[IHRO] In search of Netaji ~ Dr Saibal Gupta SAIBAL GUPTA The great leader, who only wanted independence of India and nothing else, achieved his objective with honour. Through the INA he demonstrated that secularism is an “ism” created by Partition. Also, Indians can fight unitedly for their motherland and attain freedom through fighting. The anger of the people, evident during the INA trials and the Bombay Naval Mutiny, turned out to be the last nail in the coffin of the British Empire The headline may evoke a bored yawn from a section of readers, but the fact remains that we lost Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose many times before his plane took off from Formosa. We have never learned to judge our present on the basis of historical perspective as other nations do. We never had a sense of history. Our history was discovered by the British and other Europeans, but we never studied the subject intellectually. There are four facets that need to be considered. 1) Did we lose Netaji on 18 August 1945 when his plane flew from Taipei towards Dairen in Manchuria to enter Soviet Russia? Russia had invaded and annexed Manchuria when the atom bomb was being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 in 1945. On 14 August, Japan surrendered and the flight of this plane was detected and logged as it passed Japan but was not intercepted and allowed to proceed undisturbed. 2) Or did we lose him when in 1943, after being disillusioned of help from Germany in liberating India, he left for Japan travelling in the German submarine U-180 around the Cape of Good Hope to south-east of Madagascar, where he was transferred to the Japanese I-29 for the rest of the journey to imperial Japan, an unprecedented feat by a civilian at the age of 46? 3) We did lose him physically on 19 January 1941, when accompanied by his nephew Dr Sisir K Bose, he left in a car destined for Afghanistan and onward to Soviet Russia with an Italian passport. He was transported to Moscow where he hoped that Russia’s traditional enmity towards British rule in India would result in support for his plans for a popular rising in India. But the Soviet response was disappointing and he was passed over to the German Ambassador in Moscow. 4) The major loss to the nation and to us occurred in 1939, when in his second election as president in the Tripuri Congress session ~ after his tenure the previous year at Haripura ~ he was forced to resign from his position by the machinations of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and their followers. With the outbreak of war, Bose advocated a campaign of mass civil disobedience to protest against Viceroy Lord Linlithgow’s decision to declare war on India’s behalf without consulting the Congress leadership. Having failed to persuade Gandhi of this necessity, Bose organised mass protests in Calcutta calling for removal of the ‘Holwell Monument’ commemorating the Black Hole. He was imprisoned by the British, but was released following a seven-day hunger strike. He was in house- arrest under the surveillance by the CID. The period before these four stages was the formative phase of Netaji, which included a period as a wandering monk. He was drawn to the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, had a brilliant academic career, had stood second in Matriculation, entered Presidency College, had assaulted Prof Oaten and was transferred to Scottish Church College. He went to England, was ranked fourth in the ICS examination, but refused to join and returned to India. He joined the Congress, became CEO of Calcutta Municipal Corporation under Mayor Chittaranjan Das in 1924; was arrested in 1925 for nationalist activity and sent to Mandalay where he was afflicted with tuberculosis. He returned to India and twice became Mayor of Calcutta. What remains a mystery is his physical disappearance from the world scene. The story of a plane crash in Taipei has been widely discounted, and pre-eminently by Lord Wavell, the then Viceroy of India, and Mahatma Gandhi. As Hugh Purcell has written: “On August 16th at a meeting in Bangkok, Major-General Isoda Saburo, head of the Hikari Kikan, or Japanese liaison with the INA, agreed to try to get Bose into Manchuria as the first step to reaching Moscow. The last photo of Netaji alive or dead shows him at Saigon airport on August 17th, 1945. Five days later, on August 23rd, the Japanese News Agency announced the death of Bose”. There is no confirmed information after this and we have to wait until the papers in different government archives are declassified. But one can construct the possibilities from world events. Netaji had become restless over not being able to exploit the opportunities that had been thrown up by the Second World War, indeed to act against the British as a true patriot. He probably decided to escape to Russia after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed on 23 August 1939. But by the beginning of 1941, when he left India, that treaty was crumbling as Hitler was planning to attack Russia and Stalin was feverishly arming Russia with the help of the Allied Powers. In parallel, major changes were taking place in Russia. He reached Moscow with an Italian passport and the Soviet authorities promptly sent him to Berlin before the German army attacked Russia on 22 June 1941. It is a measure of his great stature and personality that he had pointed out to Hitler the folly of attacking Russia. As a nation, we are still suffering from his loss. Nirad Chaudhuri, commenting on Congress politics in 1938-39, had written that whatever was discussed or debated, the hard-faced men in the backroom of the Working Committee knew what had to be done. The party had to be brought solidly around the Nehru-Gandhi axis. That was achieved when Nehru acquiesced, forgetting his resolution of ‘Poorna Swaraj’ as president of the Lahore Congress in 1927. The Socialists and others left the Congress. Subhas was in favour of confrontational politics against the British, and not armed revolution with which he was charged. Crafty Gandhi must have seen the logic and gauged the popular sentiment. He gave the belated call for Quit India in 1942 when Subhas was out of the fray and Congress leaders were waiting to be kindly removed to jail. The popular upsurge became leaderless. What happened between 1942 and 1947 was much too shameful and gory to be recounted. But the facts will be unravelled one day. Within the Congress party, the Nehru-Gandhi axis, that was formed in 1939, has grown stronger over time. To many it is probably more important than India although there was no Gandhi after 1948. The Nehru gene has undergone many mutations and is almost lost. In 1939, Subhas Chandra Bose, the elected president, was expelled from the Congress for his socialist views and the party was reduced to a pro-business entity financed by the business houses. The freedom that was finally earned by ‘arrangement’ and not through struggle has gradually become increasingly dubious in the hands of succeeding generations of cronies, who have transferred the nation’s wealth abroad. The great leader, who only wanted independence of India and nothing else, achieved his objective with honour. Through the INA he demonstrated that secularism is an “ism” created by Partition. Also, Indians can fight unitedly for their motherland and attain freedom through fighting. The anger of the people, evident during the INA trials and the Bombay Naval Mutiny, turned out to be the last nail in the coffin of the British Empire. ...........
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 03:04:02 +0000