RISING LIKE A PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES

The only leader who had united India overriding all divisive factors that had then and subsequently fragmented India. He alone, rising above all pettiness of identity, with a vision clarified by enlightened reason and a love that transcended all barriers that thwarted India's future hopes, paved the way for his army for a united assault on the British Indian Empire leading to its eventual collapse.

The Indian National Army led by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was India's Army of Liberation that dealt the death-blow to Imperial Britain's dreams of a continued occupation of India after its victory in the Second World War. The Quit India Movement of Gandhi had by then petered out and the Indian National Congress was in no position to force the British to leave. That they did, however, leave in a hurry must be ascribed to the impact the INA Trials at the Red Fort had on the nation. The Royal Indian Navy revolted. So did the British Indian Air Force. Finally, even the British Indian Army unit at Jabbalpur revolted. The situation was ominous for the British with only 40,000 British soldiers in their Armed Forces in India and 2.5 million retrenched and disgruntled Indian soldiers, who had served in the British Army during the Second World War, returning home to the Netaji fever raging over the nation.

Bose had succeeded in making Indian soldiers serving in the British Army switch loyalty from the Crown to the motherland. The British had ruled India ruthlessly by using Indian soldiers in their service to suppress any insurrection. Now they could no longer rely on the loyalty of these troops for Bose had undermined it by planting in their minds the seeds of patriotism.

The country was a cauldron seething with the fire of patriotism and the freedom-fervour. There was widespread unrest throughout the country with the shadow of Netaji, who had been reported to have died in an air-crash at Taihoku, looming large, urging the awakened masses of the nation to drive the British away. The perfidious colonists took the message as memories of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 (as the British had dubbed it but what in effect was The First War of Indian Independence) were quickened and before being massacred by the masses, took to their heels after dealing the death-blow to India by partitioning it. Gandhi remained a passive protester and, thereafter, a mute spectator as Mountbatten, Nehru and Jinnah sealed India's fate.

The first Prime Minister of independent India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, disgraced the INA soldiers by refusing to employ them in the Indian Army, refusing them pension and, by implication, effectively treating them as traitors not to be trusted, for they had, after all, disowned loyalty to their colonial masters in spite of their army vow of loyalty to the British Crown.

And what happened to our hero, Netaji? Hang on, my friends. India has patience enough to forbear a while more and we will, sure enough, unravel the mystery soon. Jai Hind!