India's doom was sealed the day Gandhi debilitated the nation with his passive methods carried to the extreme and eliminated all opposition. His perfidious sidelining of Bose at Tripuri was undemocratic, malicious and thoroughly unbecoming of his poet-offered supposed status of Mahatma, and it set India perennially careering into future chaos, dominion, partition, et al. Gandhi's 'backing the wrong horse' in Nehru was not an instantaneous error of judgement, as is often made out to be by casual reference to remark made by him in the phase penultimate to freedom, but was a deliberated decision made by him with cool political calculations made which later in altered pre-independence conditions backfired on him. If people are puerile enough to therefore presume that Gandhi has switched sides thereby and thereafter to Netaji's, they are living in a fool's paradise. The shrewd contriver that he was with hardly any simplicity of being to warrant his famed honorific, the politician in Gandhi always came to the fore for self-preservation and elimination of opposition even as the colonial masters found in the Mahatma their perfect buffer between the Crown's interests and the explosive force of the revolutionaries.