Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  Gandhi always presumed that young Bose was in a hurry and would wreck up his plans for the grand freedom, an outcome of talks, and ignoring the psychological analysis of his other disciples.

  A senior Congress leader A K Azad in his book India Wins Freedom, gave us some clear details that, in absentia, how Bose began to ‘colour Gandhi’s views on war’.

  Even the failure of the Cripps Mission was an outcome of Gandhi’s shifting stand as Bose would like it, which Azad termed as ‘pro-Subhas’.

  Let us not forget that Gandhi, who looked like a small and peevish Mahatma (a Great Man associated with all that is saintly), when he complimented Bose after his Tripuri victory in 1939 —‘After all, Mr Bose is not an enemy of his country’— may have shocked the liberal British and Indian people who believed that Gandhi was all ‘compounded with milk and honey’, says Michael Edwardes in Last Years of British India.

  ‘Gandhi, whom so many both in India and abroad thought compounded of sweet and light, had by the use of his overwhelming prestige and sort of intrigue one would expect from Tammany Hall succeeded in disposing of only real opposition to his leadership.’’ Ibid, page 78

  Earlier, when Bose was President, despite his wish, he turned his non-cooperation not against the British, but against an elected President of his own party. Ibid

  Though when the Bose phenomenon, in his absentia during last days, terrorised the British Indian representatives of 10 Downing Street in anticipation of unforeseen violent consequences, Gandhi, much to the surprise of his followers, defended Bose to his American biographer Louis Fischer, saying, ‘democrats would not make a better world’ and ‘... after the war the democrats would turn Fascists themselves’.

  It wasn’t exactly a thing that either Britain or America would like to hear from Gandhi, by then Gandhi and Bose buried their hatchet. And his Gandhi's assessment was prophetic.

  While this shocked Fischer, it seemed that apparently Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s frank assessment (appreciation) of Bose by Gandhi, may still have clung with him when he spoke to his American biographer.

  However, unhappy and saddened by his disciples’ quickly-shifting loyalties to the British, and who now claimed to be the disciples of the British tenants of democracy and liberalism (which the British only practiced in Britain and not with men or women in their colonies) save British-loyalists in Indian politics, Gandhi also chose to warn his cheated countrymen. Of course, the inference would be open to debate and even stir up heat and dust, but even British scholars, such as Michael Edwardes, agreed to it in his book, Last Days of British Raj.

  Especially after Edwina Mountbatten was set on Indian nationalist Nehru almost in the fashion of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (with a bit of circumstantial differences) ‘the saint was discarded with his phalanx, as they don’t need him anymore but (British) needed a more pro-British Indian politician, like Nehru, who understood their language better and trained in their way,’ said Edwardes.

  Apparently, it does not necessarily leave us here to conclude that their relation got totally broken up ideologically with their erstwhile mentor Gandhi, who was not known to be very forgiving to his Indian dissents, but by then, left lonely, with British-loyalists decamping their master, Congress no more remained Gandhi’s, like it was during 1939 and had Gandhi’s ‘iron hands’ weakening its sinews.

  Of course, Gandhi could not stop the mass killings and genocides in Punjab and Bengal as the Muslim League used its Jinnah-inspired destructive forces by evoking a maddening communal hysteria as a weapon along with a destroyed Indo-British administration, and the Congress leaders stood like mute spectators despite their victory in the war. The British were successful in inflicting a final damage before they left India forever.

  They were not even satisfied by bringing Indian leaders like Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and notably BR Ambedkar to agree that they must live as spiritual slaves of destroyed British empire and created a Commonwealth for freed colonies!

  It’s interesting to note that while tough freedom fighters were ruthlessly shoved behind the bars, none of the Indian leaders and British loyalists, who engineered the killings of millions of poor people in Punjab and Bengal, were jailed.

  This is because the British, by then, had become conscious that India was no longer their colony, exploiting which they could rebuild their destroyed empire.

  However, some of the recent books reveal that Gandhi could not be blamed entirely for the bitter outcome, barring his decades-old policies which fetched India such bitter harvest.

  Yet alone, shaken and frail, old, friendless Gandhi, with his great international image, could not stop the killings during the Partition, though Bose warned the Congress, in his outstanding presidential speech in 1938 during the Haripura Congress when he was Gandhi’s Presidential candidate, that a negotiated freedom would leave India divided.

  Though, only on 23 January 2011, Narayana Murthy, who is not even a historian, said that Bose’s presence in post-war India could have averted Partition and would have put his country far ahead of China.

  Gandhi lost to the Partition and brutal killings, to ‘his reformists ways’ (as Bose pointed out), and also to his excessive dependence on the Christian Britishers’ change of heart.

  After all, it was Bose who warned Gandhi that if his reformist ways forced British to free India, they would leave India divided. Haripura speech, 1938.

  Gandhi apparently did not like either Bose calling a spade, a spade, and terming him a reformist, or having detected that his policy’s faux pas which preached compromise and bargain, would give British a chance to leave India divided.

  ‘Only a revolutionary seizure of power would leave India united,’ said Bose, not only in South East Asia, but also while he was in India much to the dislike of Jinnah, Nehru, and Ambedkar, the last of whom also saw caste-division as a tribute to the British rule after they left India.

  And though in private, during his last meeting with Gandhi in Sevagram, Bose tried his best to persuade him to launch a nationwide movement as the British were at war, Gandhi told him that first he would like Bose not to take any risk as the nation would require his qualities of a great leader, and such a movement at this time ‘was inopportune’. In Freedom’s Quest, by NG Jog.

  When Bose left India, Gandhi becoming more doubtful about the Allies’ victory, launched his Quit India Movement in 1942, much to the dislike of pro-British elements within the Congress, such as Nehru, Rajagopalachari, and even Communists.

  This, N G Jog termed, as Gandhi undergoing a kind of metamorphosis from his earlier offer to the British of unconditional backing during the War.

  However, soon the dissidents of Gandhi fell in line as he was still formidable, and became even more formidable with Bose having already launched his military campaign against the British in Europe, and was planning to go to Japan in South East Asia.

  Some of Bose’s early Indian biographers, such as N G Jog, considered that it was a final patch up between Bose and Gandhi on an ideological plane.

  But what changed the whole perception about the final unity between Bose and Gandhi though they were at a distance of thousands of miles that physically separated them, and made them work towards the same goal?

  Bose’s aggressive plans of industrial and infrastructural rebuilding of India, with rigorous family planning, agricultural reforms, and education, didn’t mach with Gandhi’s.

  Though Gandhi, who was fighting his own civilizational clash, gave in when his heir-apparent Nehru willy-nilly chose the ladder to power, a move that the departing British used, to the hilt, to ensure their post-war interest in India. Nehru, on his part, spoke a language which was neither Gandhi’s, nor even Indian.

  It is important to note here that while both Gandhi and Bose grew up being more close to Indian realities, the former’s long stay in England and then in South Africa, gradually coloured his thinking to believe, like Raja Ram Mohan Roy who pleaded for the creation of a kind of confluence of ideal
ism between Christianity, Hinduism, (and) Islam’ and his undying faith in Victorian political values which Gandhi, like Roy believed would ‘liberate Indians and lift them from a mighty civilizational collapse that afflicted a morally downcast India and its people. (ref Gandhi and Churchill, by Arthur Herman).

  Not only Roy or Gandhi, but even the great German scholar Max Müllar in his book A Point to India, hinted that at a time when India suffered the biggest disconnect with its own ancient and far superior civilisation in terms of the lofty thoughts of Vedas, Upanishads and its other scriptures, it was time for Christianity to enter India. A point to India.

  Though, thanks to the fate of India, some of the greatest saints were born, and Ramakrishna and his disciple Vivekananda banished these stray thoughts and established a new Indian spiritual universalism which, like a deluge, emancipated Indians, and defeated the Anglo-Saxon influences which Nehru had greatly reversed during his reign.

  I must mention another great saint, Shirdi Sai Baba, who lived till 1916 in Shirdi to preach great Indian values of humanism and lifted the spirit of villagers to lofty heights.

  They all belonged to a great Indian tradition, in much traceable time, like the life and times of Adi Sankara, who also established India as one nation, philosophically and spiritually, casting aside warring and degenerated kinglets, 1,400 years ago!

  Of course, Bose could not meet the great Sai Baba, but his was also a story of Indian consciousness which scripted his political doom.

  I recall what Vincent Smith who wrote in his History of Ancient India and his contention. The British scholar of lofty standard with rare acumen and insight said, ‘We may say many things about India’s disunity, but everywhere India is the same, bound by its religion Hinduism... and even we may not know without being a Hindu by birth, in a way we are all Hindus...’ For obvious reasons, Smith’s book was discarded from the syllabus of Indian history under the silent changes triggered off by the English-educated Nehru-led Congress government. Nehru, with all his appreciation for British democracy, created a roadmap for a dynastical rule which still rules Congress much like using the logic of Churchill-like dictum: civilising India was the White man’s burden!

  Interestingly, Bose wasn’t troubled by the thoughts that there was a conflict between his spiritually-inspired nationalism, and his being a universal man as well. ‘Once India is freed, humanity is freed’: he once issued a statement, while explaining why India could not spare Gandhi at any moment, especially in the time of crisis!

  And Bose’s idealism was also very conscious about restoring unity within castes and religions, especially Hindus and Muslims, much like Gandhi and unlike Ambedkar.

  Thus without having to indulge in any speculation, had he been in India and never made the mistake of believing the great Russian misanthropist Joseph Stalin, he would have, with his newly acquired military powers, inked the destruction of the Division of India plan by the power-hungry Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and the mischievous British.

  Long ago, when I spoke to Leonard Gordon, author of Brothers Against the Raj, for an interview, he told me, ‘Only Jinnah alone could not be blamed for Partition.’ Sunday Partiot, April 1990.

  Now, to pick up the thread from where I left; as the clash of civilisations deepened, the efforts of the Soviet Union, Communist Party of Great Britain, and British Fabians, through their intellectual agents, and of course, the Lord Macaulay’s apologists in India, intensified their campaign on grounds of emerging global realities, including making Sanskrit an insignificant language.

  The Indian Pilgrim (Bose, who chose this name for his unfinished autobiography) carried out his lonely cultural battle and advised his Congress leaders to fight the anti-India political propaganda by British propagandists to the hilt.

  Christian missionaries were depicting India in a humiliating light and British propaganda showed that India was still a Whiteman’s burden, led by the Empire’s apologist Winston Churchill.

  In an article, India Abroad, Bose advised Congress leadership in the mid-1930s to take on these forces very seriously, and work on a powerful road map to campaign for their defeat.

  The lonely ‘Indian Pilgrim’ was ignored as Gandhi, obsessed with the propaganda of his non-violence and regeneration of Indian villages, and opposed to heavy industry plank, was more interested in his becoming a global master of a new creed. (Bose in The Indian Struggle).

  Bose was correct about Communists, Communist Party of Great Britain, and their agents like M N Roy who established Radical Humanism (after his intellectual frustration with Stalinism and his disillusionment with Communism were complete) and became more suspicious about Bose.

  And after his half-hearted support for Bose’s Left Consolidation Committee in the late 1930s, Roy was the first deserter followed by the Communists.

  They felt that the committee with Forward Bloc which, a party which Bose formed after his expulsion from the Congress by Gandhi, would no more remain ‘with Congress’, and thus weaken the national movement. H Mukherjee, Bow of Burning Gold.

  A much stronger man like Gandhi, the non-Forward Bloc ‘Left’, found that Bose’s making inroads with Indian masses was inevitable. Gandhi once even admitted in Harijan, that ‘after being expelled from Congress, Bose became more powerful’.

  However, propaganda by missionaries and the British could not be stopped though the IFDI converts’ suspicion about Bose, which led to ignoring Bose’s suggestion though he gave examples of UK, Russia, China and Ireland carrying on their propaganda with equal intensity. Subhas Chandra: Through Congress Eyes, Kibistan, Allahabad & London, print date not available, likely in 1950s).

  So correct was Bose’s assessment of a disastrous outcome of the anti-India campaigns, that it influenced even a man like Hitler who termed Indian freedom fighters as mountebanks and was sure that India needed British rule for more time to make them conversant with civilisation, in Mein Kampf. Bose’s protest to this (he was in Europe then) was swift and hard-hitting. In a statement he said, ‘Hitler licks the British boot’.

  There was protest mixed with apology from the German foreign office, but Bose refused to budge! He even took it up with Hitler when he met him in 1942 after a distance of time, and got bored by his elderly statesmanship.

  He reacted by telling him point blank, much to the discomfort of the interpreter: “British CIDs are very efficient but I risked my neck for my country. If I find my coming to Germany did not help my nation’s cause, I will escape your Gestapo also.’ Netaji Through German Lens, Nanda Mookherjee.

  In his fight against these malicious propaganda, Bose found a friend in an old Indian nationalist, Vithalbhai Patel, a great patriot who agreed with Bose on his thesis to create a counter machinery against such blasphemous propaganda.

  But as ill-fate would have it, Patel, who worked on this line alone for decades, exhausted himself and died, and young Bose was at his bedside in Vienna. Thus not blinded by the dazzle of Europe, Bose gradually emerged as Indian from a civilisational clash.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bose Sends Feelers to Axis:

  ‘If you help us,

  you help yourself ’

  ‘India freed means humanity freed.’

  - Subhas Chandra Bose

  I

  t wasn’t that Bose began sending feelers to the Axis leaders only when Britain got caught up in a life-and-death war with Germany, Italy in Europe, and later Japan joining in Southeast Asia.

  During 1933-37, when Bose was exiled in Europe, he ceaselessly carried out his propaganda against Great Britain with top Italian (including Italian leader Benito Mussolini more than once) and German leaders. He was also in touch with pro-Soviet intellectuals.

  Even Moscow invited him, but Vithalbhai Patel, a great Indian nationalist, dissuaded Bose from visiting Russia as British agents would paint him as a communist.

  His endeavours – political propaganda and promoting India’s cause in Europe, besides other propaganda for the nation–included the r
egistering of his very strong protest against Hitler’s Mein Kampf with the German foreign office, for criticising Indian freedom fighters and calling them ‘mountebanks’. Incidentally, when Bose met Hitler in Berlin, he requested him to revise it and he agreed. Netaji through German Lens, Nanda Mookherjee.

  Certainly, Bose’s efforts got intensified as he was forced out of Congress by Gandhi and his pack of bureaucrat-disciple politicians, though he was the elected President of the Congress, notwithstanding winning the election with a massive mandate against Gandhi’s candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. Later, Gandhi described Sitaramayya’s defeat ‘as mine’.

  The gradual differences came to surface even in 1938 when Bose was elected President for the first time and tried his best to push his strong anti-British and pro-Left policies.

  Gandhi got both scared and irritated as he realised that Congress under Bose would head towards an inevitable clash with the British government on the issue of Independence, and push ahead with economic policies such as emphasis on heavy industry, land reforms, and family planning in his framework of the proposed Planning Commission. Gandhi, on his part, wasn’t prepared for them.

  Bose also understood that he would be helpless until he could have the men of his choice in the Congress Working Committee (Gandhi advised him to have his own men, or allow another man to takeover, in one of the correspondences he had had with Bose during the crisis) who would agree with him to serve an immediate ultimatum to the British government.

  He also realised that, somehow, Gandhi wasn’t ready to immediately launch a campaign against the British as it was fighting a war in Europe, nor would he allow Bose to launch a movement as President for almost a similar objective. This is one of the reasons that drove Bose to despair, and he faced the full wrath of the British and the Congress.