India and upholding his nation’s dignity. Nanado Mookherjee, Netaji Through German Lens.

  In Europe, when certain derogatory references were made in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and it openly exposed Hitler’s prejudices against the Indian freedom movement and freedom fighters whom Hitler termed as mountebanks, Bose lodged strong official protests with the German foreign office and rather loudly felt that the Führer was ‘licking British boots.’

  Later, Bose was candid enough to admit to Rajani Palme Dutt in England, an initiator of several Indians to Communisthood, and a great friend of the Communist Party of Great Britain, that perhaps ‘it wasn’t a happy expression (Nazi-Communism synthesis), but then you also know, when I wrote my book, Nazis and Fascists did not show their naked face of aggrandisement.’

  And it was the last and first of philosophic aberrations from whence, within a short span of time, Bose distanced himself.

  I was told by some of the prominent scholars like Professor Purobi Roy, that during the war, Bose revised his The Indian Struggle while he was in Germany which I doubt his relatives, represented by late Dr Sisir Bose and his family members, who agreed to the British, Japanese, and Indian government, as well as the Congress version that he had died in the 18 August 1945 air crash – had even found it wise to publish. I must admit I myself could not lay my hands on the revised edition of Bose’s The Indian Struggle.

  Notwithstanding his distancing from his brief ideological aberration, Bose’s discarded thesis of a synthesis of Communism and Nazi philosophy gave both his Communist rivals in India and his pro-British Congress Socialists, including Nehru, enough grounds to paint him as a Fascist, a myth which got exploded much later, and his rivals had to recant their blasphemous allegations. It also sent a new alert to the British government who immediately banned the book.

  However, when I recently read Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill’s biographer, he stuck to the post-controversy aberrations (what Bose disowned in England while talking to Rajani Palme Dutt), and made himself a delightful writer, but still failed to convince those wh
o had read Bose well.

  For Bose, who had come in touch with the real India several times since his younger days (perhaps rather precious early days), and had discarded aberrations, these allegations did not matter much for him, nor could it cloud his consciousness about his ultimate Indianness.

  After all Bose did not have to rediscover his own country, like Nehru, nor would he have to read the Bhagavat Gita in his mid-twenties, like Gandhi, even though, like Bose, Gandhi was also born into, and lived in, an Indian atmosphere. Reference Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill.

  ‘Despite his classical education (English education), unlike Nehru, Bose was an Indian,’ said American author, Arthur Herman. However, what perhaps unconsciously made his choice easier from his younger days was his deep loyalty to an Indian way of life, as well as the deep cultural conflicts that Bengal underwent in the early nineteenth century.

  Following those conflicts, Bengal came out with a nationalistic Indian statement right after the culturally-aggressive Britishers got their fingers burnt post-1857 against them by Indian soldiers and their Kings because of their superior racial prejudices and limitless arrogence. However, the British crushed the war with the help of Indians who found English rule to be, in R C Majumdar’s words, “better than old system that got by then sunk in for centuries’ degeneration”.

  Even to begin with, like Punjab which helped Britishers during the War, the Western educated Bengalis had had serious reservation about 1857 revolutionaries and their aims.

  As irony would have it, within another six decades or more, the British faced their stiffest resistance, including an armed one from the same Bengal, though an apologist of British imperialist Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Herman quoted extensively from British documents of Bengali manhood, which it dismissed as ‘unmanly’.