State of the Union: The Bose enigma

New Delhi: The Nehru government spied on Netaji Bose’s family for 20 years has been the refrain the past week. This hypothesis rests on the presumption that the Nehru government and its successors were not convinced about Bose’s death, and therefore feared his return to India. The evidence that has been put forth about Nehru’s interest in the matter is a note from the then PM dated November 25, 1957, addressed to the then foreign secretary, Subimal Dutt, enquiring about the activities of Bose’s nephew Amiya Nath Bose in Japan.

An examination of the facts may be in order. On the night of January 16-17, 1941, Bose escaped from his home in Calcutta and reached Berlin on April 3, 1941, to seek the support of the Nazis for India’s liberation. At the time of his departure, relations between Bose and the Congress leadership had hit the nadir. He had resigned as the president of the Congress on April 29, 1939, and later formed the Forward Bloc. After staying in Germany for two years he left empty-handed for Japan in February 1943. He was unable to persuade Adolf Hitler to issue a declaration recognising the right of Indians to full independence. In July 1943, he took over the INA.

While Bose was in Berlin attempting to persuade the Nazis about the legitimacy of Indian aspirations, events in the Allied camp were moving rapidly. Desperate for American assistance, Churchill was compelled by US President Roosevelt, to sign the Atlantic Charter on August 12, 1941, that recognised the right of all peoples to choose the form of government they wanted. In fact, Roosevelt wrote two letters to Churchill on March 11 and April 12, 1942, urging him to hand over India to Indians. In the latter communication, following the British chicanery over the Cripps Mission that provided the trigger for the Quit India Movement, Roosevelt chastised Churchill stating, “The feeling almost universal is that the deadlock has been due to the British government’s unwillingness to concede the right of self-government to the Indians notwithstanding the willingness of the Indians to entrust to the British military control.” These letters are reproduced in Churc-hill’s History of the Second World War. The significance of these developments would not have been lost on Bose.

Moving back to the INA, the only significant action it saw in the Indian context was in the battles of Imphal and Kohima in April 1944. Though Indian forces were able to plant the national flag at Moirang, soon they had to retreat and Bose was constrained to announce the failure of the Imphal offensive by a radio broadcast from Rangoon on August 21, 1944. Also, the personnel of the INA were not treated well by the Japanese.

But the tide of war was turning against the Axis. Thus, Bose found himself on the side of the vanquished.

Now let us turn to the conjectures. For the sake of argument if it is assumed that after dissolving the INA on August 17, 1945 Bose had come back to India what may have happened? He, perhaps, would have been another important player on India’s political firmament. However, it may be worth recalling that the Forward Bloc that he had started was unsuccessful in even uniting all the radicals and Left groups. The best that was achieved was a Left coordination committee of which Bose became the chairperson before he escaped from his home in Calcutta in 1941. It, therefore, may be a bit of a stretch to assume that Nehru, Gandhi and the Congress felt threatened about Bose and, therefore, put his family under surveillance. In any case, Bose’s real difference of opinion was with Gandhi and not so much with Nehru.

Even if it were presumed that the plane crash in Taipei on August 18 was a smoke screen to facilitate his escape and he was indeed headed to the Soviet Union to resurrect the struggle, Bose would have been aware of the Soviet attitude towards him. In his book, Nehru and Bose: Parallel Lives, Rudrangshu Mukherjee writes: “Berlin was not Subhas’ first choice. On Subhas’ arrival in Kabul, Talwar who was with him, made attempts to contact the Soviet ambassador but failed. It was then that Subhas gatecrashed into the German embassy. He had a better reception there.” Mukherjee elaborates, “After what for Subhas was an agonising wait, he left Kabul on March 18, 1941, for Moscow en route to Berlin. He arrived in Moscow on March 31 and left for Berlin the same day.” It is evident that Bose had no expectations from the USSR.

After the declaration of war by the Soviet Union on Japan on August 8, 1945, merely 10 days before the purported air crash, Bose would have been well aware that he would not be welcome in the Soviet Union which had by then lost 26.6 million people. Even his attempts to contact the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo, Jacob Malik, were thwarted by Japan. Thus, if he was indeed going to Manchuria, then Bose was flying in the fog of war.

There is another tittle-tattle that has been spread — that the Congress leadership prevailed on Joseph Stalin to neutralise Bose. In the years before and immediately after India’s Independence, Stalin had a very low opinion of Indian leadership. Under these circumstances, such a charge can only be termed as comical.

Finally, why should Nehru have been interested in Amiya Bose’s activities in Japan? Like Germany, Japan also carried the “war guilt” heavily on its conscience. For a country that was attempting to shake off that legacy, it is unlikely that it wanted to be reminded of its war associations. Nehru, who believed in Asian solidarity, possibly saw an opportunity to bring the Japanese within his ambit. He, therefore, may have been apprehensive of any Indian activity that delved into a past that Japan was attempting to surmount. The reason for the query could be as innocuous as this. Whatever the real story, time has come to declassify all files pertaining to Bose so that blasts from the past finally stop feeding fevered imaginations.