Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

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  As we saw, Bose’s decision to escape to Russia was not only tragic, but fatal. What should be considered as a tribute to Bose’s contribution to his mother land’s liberation, was the British seeing and admitting fear of the spin-offs of his activities in Europe and Asia, now personified in the captured men of the INA.

  The British realised that India and Indians were not prepared to listen to anything against Bose. There were no charges of war crime and they had no weapon to prevent the upheaval!

  A top secret document released in Fortnightly Security Intelligence Summary, dated 14 September 1945, item no 109, pp 262-263 is worth noting for its correct perspective: ‘Bose’s established death would solve the difficult problem of dealing with him, but his patriotism and activities, even though from the wrong side of the fence, are likely to hold an important place in the nationalist mind... one politician (name not mentioned) even declared that his legend will continue to inspire the people and steel them in their determination to free India and Asia from Imperialism.’

  The note has two important indicators for the Government and for pro-Congress historians. Firstly, accept Bose’s fake death theory as it would solve the immediate problems thrown up by his escape to Russia. Secondly, for the pro-British Indian government headed by Nehru, the indications were shameful, as despite ‘Nehru’s expected mischievous views’ people would refuse to get influenced. Thus the new Indian Government should try to establish Bose’s fake death story as true!

  And interestingly, Nehru did the same! All Congress governments, barring the one led by Lal Bahadur Shastri, till the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance I and II remained loyal to the British, and maintained His Majesty’s government directive.

  Interestingly, the British administration (just before the INA returned without Bose, of course) was also contemplating to lift the ban on the Forward Bloc as the war ended.

  ‘The Governments of Bengal, Punjab, Madras and Bihar raised many objections, their reasons being that the Forward Bloc might prove dangerous in connection with the return of INA personnel in India and the possibility of action having to be taken against Subhas Chandra Bose.’ 19th September, 1945. Note was issued by R Tottenham, secretary.

  This note proves our earlier contention that the Congress had actually first supported the Britishers’ decision to try INA men for ‘violence of their master’, making their (pro-British Congress men) ‘second boss, British vulnerable’ by creating a terrible unease.

  It became intense, as Indians, they (Britishers and Nehru-led Congress) understood, would not listen to either the Congress or British arguments. Thus, they engaged their men, also the same ‘mischievous Nehru’, doning the layer’s robe during the trail, no matter how fake, to defend INA men at Red Fort!

  While Secretary R Tottenham’s note exposed the dirt in the Congress, they were still wearing their heart on their sleeve, despite Gandhi hailing Bose as a ‘patriot of patriots’, as said by Dr Purabi Roy, who quoted rom a TASS (a Russian news agency) report from London, published 10 September 1945.

  A report suggested: ‘… despite the fact that the Russo-Japanese conflict was in full swing. The Japanese were trying (so) that Bose could establish the contact with Russians and serve a non-official Soviet-Japanese emissary of good will. After the defeat of Saipan Island in September 1944, at the conference in Tokyo during which the Japanese tried to enlist the support of East Asian countries, Bose, as was reported, (was) informed by his close associates that Japan will be defeated and INA would have to take care of themselves as much as they could. At the same time, Tojo’s cabinet supposedly promised Bose that, in case the war goes beyond the expected scenario, (they) will establish a contact with the Russian authorities for (him) and (he) will be secured in Russia’.

  The report presupposes that even Tojo (who resigned and was replaced by the Hakari Kikan government) knew that Bose was planning to escape to Russia!

  Bose finally gave up all other ideas apart from seeking asylum in Russia. During the last meetings (between 14 to 16 August 1945) he gradually handed over charges to Major-General MZ Kiani and ordered him to take over from Habibur Rahman as well as oversee the surrenders of the INA legionaries.

  However, some of Bose’s last broadcasts on the emerging national issues in India, where he feared that the Congress would compromise with the British, must have had a chilling effect on both, the Congress and their British bosses in Delhi and London.

  ‘Bose’s broadcast on the Shimla Conference continued his general line of argument being as before, that there was no need for the Congress to think that because the Allies are winning the war, the time had come to make a compromise with Britain. War has many surprises and it was by no means certain that the Allies would win. As Napoleon had said “the issue is sometimes decided in the last five minutes’’. Moreover, a well-known British commander, General Slim, who took part in the recent operation in Burma, had admitted that Japan, unlike other nations, would fight to the last.’

  However, Bose appeared to have reconciled himself to a compromise between the Congress and the Viceroy, and in a speech which was a virtual declaration of war on the Congress, outlined a programme for internal movement to be carried on to fight the Congress:

  ‘All groups opposed to the acceptance of the Viceroy’s offer should join hands to demand that the Congress... programmes for the new central and provincial Governments and give the country details of the extent of men, money, and materials to be supplied by ‘Britain’s war’ fund and should agitate for the release of all political prisoners (this being the acid test of Lord Wavell’s sincerity), on which Congress must not be allowed to compromise.’ Bose did a loud thinking to create unease for both the British and their loyal men.

  They should demand of the Congress that it should not allow India to contribute to the British fund, insist on India’s blocked sterling balances being made available, and reopen the question about India’s public debt. Sisters and brothers at home must keep up an agitation on all these issues in order to force the Congress Executive Council to resign. Weekly Security Intelligence Summary dated July 13, 1945.

  Bose’s speech to his countrymen reflects the same despair about the Congress’ unreliability – Nehru turning into an international gospel-giver rather than being careful about India’s interest.

  Of course, Bose did not mention about the Partition as an issue in the speech we have quoted, but in his heart he feared it, as he knew the Congress better for having worked with them till he was ousted from the office of Congress president because Gandhi felt he should be.

  His worries were too deep as he could not love his nation and people wisely enough, like many of his peers did. He was in a hurry to save it from the ‘English-Congress’, and the League-triggered plots, and in a hurry, it only hastened his decision to escape to Russia which, he thought, might put a break to the catastrophes occurring in India.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Bose in Russian Hands

  F

  or a number of Indians, including those born in Bangladesh and Pakistan, the lure of Russia proved fatal. They were drawn to Bolshevism by Lenin and his famous thesis on the National and Colonial Question at the Second Congress of Comintern, 1920. They all met their end at the hands of Joseph Stalin.

  Stalin’s Indian Victims by Santanu Banerjee, The Indian Express, 28 September, 2003, also courtesy Google, Wikidpedia.

  If this was the sad tale of forty-five brilliant men (or even more) who were lost to history’s worst purges by Stalin (according to KGB declassified documents), a misanthropist of much greater degree and dimension, then another side of the story of those butchered men had been India’s mysterious ‘friendly relation for decades with a Stalinist Russia!’ And as Bose eventually joined them, because fate somewhat forced him to choose Stalin with a circumstantial difference, as an ally, the Russian dictator freed the British Government, a section of the Indian Congress leadership, and Socialist establishments from the consequences of a violent en
d of colonial rule.

  However, in equal measure, it exposed Soviet Union’s hidden hatred towards an India which would be free by its own terms.

  Thus, it isn’t difficult to decipher the link and understand how, during the Cold War, India gradually slogged in Moscow’s camp. It does also explain the implications of Nehru and his likes who had propped up a worthless Non-Align Movement, globally.

  It was merely to safeguard the Soviet Union’s expansionist interest globally which Kremlin did actuate by pumping in millions of Rubels through its agents and agencies, and gradually becoming a financial broke leading to its physical dismemberment.

  An Indian Communist, who visited Russia during Yuri Andropov’s regime and stayed there till his successor K Chernenko took over, told me, ‘even CPSU men complained to me about their socio-economic status vis-à-vis the royal treatment given to the Indian friends – the Indian Communists and people from the Congress camps.’

  The cruel irony did not, however, stop here as far as India’s political establishments were concerned, which included not only Congress’ self-styled democrat and first ‘Left’ Prime Minister Nehru, but all truth lovers, that is, Gandhian disciples in the Congress, Socialist camps, as well as the Communist camps before its split in 1964.

  The surprise did not hold us back here, either. It wasn’t an accident that Bose, who was sadly mistaken, and had misread Stalin, committed a profound political blunder by always considering Russia as a tactical ally, not an ideological one, and was forced to gradual petering out in a Stalinist Russia and afterwards. Bose should have understood the gravity of the matter before he chose to enter Russia. A better assessment was expected from a leader of Bose’s intellectual stature, considering his knowledge of Stalin’s history of revenge killings.

  Sadly, Bose at that point in the crisis gave preference to his profound misunderstanding of Kremlin than to his brilliant analytical acumen. Even his earlier experience of the acute problems he faced in Kabul with the Russian embassy had not opened his eyes.

  Though some of the commentators mentioned that his being in touch with top Soviet leaders did not help him, but when it came to old relations, they refused to be accessible, and until the German and Italian chancelleries intervened, he wasn’t given just even a transit visa.

  ‘In event,’ wrote NG Jog, ‘it was providential that Bose did not receive asylum in Moscow. For within three months of his reaching Berlin, the Nazis invaded Russia, which consequently became an ally of Britain. Had Bose gone to Russia, his future fate could easily be imagined. As it was, he soon became the target of Russian propaganda and was labelled as a ‘notorious would-be Quisling of India’, among other epithets.

  Jog correctly summed up what would have happened to Bose, ignoring the possibility of his either being transported back to Britain or Stalin ordering his execution.

  As when Jog was writing his book, not much truth about the ‘killer’ Stalin came out from the KGB files of Kremlin-inspired genocides and human liquidations which Stalin presided over.

  However, Jog proved prophetic in another sense: the same fears in real terms revisited Bose once he escaped to ‘friendly Soviet Union’ after the war.

  ‘It was an opportunity for Stalin, the misanthropist, to intern Bose forever, first in Kremlin and then in Moscow (till Hitler’s Russian counterpart had hopes of using Bose as his stooge), when Stalin lost his hope of using Bose, and the Cold War broke out in 1947!’ said former CPI General Secretary, A Bardhan’s office secretary K Ponda, adding that ‘the Britishers who enjoyed Bose’s misery in Russia, acted wisely by not trying to bring him out and try him as a conspirator against His Majesty’s Government. India would have been in flames along with several pockets of South East Asia’, and which a destroyed Britain could not be able to quell..’

  It would be like rubbing salt to a Bose-triggered cancerous wound that England inherited from his activities. For despite his being very vocal and his being first about a correct analysis on a split in the Allies’ camp–between the Anglo-American bloc and the Soviet Union–his understanding that while his thesis that the victors would soon be split into two warring groups was one hundred percent correct, he did not know the trap laid out by the Russians and his so-called advisors in Japan!.

  It was a profound blunder by Bose who trusted Stalin, a habitual killer and misanthropist, and for whom brilliance had been an anathema.

  However, Stalin behaved in a different way for Bose, much to the surprise of the Britishers. He took care of Bose, who was ‘first kept in Kremlin, but soon they realised that keeping Bose in Kremlin would be dangerous if any foreign diplomat sees him by chance... so, they decided to shift him to a huge house in an eighteen-acre land in Moscow. Here, Bose would have two sentries, one radio, English newspapers, and cigarettes to smoke, but with no one to communicate with,’ according to K Ponda.

  Recently, I had the opportunity to read Stalin, a killer and his inspired purges, from a few pages of Victor Serge’s Memoir of a Revolutionary (Bolshevik).

  ‘It was cruel for a sensitive poet, writer, and thinker like Tagore to be in Moscow, and yet remain unaware about when grim realities amidst ‘talks of new humanity’ were unfolding. Though he could never know it in his lifetime, but it happened nevertheless! And as irony would have it, the day Rabindranath Tagore was received in Moscow in 1930, Stalin executed forty-eight persons on trumped up charges!’

  After eighty-two years, the truth came to be known widely, when Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (originally written in French) was translated in English and published recently.

  Serge, an anarchist and a brilliant writer, who later joined the Bolsheviks in 1919 and was appointed within the press services of the Communist International, closely watched Lenin and Trotsky, and was an unfailing critic of the dictator Stalin.

  He also witnessed the war of succession after Lenin’s death and how Stalin butchered his rivals, including Leo Trotsky, even after deporting him to Mexico!

  These merciless purges happened in 1930.

  ‘Crisis in coal industry, the Shakhty sabotage trial, fifty-three technicians in court, executions... Naturally, there is a meat shortage – execution of Prof. Karatygin and his forty-seven confidantes for the sabotage of meat supply – an execution without trial. On the day of the massacre of these forty-eight men, Moscow received Rabindranath Tagore; there were speeches about “abundance and a new humanism, and a splendid official reception”,’ writes Serge. p 288, Memoir of a Revolutionary

  Like Serge reeled them out, amidst talks of ‘new humanism’, Tagore was unaware of the darkest spots within which Stalin created a ‘new humanism’ in a new Russia, which took people seventy years to destroy after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

  Impressed, Tagore wrote in one of his letters from Russia, ‘In stepping on the soil of Russia, the first thing that caught my eye was that in education, at any rate, the peasant and the working classes have made such enormous progress in these few years that nothing comparable has happened even to our highest classes in the course of the last hundred and fifty years… The people here are not at all afraid of giving complete education even to Turcomans of distant Asia; on the contrary, they are utterly in earnest about it.’

  Incidentally, Serge, who was expelled from the party and was arrested in 1929 and again in 1933, was allowed to leave USSR in 1936 after a global protest by militants and prominent intellectuals like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Serge came up with a memoir that would, wily-nily, taint the splendid tributes of Tagore, as despite his unfailing insight into human societies, this time he had failed to catch the smell of the blood of innocents on Stalin’s hands. Serge died in 1947, hunted by Stalinists agents who may have assassinated him.

  Thus, one can understand the source of Bose’s grave misunderstanding of Stalin’s regime, which cost him his precious life. And, in turn, what actually helped a misanthropist like Stalin was Bose’s fake camouflage propaganda that he had perished on 18 August 1945 air
crash, which after decades, the Taiwan government exploded as a myth and told the world that no such air crash had taken place during the time, and both Bose and Japan had faked it.

  A conscienceless man, for Stalin, Bose’s open opposition of the German military attack on Russia was of no use, though Bose took the risk of getting executed in Reich.

  Apparently, this exposé had embarrassed the United Kingdom, America, Russia, Japan, and the Congress Party in India.

  This proved that all the global and Indian political establishments (Congress) had joined hands with a rare sense of camaraderie, to do Bose in!

  Another factor helped the Russian dictator who had no ideology and only wanted to cling to power, was the fierce anti-Bose sentiment of the Indian government after the Independence.

  However, the British government knew from the beginning about Bose’s crossing over to Russia, and passed over the information to their neo-friends in the Indian camps, who, by then, had become British-loyalists and discarded Gandhi, ‘the saint’. It was no more a matter of ideology, but rather the issue of who would head the government after the British leave a devastated India, post-Partition. Keeping this in mind, they agreed to reinforce Bose’s trap in Russia.

  Chief of the INA Women’s wing called ‘Rani of Jhansi Regiment’, Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, who later joined the CPI (M) party, actually knew that Bose had been trailed by American killer-sleuths till the Russian border (she later told an Indian researcher about Bose’s entering Russia). She also claimed to a researcher, VP Saini, that a British historian (she did not name him/her) informed her that Nehru asked Mountbatten ‘not to allow Bose in India before India is partitioned’.

  As for example, a little earlier, Nehru told Taya Jenkin, in her book Reporting India, ‘I suppose I am right to say that I let down Subhas... after all India would have been either of us...’ He was talking about the 1939 crisis in the Congress.

  He was also explaining his position during the time that Bose had won the presidential election, despite the opposition from Gandhi’s supporters and Nehru’s tacit opposition to him in 1939. Bose had to resign because of Gandhi’s non-cooperation, not against the British, but against his own elected President! Last Years of British India by Michael Edwardes.