Thursday 10 May 2018

***************UNFINISHED

The Indian freedom struggle had two parallel movements. One was the Gandhian unarmed struggle, the other the armed revolutionary struggle. The former mobilised the masses while the latter dealt the coup d'e'tat to force the British to quit. Unfortunately, people do not wish to know much about either and are quite content to either wallow in the mire of ignorance and form uninformed biased opinions or misinterpret facts, misrepresent them to suit personal agendas. What is needed, though, is proper education in both these movements that ran parallel but could never combine thanks to the shortsightedness and dogmatic intransigence of Gandhi and his collaborators in the Congress. Subhas Chandra Bose, however, worked to bolster both the movements for freedom at any cost was his ultimate goal unlike Gandhi whose so-called scruples prevented him from waging an all-out war against the British, for, after all, he did not want the freedom of India at the cost of the ruin of Britain. What this effectively did was to facilitate the British to partition India and serve the interests of the Crown at the cost of India. This much for Gandhian sagacity. On the other hand, it was the armed assault of the Indian National Army led by Netaji that effectively catalysed events in India like the outbreak of mutiny in the Royal Indian Navy when 20,000 naval ratings revolted against their British masters to hold to ransom 70 ships, and this was followed by mutiny in the British Indian Army and Air Force as well. The message was sent clear and unmistakable to the British authorities that their days in India were at an end as the loyalty of the troops that defended the Empire had been eroded and it was but a matter of months before others in the armed forces would join in and make mincemeat of their masters. The World War had ended and the battle-hardened returning troops, 2.5 million in number, would be too potent a force to deal with, and with insufficient number of European troops to give combat to them in case of an uprising against the Raj, there was but one logical course for the British to adopt, that of a quick withdrawal from India while it was still possible with honour intact.

No comments:

Post a Comment