Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  Yet, as paradox would have it, notwithstanding their basic similarities, they never quite agreed. Gandhi, when he saw his loyal ‘disciples’ quickly shift their loyalty to the leaders of the destroyed British empire after the war and help them scripting the fate of a divided India, his remorse was captured best by foreign historians such as Michael Edwardes and Arthur Herman.

  The root of their disagreement lay first in Bose’s spiritual education and training at an early age which belied Gandhi’s expectation that Bose would try to rediscover him not only as a political leader but also, after the early death of the great Chittaranjan Das, as a spiritual guru.

  Conflict deepened as Bose was only looking for a pragmatic political leader in Gandhi, and Gandhi, after realising his mistake, proved that he himself wasn’t after all compounded of milk and honey, like many thought within and without the country,’ says Michael Edwarde in his book Last Years of British India.

  And saw to it that by employing his political tool of ‘non-cooperation’, he shoved Bose out with the support of his ‘disciples’. For Gandhi, it was a non-violent liquidation of Bose in 1939, as Bose won the presidential election. N G Jog In Freedom’s Quest.

  Bose’s final defeat was with the core managers whom Gandhi had put in operation. They had no faith in democracy but were all for a Tammany-Hall-like intrigue where the people who voted Bose back as president, had no say.

  These two parallelly running thoughts and attitudes needed a far deeper examination and understanding.

  However, in 1939, when Bose challenged Gandhi openly, it hurt the latter so much, that bitterness could never quite leave Gandhi, despite his knowing that Bose was one of the few Indians who he could have trusted, at least on the issues of Partition and officially introducing casteism in an independent India. This used to sadden Gandhi in his last days, and even though Gandhi’s bitterness began to diffuse later, it was a bit too late.

  Much earlier, as I read several books by scholars like Girija K Mukherjee and others, I tended to believe that Gandhi’s tributes to Bose, somewhat tinged with regret, could be his attempt to patch it all up with Bose on an ideological plane.

  Gandhi could accept Bose’s interpretation of emerging issues and his idea about modern India vis-à-vis emerging global realities as his own, or at least more than that of his disciples who replaced Gandhi as agents of Britain’s sold-out man, Mountbatten.

  What was equally stunning when Gandhi’s personal secretary Mahadev Desai brought into public Bose’s last meeting with Gandhi, his version was that Gandhi was told by Bose his plan to start a movement with the help of anti-British forces globally in the second great war.

  And characteristically, Gandhi warned and tried to dissuade Bose, but Bose told Gandhi that he was in no position to change his plans. ‘I want your qualities as a leader to be used at a time when the country needs you the most,’ Gandhi told Bose (according to Desai). Yet Bose, as President of the All India Forward Bloc, still remained expelled from Congress at that time! On the eve of Bose staging the great escape, Gandhi also sent Bose a message that if he chose to apologise for all his public criticism of Congress under Gandhi’s leadership, suspension would be revoked. To Gandhi’s proposal, Bose, inspired from a poem about the Swiss folk hero William Tell, told his emissary to tell Gandhi, ‘I kneel kneel only to God alone. My body is in Austrian hands, but my conscience is my own’. That ended all effort for a patch up.

  Bose, who by then had formulated his own philosophy regarding a new modern India, thought he would walk under his own sky.

  One of the current top CPI leaders, K Ponda, in early 2010 gave me an interesting input. He said that Bose was also told by a top intelligence man that he should leave India immediately as British strategists in India and England found Bose’s stay in India, even within a jail, as dangerous: ‘Bose always considered British disadvantage as an advantage for India’. And after all, he was an Indian ideologue who would neither be impressed by fashionable labour leaders nor the Communist Party of Great Britain!

  Thus Bose’s ideological isolation was complete with enemies within and without!

  Yet, paradoxically, as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad told us in discussions regarding Gandhi’s change of heart during the war, ‘Gandhiji did not express his opinion about the outcome of the war in clear cut terms, but in discussions with him, I felt that he was becoming doubtful about an Allied victory. I also saw that Subhas Bose’s escape to Germany had made a great impression on Gandhiji. He had not formerly approved many of his actions, but now I found a change in his outlook. Many of his remarks convinced me that he admired the courage and resourcefulness Subhas Bose had displayed in making his escape from India. His admiration for Subhas Bose unconsciously coloured his view about the war situation.’

  There was more. A little before Stafford Cripps visited India, there was a news that Bose had died in an air crash, and a deeply moved ‘Gandhiji sent a condolence message to Subhas Bose’s mother... he spoke in glowing terms about her son’s services to India.’

  Later when Cripps met Azad, he told him that he didn’t ‘expect Gandhiji to speak in glowing terms about Bose who had openly joined the Axis bloc,’ as Gandhi was a believer in non-violence. India Wins Freedom.

  Interestingly, Azad’s point is clear as the war camp in India got divided into two groups – one, Gandhi-Bose group focussing on nationalism and freedom without Partition, and second, a pro-British group-led by Nehru and Jinnah even with Partition.

  About Gandhi, Cripps also sent a signal to single out a pro-British Indian hero to 10 Downing Street. And Nehru was an obvious choice.

  Incidentally, Gandhi kept the Nehru and Mountbatten lobby harassed by his repeatedly telling people that Bose didn’t die in the aircrash, ‘as his inner voice told him’.

  Gandhi told his American biographer L Fischer, ‘I do not think democrats would make a better world, I see democrats becoming fascists themselves.’ He was defending Bose as he talked to L Fischer! Yet tragically for India, both understood each other when none were near to each other to be able to spike the Partition.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bose Emerges Indian from a Clash of Civilisations

  ‘S

  ince I came to Europe, I maintain more strongly than ever that while it is imperatively necessary that we should study all modern movements abroad, it is equally necessary for us in India to chalk out future lines of our progress in conformity with our past history... The geographical and intellectual isolation which India enjoyed for centuries should enable us to adopt a sympathetic but critical attitude towards others, lands and nations.’

  Bose to the media in England and India in 1933-34 from Geneva.

  Subhas Bose and His Ideas, J S Bright, Lahore, 1946

  If the British government is allowed to fiddle with the constitution of India, and allowed to script a transfer of power, they will leave India partitioned on communal lines.

  Bose predicted this a decade before it actually took shape, during his 1938 presidential speech in Haripura. It was a prophecy that came true, following which millions of Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered and killed as the negotiation that had begun with Gandhi relegated to the backyard, and the British choose their ideological stooges Nehru and Jinnah in the days culminating to the Independence.

  However, the British fashionably called this, the ‘Transfer of Power’. This also brought the focus on how civilisational unity was left battered by ambitious Indian leaders, and destructive and wily Britishers.

  For an Indian Bose, was gradually emerging from a rather long stretched-out clash of civilizations, it was his evolving socio-economic philosophy which not only scripted his isolation from ideological Foreign Direct Investment (IFDI) converts among Indians who by then were swelling their ranks both in the camps of Bolshevik-inspired Indian Communists who used to take lessons both from the Communist Party of India, Moscow as well as the Communist Party of Great Britain, and were in the camp of British Fabians-inspired Indian socialis
ts such as Nehru.

  They also pretended to be ‘internationalists’, a more fashionable term than ideological converts.

  However, it was inevitable as all emerging world powers wanted desperately and fervently to spread their sphere of influence in India with beginning of its journey towards Independence.

  Even a section of intelligentsia in Britain, and also within its expanding powerhouse think-tanks – both in the Tory and Labour camps – with a tacit compliance with the Great Britain’s Empire – apologists in India, could visualise that India would be freed and they would like to have their men.

  For all world powers, barring perhaps America, Germany, and Japan, all were trying to plant their men so that Independent India can ideologically preserve and protect their nations’ interest after Independence.

  Realising Germany and Japan’s indifference, Bose felt that their help would be without any ideological tag or price, and an alliance which could be worked out purely on strategic realism.

  ‘Enemy’s enemy is our friend’ read one of Bose’s political slogans which, as we have seen earlier, Bose pursued. However, he also tried the Russian avenue, but an indifferent Kremlin, under the control of Stalin, worried over the outcome of the war, ignored Bose's gestures. As a result, Stalin gave Bose no assurance, though he allowed Bose to use Moscow as a transit from Afghanistan to Berlin,

  In India, as Bose began travelling into war, what fuelled the trend was foreign funding given to these Indian converts. Funding was made available initially by the Communist Party of Great Britain, and then by Moscow till the Stalinist oppression in the system gave birth to Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost.

  For example, the newspaper brought out by Aruna Asaf Ali, Patriot, enjoyed the help of Kremlin and Nehru. The newspaper much later, after Independence, had to wind up after the collapse of the socialist Soviet Union, was a case in point.

  It would be unwise to presume that Bose did not read the Anglo-Saxon and Russian intentions, though he somewhat fatally overlooked Stalinist crudities. However, he was open to any help (barring from the UK) minus any preconditions attached to such assistance or any binding from any IFDI point of view for an assistance to India’s freedom struggle.

  This apparently did not bode well for Bose as it not only scripted his ideological isolation, as we spoke about earlier, but also produced a greater and much intensified enmity among his IFDI-converted peers, both in the Congress as well as in communist camps, and to a point, selectively among Indian socialists who were often influenced by Nehru’s suave, pious, and ideological platitudes. This includes opposition to Bose by MN Roy, a radical humanist who, now as documents prove, allowed himself to get guided by the Communist Party of Great Britain to escape Stalin’s slaughter house.

  I will give one instance in passing: the Communists and Fabians who became friends during war, and later, Nehru and his communist friends, never missed a chance to paint Bose as a fascist, but in fashionable terms that Bose could neither be called an intellectual (as he was not a Communist) nor aware of Marxist interpretation of history. Hiren Mukherjee, in Bow of Burning Gold.

  For his assessments of the pre-war and post-war situation, he lacked depth, and his understanding often got tainted with a kind of intellectual incompleteness as well as ‘opportunism devoid of idealism,’ wrote Hiren Mukherjee, CPI leader, in his book Bow of Burning Gold. Even more well-read CPI leaders condemn it as ‘a planned write-up to give Nehru an edge’.

  Here I must mention an instance: a rather confused assessment of Bose, Professor Hiren Mukherjee, a well-known CPI leader and known for his closeness to the so-called socialist and first Prime Minister of India, Nehru, in his book A Bow of Burning Gold, with left-handed compliments, said, ‘With his (Bose) political pragmatism and even more towards religion and the philosophy subsisting on it, he found – not even on the intellectual plane like Jawaharlal Nehru did – no bridge of understanding with Marxism or anything like as assessment of the November Revolution, and of the Soviet Union which, too, was no more than one among other likely allies, in certain circumstances for opportunistic reasons, of the Indian struggle for freedom.’

  I quoted Mukherjee here to show how deep was his rancour – later turned polished – with which he could malign with intellectual guile, Bose’s image among progressive Indian intellectuals and historians.

  For Mukherjee, a top CPI leader, knew well how Bose, after the end of the war, came to know about the real ‘naked face of Bolshevik philosophy packaged as new humanism’. Mukherjee was also aware that he was spending his last days in cold Moscow in isolation.

  Much like Nehru, Mukherjee’s hypocrisy, like his masters in Moscow and India, was stunning indeed.

  And like the Congress party now mortgaged to the Nehru family, they could paint Bose in a negative light more effectively.

  It also proved that Mukherjee, who tried to pit Nehru, a Fabian socialist, without a proper understanding of India, and who often saw India through the British lens to belittle Bose, had either not read some of the important interviews of Nehru, or ignored them as the truth would explode the myth that they had all contributed to create for decades.

  As for example, in Reporting India, (page 217, published 1962) by Taya Jenkin, where Nehru agreed that he did ‘let down Subhas’: ‘I suppose I let down Bose during the 1939 Congress crisis (though) I was in agreement with what Subhas was trying to do.... (As) India (after Independence) would have been either of us.’

  The last line said a million words as to why Nehru joined the forces that were plotting to politically kill Bose in the Congress with others, whom the socialist Nehru knew were neither progressive nor socialists. One such was the Free Press Journal of Bombay which said, after all, ‘his (Gandhi’s) aim was to finish him (Bose) off politically’.

  And Nehru, due to the piercing question from Jenkin, admitted that Bose was another prime-ministerial candidate.

  Even Azad left a clear hint in his book India Wins Freedom on how a changed Gandhi had left the Harrow-educated, pro-democrat Nehru bitterly disappointed. Bose would have posed a formidable challenge to him or could even outwit him had it not been for the British government’s blessings towards Nehru, even though the people of India would have been with Bose.

  Mukherjee, who represented the secret prejudices Communists, and was a loyal member of the Indian Communist Party of India (who knew about Bose’s end in Russia, like his party’s big time comrades, such as Ajoy Ghosh and Amreet Sreepad Dange in Ajoy Bhawan, New Delhi after 1945), despite his pious ideological platitudes and a nebulous internationalism, allowed them to weigh heavily in favour of Nehru.

  He did not have the intellectual guts to admit, that for a thinker like Bose, Russia under Stalin had lost its intellectual appeal once Leninism was dead and was replaced by an ideology of killings and brutal purges, purely to advance the cause of a ‘personalised cult, packaged as Communism, which was both anti-intellectual and anti-people and shifted to a like Tammany-Hall-intrigue-inspired Communism by Stalin’.

  Interestingly, though I have criticised Bose for having failed to have a proper understanding of the danger that Stalin posed to a statesman like him, Stalin, who used to meet Bose to discuss issues, never tortured him.

  ‘For him, Bose was an atom bomb to scare off the UK and US during Cold War,’ said K Ponda, former member, CPI Executive Council. ‘Stalin looked after him well,’ he added.

  I would repeat the words of Sankar Roy, former secretary of Ronen Sen, a politburo member of the undivided CPI, who told me that ‘Bose was blind to Stalin’s mistakes and brutal policies.’

  The only fault of Bose – rather a fatal one – was that he, despite all this, saw no danger from Stalin, a far more inferior man!

  Hiren Mukherjee also has no explanation for the Russia-German Non-Aggression Treaty which actually detonated the Second War with the ‘British having scripted with all seriousness its avenues for decades, after forcing Versailles Treaty on Germany.’ AJP Taylor, Origins of Se
cond World War, Second Thoughts.

  For Bose, IFDI had of course been an inevitable ideological confrontation which could not have been avoided, but what sprang up in the process as a surprise was Bose’s deepening conflict with an unaccommodating Gandhi (though both patched up when all was lost).

  What requires deeper analysis is Gandhi’s continued disregard, despite also being an Indian who had faced major failures in the 1921 non-cooperation movement and the 1931 Dandi March, the latter of which, in totality, failed to impact the Britishers.

  Bose, who hailed Gandhi and his movement as an instrument of great mass mobilisation, and a unifier of an India divided on the basis of caste and religion finally widened his ideological cleavage on tactical questions over both a political and socio-economic strategy regarding the issues for post-independence India, and the conflict was all over the issue of emancipation of Indian people in more economic and educational terms.

  As for instance, when Bose set up the National Planning Commission as Congress President in 1938, Gandhi did not like the idea nor did the industrialists (barring J RD Tata) who claimed to be Congress activists and Gandhi’s Indian industrial loyalists.

  Now it is the turn of Gandhi’s loyal disciples to turn British ‘loyalists in Congress’ who accepted a divided India with grace, the difference between Bose and Gandhi at the last stage ran less deeper than it actually looked to many Indian biographers who wrote wonderful biographies on Bose, barring a few of Bose’s foreign biographers who were wiser by their access to secret British documents and avoided such risky conclusions.

  There seems to be much conscious effort to balance Bose’s ideological dispute or difference with Gandhi by trying to fudge the core problem when both stood united.

  Though Gandhi always avoided commenting on Bose’s political philosophy – tactics, socio-economic, and political planning for free India – and never indulged in popular malicious campaigns, often British-inspired, used against Bose by Communists and Indian Fabians, especially led by Nehru who led the attack on Bose in his absence that Bose represented Fascism, Gandhi had never been seen maligning Bose even at the end. NG Jog, In Freedom’s Quest.